THE CORRECT USE OF SOAP

IS THIS WHAT THEY MEAN BY STREET CREDIBILITY?
You ve forgotten what it s all about . . . you. Not that you ever did owt worth rememberin . Vera to Jack Duckworth.

You can walk on the Stars when you walk down Hollywood Boulevard.
They ve got them outside the Chinese Theatre set into the pavement. You can walk on Monroe, Garbo, Dietrich, Harrison Ford, John Wayne. In Water Street, Manchester M60 9EA, they hang the Stars from the lamp-posts. Curly Watts. Jack Duckworth. Elsie Tanner. Raquel. Ena Sharples.
Granada Studios is the hub of the Soap Opera universe. This is where it all began. This is where it continues. And I m here. On the set where Coronation Street is filmed. Squatting down to peer through Sally Webster s letterbox. Is that a pram? There, by the stairs? This must be what it s like for a TrekkIe to sit in Captain Kirk s chair on the Starship Enterprise Bridge. This must be what they must mean by Street Credibility.
And the bizarre unsettling thing is that Coronation Street looks real. These are houses. Just like the houses out there in Moss Side or Salford. When it rains on Rushholme, it rains here. When the sun shines on Cheetham Hill, it shines here. Weeds grow up through these street-cobbles. There s graffiti etched into the black metal fold-away doors of Kevin s garage unit. There s even a gob of bubblegum on the gutter fall-pipe outside the Mallett s, like there would be in a real street. Chances are someone, a day visitor gawping just like me, artfully sticky-fingerered that gum there so they could watch out for it in up-coming episodes and say Hey, there s my Bubblegum! . And sure, some of that graffiti scrawled into the Rovers back-passage says stuff like Hello Vera . But it s nevertheless in context. It gives the set a reality make-over. Even the backyard of the Rovers looks convincingly scruffy.
This is Soap-Land. This is dream. But it s a marketable dream. For #12.50 you can buy five-minute video clips where they ll edit you into the action. Ken and Samantha are at the Bar in the Rovers, when you yes you come in and ask directions. Ken tells you. Sam adds details. Of course, you don t actually get to meet them. You just talk at a blue-screen. But you do get your name there as those oh-so familiar credits scroll over those same dreary Weatherfield roof-tops to that same dismal theme tune. The same one they ve been using since Episode One went out on that long-ago and far-away 9th December 1960. There s been no Dance re-mix. No rebranding here. When you talk hard-core Soap, you talk Coronation Street.
You get seduced away by Eastenders, Brookside and Emmerdale. You might remember Crossroads or Eldorado. You do the afternoon hunks-in-trunks Aussie Soaps. But there s always Coronation Street. It s been broadcast consistently, without a significant break, two, three and now four times a week, for the best part of four decades. Every week. Every month. Every year. Of course we don t watch it. Well, not regularly anyway. But it s impossible to be alive and aware in the English-speaking world and not be at least vaguely acquainted with it. As a kid you probably catch a few years of it as you try to write your homework while Mum has it on in the background. You miss out during those years of clubbing and college. Then you come back to it when your own domesticity encloses you around that TV. It s still there. It never went away. There s never been a social documentary quite like it. It s phoney, of course. It s artificial. But within that formulaic fabrication of plots and characters, there s a continuous social drama that samples film-clips from all our lives. It s just . . . there.
And I m here. On the Street of Dreams. On Coronation Street. Outside the Kabin, the only newsagent in Britain that never stocks top-shelf magazines. Except these houses are all empty. They re shells. Because exteriors are filmed here. Interiors are to be found in that studio block over there, the one that looks like a converted Mill building left over from Manchester s industrial past. The Studio Tour boasts it will reveal exclusive secrets behind the magic of television. In fact it just passes through a sequence of old sets knocked up from plaster-board for #400 apiece: the three-sided inside of Jim s Cafe where they have a mock-up pan of polystyrene beans. And the burned-out remnants of Sally Webster s kitchen, left over after a story-line fire.
Seven million viewers watch Top Of The Pops. 12.5 million admit to a regular Emmerdale addiction. And peak story-line Soap episodes the Dirty Den shooting, Bet Lynch s last exit, can attract audiences of up to 20 million. Melvyn Bragg devoted a South Bank Show to Coronation Street. It is Culture War. It is North vs South. It has mass appeal. And cult status. It is probably the Newest New Rock n Roll. The Last Word In Cool.
Television is Britain s favourite pastime. More than that, it s an obsessional pastime. Bigger than Pop Music. Bigger than Sport. Bigger than god. Bigger than . . . sex. We watch. We all watch. It s a shared experience. TV is the Soapiate of the People. Soap Stars are the SuperModels of the Late Nineties. They live in Telly-Soap s which are Virtual Communities, and it s been that way since long before Cyberspace created the term.
The cast of your favourite Soap are surrogate friends. We gossip about them. Should they this? Will they that? Wasn t it scandalous what he said to her? It s habit-forming. It s addictive. It keeps the real world at bay. We mainline on daily fixes of Soap. In an atomised world of social fragmentation, it reassures us with images of continuity. People who know nothing whatever about their next-door neighbours, know and vicariously share all the most intimate details of Ramsay Street, Brookside Close and Albert Square through that voyeuristic access-screen in their front room.
Television demands no troublesome interactive involvement, and no participation at all beyond the flick of the remote. But Soaps are the campfire around which urban mythologies are spun. The SoapBox through which we talk out our collective fears and moral dilemmas, defining what is and what is not acceptable. Even when Soaps seem to be challenging what we think of as conventional attitudes, they do so by simultaneously defining what those conventions are. Soaps are morality tales. They deal in Sexual Abuse. Domestic Violence. Surrogate Parenting. Gay and Inter-Racial affairs. Drug Addiction. Abortion. They deal Love-Rats, Streetlife and Pondlife ...
In Soap, a week is a long time. Three episodes. Sometimes four. Now Coronation Street has Hayley. Soap s first transsexual. I wasn t born a woman , she tells wilting potential lover Roy, I am a woman by choice. To Richard Ingram, writing in the Observer, this sad development is only the latest in a long process of dumbing down what used to be a great British institution, one enjoyed not only by millions of ordinary viewers but by such figures as Laurence Olivier and John Betjeman (who used to say Coronation Street was better that Dickens). Under the new producer, Brian Park, old characters have been ruthlessly killed off, comedy (the mainstay of the programme) has been reduced, while trendy issues such as ecology have been injected into the storylines along with sex and violence.
Such attacks along with the Broadcasting Standards Commission condemnation of Corries recent unnecessary violence must be the source of great delight for Park. Why should the distaste of Catholic reactionaries like Ingram and Dead White Poets like Betjeman necessarily take precedence over the thumbs-up given by the escalating viewing figures of real people?
Because in truth, there s nothing in the imaginary worlds of Soap that doesn t, or hasn t, at one time or another, happened in the real world. No matter how unlikely it seems. It s just that such stuff is most often a once-in-a-lifetime thing, whereas Soap plot-line imperatives demand that incidents come in train to a limited pool of characters whose lives then become a sequence of disasters, crises, and trauma. Happiness makes for bad TV. Lives must be complicated by relationship problems. Marriages must be ruptured by affairs. New lovers must have dark secrets. They feud. There s love and betrayal. Sex and sin. They suffer. There s infidelity, childlessness and loneliness. Guilt and gormlessness. Death is good for ratings.
And Soap is a major life-style investment. A commitment. Like the vast novels of Proust or Tolstoy. Only longer. You have a life, then Soap seeps into the fabric of your week. And you have only a voracious all-consuming habit. Normal service will not be resumed. Ever.

SOAP BOX JURY
I don t like talking about things I don t understand. I m interested in . . . stamps and . . . and . . . and aircrafts and trains. I sort things into columns. I like lists Roy s reaction to Hayley s transsexual confession.
Oh, go boil your brains, yer sad little plonker Mike Baldwin to Don Brennan.

Soaps began in the Depression years BC ( Before Corrie), on 1930 s American Network Radio. They took their generic name from early sponsors such as Proctor & Gamble or Colgate-Palmolive, who hoped their habit-forming quality would transfer to the listeners shopping lists. And from the start they were commodities virtually indistinguishable from the media through which they were sold. (Perhaps, following its sponsorship deal with Cadbury s, Coronation Street should now be called a Choc Opera a world of Chocolate Men and Chocolate Cats and Dogs?)
Soap s initial attraction lay in cheap production cost, combined with the guaranteed audience figures they delivered to those all-important sponsors and advertisers. The target listeners were largely female, and largely home-bound. So 15-minute Radio-Soaps featured characters they could identify with, embroiled in multiple plot-lines that kept them hooked. Like the Saturday Matinee Westerns and the Flash Gordon serials, they had cliff-hanger endings to ensure you tune in for the next episode.
That was then. Now is now. And Soaps continue to deliver relatively cheap and high-ratings-value brand-loyal TV. As channels multiply, with Satellite and Cable add-ons, that becomes an increasingly crucial consideration.
Coronation Street was devised by 23-year-old Tony Warren, whose grandmother lived in the Salford back streets across the canal from Manchester city centre. He was born in 1936, went to Eccles Grammar School, became a child actor and a teenage model. His finest creation started out grounded in the kitchen-sink realism of the then-current movies Room At The Top or Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, black & white films featuring snottily rebellious characters like the street-wise Arthur Seaton. And by tapping into this harsh 1950 s Northern Working Class dissatisfaction, Warren set new standards in TV drama (as Brookside would do in its first extremist phase), proving that a twice-weekly Soap could, just once in a while, aspire to moments of truth and dramatic tension as intense as any that them there posh playwrights could manage.
It isn t reality. It s adjusted reality, Warren explained. He d been working with Children s TV, unhappily adapting the screen adventures of poncey aviation hero Biggles for #30 a week. But it was there he spotted the monstrously granite-faced Violet Carson (Ena Sharples), all gimlet eyes and wrinkled stockings, and Doris Speed (Annie Walker), when they came in to do bit-parts for kid s shows. Warren, young, gifted and gay, had a thing for strong women. I grew up in a matriarchal society. All the men were at war, and I was surrounded by strong women.
There had been attempted British Soaps before or, in the vocabulary of the BBC, serial dramas or returning serials , but there d been nothing quite like the one that Warren delivered. He d originally intended calling it Florizel Street, until the Tea Lady pointed out that made it a sound-alike for a brand of toilet disinfectant. So it became Coronation Street, a twice-weekly A Kind Of Loving. A thrilling monotony of feckless ne er-do-well males with under-arm odour problems, held together by a streetful of battling feisty mouthy women. Standards, like knickers, were seldom dropped. It all happened in the relentlessly Codgerish mindset of the drab industrial North, and action tick-tocked obstinately between gritty socio-realism and pantomime. It took off like a rocket. Labour PM Harold Wilson attributed his 1964 election victory to scheduling polling day to avoid clashing with Coronation Street viewer-loyalties. And thirty-two years later, 29th August 1996, his successor Tony Blair visited the Soap set itself. Such is its enduring power.
Warren had a tempestuous relationship with Granada. With executive producer Bill Podmore. And with his own sudden celebrity. After three years of Coronation Street he was seduced away by Beatles manager Brian Epstein to script the Ferry Cross The Mersey movie for Gerry & The Pacemakers and Cilla Black. It didn t work out. He snubbed the show s 500th Episode Party . He went to California, did most of the things drunks do including kicking in a TV screen in Amsterdam because he couldn t bear seeing what was happening to his creation. He returned from California in the mid- 70s after they d given him three weeks to live. But he beat booze and drug addictions. He wrote an autobiography called I Was Ena Sharples Father (1969, published, appropriately, by Duckworths,) and some novels. The books are characterised by the same Mild & Bitter backstreet Northern austerity, gruff nostalgia and camp humour found in the Street. So it was probably inevitable that he d gravitate back to Weatherfield . His name is still there on the credits.
Meanwhile the Street gradually morphed from monochrome into colour. In the late 60s, hippies move in to establish a squat with Jimi Hendrix posters on the wall and Pink Floyd on the Dansette. In the 70s there s a strike at Mike Baldwin s factory. Ken Barlow wears flares. Ray Langton has sideburns. Then there s the punk in the Rovers confronting startled busybody-meister Hilda Ogden. In the Thatcher years Mike Baldwin goes bankrupt. Then he gets a Yuppie flat in a Docklands development. Politics seldom intervenes directly. But its effects are always there. Now there s cerebral ex-dustman Curly, who can out-gump Forrest Gump. Belfast subtle-as-a-sledgehammer Jim McDonald who even has difficulty speaking English, so he does. His ex-wife Liz who wears dresses like spray-on G-strings with shoulder pads. And Alma, played by Amanda Barrie, who once rose from her bath wearing those enormous eyes and little else, in Carry On Cleo.
Ken Barlow is the only original cast character left. He began as the perfect Angry Young Man. The smart working-class intellectual who goes to university and returns radicalised, impatient, and also a little awkward with his parents simple values. He came, direct from Central Casting, via Look Back In Anger. But while the movies and the Penguin paperbacks get frozen in time, that s not possible in a Soap. Instead his every flinch and compromise get magnified on-screen. Bambi-eyed Raquel has her dreams. She pursues them around the world to Kuala Lumpur. Even Reg Holdsworth gets promoted to the Lowestoft Branch of Betterbuys. But Ken never leaves the Street.
In the Bar of the Rovers he gets respect. In the Rovers he s the resident intellectual. In the big world outside he d lose that status. So he marries. Has affairs (his sexual history probably rivals that of Peter Stringfellow). Has kids. Loses his job. Gets divorced. Gets another job. Messes up parenthood. And he sups ale in the Rovers. The only remaining evidence of his supposed intellect is his habit of answering the door with a book in his hand . . . Saturday Night And Sunday Morning s Arthur Seaton is probably still out there somewhere too. Married and bored. We don t know. But with prissy Ken Barlow we ve watched each cringing tick, and wincing cop-out of his gradual erosion into terminal dullness.
But hey, Coronation Street can t win claims Mail On Sunday TV-pundit Brian Viner. It is damned for not being true to life, then damned because it is populated by the ghastly, the silly, the awful, the whining, the preposterous and the weedy, which seems to me to be admirably true to life ...

SEX & DRUGS & SOAP & ROLL
Despair. It s like a blackness all around me, and I just can t see any future. There s no reason to get out of bed. I keep the curtains drawn. Nowt matters Don Brennan, Coronation Streets once-resident pervy creepazoid and monopedic psychopath.

The first thing you see, as you enter the set of Coronation Street, is Stan Ogden s grave. A slightly macabre black marble headstone. There s life here. And death too. Even if death is sometimes just another kind of Closing Time. One that even Vera in a frizzy fright-wig can t hold back. The original Rovers Return set, designed by Denis Parkin, burnt down in 1982 (due to Jack Duckworth s faulty rewiring in the cellar) to make way for this set to be built. But in Soap there is no beginning, and there is no end. Ever. Above all it must be seamless, endless according to Hilary Kingsley, who should know. She wrote a book about it.
And now I m here on the Street of Dreams, in the footsteps of Ena Sharples, Hilda Ogden and Bet Lynch. Emily Bishop lives over there at no.3. No.9 has that ghastly stone-cladding. No.11 has Dennis Tanner 1951 scratched into the window-ledge. I ve never been here before. But I know it intimately. There s something about this Weatherfield that says solid. That says real. Soaps have a tendency to leave vague retinal after-tastes, a suspicion that even when we don t watch them their lives go on off-camera. Like the lives of people we don t know who live in the next street or the next town.
And hey, isn t that Steve McDonald over there by Fiona s Hairdressing Salon his eyes rolling ceilingwards in that irritatingly mannered way he has of acting his immaculately bored condescension? They promised us an on-set cast member. We get Steve McDonald. I ve never met a Soap Star. Never had any inclination to. I did see a grouchy Fred Gee one-time Rovers cellar-man, at the Scarborough WaterWorld. And at the height of her storyline heartbreak romance with Sex-on-Legs Des, in his eyes, bosomy Barmaid Raquel opened a Charity Shop in Wakefield and brought the City Centre to a standstill. I glimpsed her waving to massed Soapaholics from an upstairs window.
But being bathed in the temporary limelight of Soap Stardom can be a precarious thing. They re all on twelve-month October-to-October contracts which a ratings-drop can abruptly terminate. Scripters conspire dire and horrendous fates for the more disposable characters as devices to seduce viewers away from rival channel attractions. Reg Holdsworth was massive. A major-league cult. NME sold T-shirts of his KNOWLEDGE IS POWER slogan. Now he sells double-glazing. And what about Chris Quinten? Chris who ...? My point exactly. Then there s She who must not be named . Was I hallucinating or did Gob-Almighty Poison Ivy Tilsey really guest on The Word with Collagen Implants, Liposuction and a hangover, jamming with Happy Mondays and telling Terry Christian she d shag anything on two legs and most things on four ?
Her biography (Lynne Perry s Secrets Of The Street My Life As Ivy Tilsley) remembers endless after-hours brandy and Babycham binges in Manchester pubs and clubs, which end by bedding every likely man who catches her eye. There were toyboys, there were one-night stands, there were times she was so off her face she couldn t remember if she d had sex or not, or with whom. Most of the sex happened when I was drunk. I wasn t looking for romance, I was looking for attention. She slept with a married cast member, his name as yet undivulged. Had a DIY abortion. Then the scripters got their revenge by exiling her from Weatherfield to a Catholic Retreat , where she eventually died unseen.
But it s no new thing. Ernie Bishop, Emily s tediously dull Lay Preacher husband, was shot to death on-screen for the temerity of daring to stage a pay demand. And in 1983 Peter Adamson (Beer-Gut Love-Thug Len Fairclough ) was slyly written out following the gleeful press coverage surrounding the charge of which he was subsequently acquitted that he indecently assaulted two eight-year-old girls in a swimming pool. Some say his real crime was ratting on the show s low-life in a simultaneous series of press confessions.
Three years after that Julie Bet Lynch Goodyear - the brassy big-mouthed barmaid with dangly earrings was the target of salacious tabloid revelations concerning her (alleged) Lesbian Love-Nest antics. She survived. Her star is still there on the lampposts of Water Street. But the lesson is clear. The Show is all-important. No individual cast-member is bigger than the Show. Characters come and go. The Show survives.
And it survives even when the thickening lather of Soap War gets intense. With the 80s came Brookside, followed by Neighbours, Eastenders, and Home And Away. Phil Redmond got drafted into sleepy Emmerdale, where the sheep traditionally move faster than the plots. He promptly blitzed it all in a Lockerbie-style Air-Crash Disaster. Following that with a police gun-siege, murderous Kim Tate with cloven bosom heaving, and a three-cornered lesbian cat-fight over the favours of doe-eyed vet Zoe. In Albert Square Nick Cotton became a heroin addict and gay couple Colin and Barry are seen almost but not quite kissing. Meanwhile, off-screen revelations of Dirty Den s real-world dirty deeds (Leslie Grantham is a convicted murderer), and mouthfuls of column-inches devoted to Gillian Taylforth s (alleged) oral exploits in a Four-Wheel-Drive on an M-Way sliproad, ensure Eastenders a high tabloid visibility.
Not to be outdone, Brookside introduces gay trauma with Gordon Collins coming-out, Nat and Georgia Simpson s consensual brother/sister incest (which forced Channel 4 to issue an apology to scandalised viewers), the long-drawn-out heroin agony of the Corkhill family, then no-fun Christian Fundamentalists, and lesbian child-abuse victim Anna Friel. There are also corpses buried under the Conservatory uncomfortably close to the Fred & Rosemary West Show. And Coronation Street? It weighs in with a provocative hard-hitting storyline about Dithering Derek and Moaning Mavis missing garden gnomes . . .!
So Brian Park is brought in to Spice Up Corrie s story-lines. Hence Kevin and Sally Webster s love quadrangle with a loud-mouthed man-eating tart-next-door. And if that doesn t set your adrenaline pumping fear not, he s got more. He s got Hayley! It (transsexuality) has never been tackled before in a Soap, and we felt it was a challenge for the show, Park explains in the kind of press leak teasers that allow audiences to rehearse their outrage. But she is not going to come on looking like Lily Savage, and there will be no meat-&-two-veg jokes. Well there s nowt so queer as folk, I SAY, THERE S NOWT SO QUEER AS FOLK, as butcher Fred Eliot might double-speak it.
Especially in Soaps. There have always been Randy Romeo s on the Street . There have always been Slags, Slappers and Sacred Monsters. Sometimes the most memorable characters have been a combination of all three. But, to be honest I am worried. Very. There have been changes. And sometimes you do pray for an Emmerdale-style Air Disaster to wipe out the Street s current cookie crew of one-dimensional posers. Who among them is destined to hang on the lampposts of Water Street? Will triple charisma-bypass victims Nicky Platt and Toyah Battersby genetically engineered for Smash Hits pin-up spreads while omitting the DNA-code for acting ability one day go up there alongside Bet, Ken, Ena, and Hilda? I doubt it. But I could be wrong.
Here, in Water Street, Manchester, you walk with the Stars. With the ghosts of Stars. And with Stars as yet unborn. Tony Warren once commented that Coronation Street didn t go soft. Life did. Perhaps he s right. I ll drink a pint of Newton & Ridleys to that in the Rovers, well no, not the real Rovers, but a touristy replica Rovers a spit away from the real one. If real is a term you can use. Which you probably can t . . .
Button it, yer great long streak o weasel s watter! n