Looking Back - On The Street

I surprise myself when I report that two of the most memorable programmes we watched on television back in England related to that most venerable of British 'soaps', Coronation Street. The series has now been going for fifty years and was the centre of its own little nostalgia fest in December. We watched the episode in which the script writers arranged the demise of a fair number of the cast through various explosions and a train plunging from a viaduct, but this was not terribly memorable, except for provoking Noi to laughter when various of the denizens of the street started running towards the scene of the disaster in ungainly fashion. The acting's as bad as Malaysia, she chortled.

No, it was the re-broadcast of the first ever episode, from 1960, that really stood out as fine television, along with a BBC drama entitled The Road To Coronation Street which was a kind of celebration of that event, focusing on how the creator, Tony Warren, moved heaven, earth and Granada TV to get his work on screen. And celebrated it should have been. As a little boy I took the Street for granted as something rather old-fashioned that adults enjoyed because it was all a little dull - like real life. The point I missed then was that that was what was revolutionary about the enterprise. Ordinary Manchester people, speaking in an ordinary Manchester way, about ordinary Manchester stuff. It was us on screen.

And that first episode was genuinely good stuff. Tony Warren's script really caught the rhythms, the poetry of everyday speech. And the characters immediately suggested something of the archetypal - especially Pat Phoenix's brilliant Elsie Tanner. No wonder it ran and ran.

Noi was disappointed because they didn't broadcast the second episode. She wanted to know what happened next. But I suppose it would have been a bit much to have repeated the whole fifty years.