FIFTY UP
Last Wednesday, I slipped out for the evening on one of my very occasional Surrogate Yummy Mummy solo nights out. I went along to the ‘COROnation Street’ Stage Show at St James Theatre in Courtenay Place.
The Show celebrates the plot lines that have sprung up, evolved and resonated since the TV show was first broadcast in Britain in 1960. The serial-soap ‘Coronation Street’ has been running for just on 50 years on New Zealand TV.
The Stage Show is a Lancashire Hot Pot with Bubble-and-Squeak concoction of meaty bits from old dramas, plot thickening and yesteryear’s sprouts and spuds fried up as circus slapstick, pantomime or Blackpool Pier special.
I generally enjoyed it, though sometimes it seemed [in a second choice off the menu cliché] a bit like eating old fish and chips that had been stored in the fridge. And I was struck by the advanced age of most of the audience and strained for a sniff of accompanying mothballs and embrocation.
It raised all sorts of emotions for me. About time passing, about the nature of place and the curious predicament that we find ourselves in nowadays in seeing ourselves and others age so obviously and then fade.
I had planned a heavyweight article about nostalgia and solastalgia but maudlin thoughts are not really appropriate for such a working class and Northern English series of story lines, in which the characters often pride themselves on their earthiness, stoicism and humour.
So I have taken some time to muse.
As a start, I went along to one of our bars in Courtenay Place, The Library, for a quiet beer and some time for reflection after the show. The North of England seemed a long way away from the gaggles of girls on hen night outs and smart young predatory foxes on the prowl. Smart and trendy versus eh-by-gum.
And I have since been catching up on some of the early episodes to remind me of what I used to watch back then, what I saw and what TV producers wanted me to see.
It is fascinating to contrast two clips from 1964. The first shows the opening episode of ‘Seven Up’ – the programme that provides a longitudinal study of the way in which British society is evolving by following a cohort of kids born in 1957 [unfortunately deleted from this site due to 'copyright' issues but probably still available on YouTube]. The second is a clip from Coronation Street in 1964 [see above].
The comparison shocked me.
The Coronation Street episode for my money is much more ‘real’ and dates better. In fact the early episodes of Coronation Street were remarkably punchy. They tell, for example, of mental illness and its stigma, political protest and its impact in dividing families, and the heavy-handed policing of the infringement of local by-laws on shop opening hours.
And the sets and camera work were innovative, as was the use of the back street scenes and the vernacular.
By contrast the pomposity of the opening trailer for ‘Seven Up’, with its James Bond-type music and the highly modulated ‘Received English’ of the presenter, immediately alienates modern viewers.
GREAT DIALOGUE AND ACTING TOO
If you watch through the Coro clip that I have embedded above, you can pick up on the disintegration of Ken Barlow’s marriage to Valerie [she who notoriously paid off all her debts to life at the wrong end of a faulty hair-dryer].
The acting is marvellous, as is the script:
Ken Barlow, the young school teacher, is upstairs lying on the bed. His wife Valerie calls up to him from the kitchen.
Valerie: “Ken your dinner’s ready!”
Ken: “Yeh!”
Val: “Pardon”
Ken: “Alright, I’m coming!”
Val: “It’s getting cold – I’ve done you some kippers.”
Ken: “What are you doing up there, anyway?”
Valerie comes into the bedroom
Val: “Ken?”
Ken: “What’s up? Nothing - I’m just having a lie down.”
Val: “Well, your dinner’s on the table. Are you feeling alright?”
Ken: “Yes. You know, it’s getting just about impossible at school”.
Val: “What is?”
Ken: “Everything. Every time the headmaster looks at me it’s like being cut with a knife.”
Val: “Look, are you coming down to dinner or not?”
Ken: “Valerie I’m talking about my life – not discussing the price of cabbages. I’m your husband”.
Val: “Well, I’m not your headmaster, I can’t do anything”.
Ken: “No true enough – you could be on my side. That’s marriage for you isn’t it – great institution!”
Val: “Oh it is. There are you are somebody agrees with you – that’s what you like isn’t it. I think marriage it’s terrific. Lonely but it's fun – there you are I agree with you.”
Ken: “What the hell are you talking about?”
Val: “About you ‘Luv’. It’s the only subject your interested in.”
Ken: “Is it? Is that why I’m trying to do something with my life – is that why I’m going through all this?”
Val: “Oh I’m not talking about that.”
Ken: “No of course you are not - because it’s important – because you might have to think. Because I might need your help and that wouldn’t do would it? No - all you’re fit for is mithering about me dinner.”
Val: “Oh stop it I’m your wife, I’m supposed to get your meals”.
Ken: “If I had wanted a house keeper, I would have married one. I thought I had married a person – someone with feelings - and someone who thinks about me. And you don’t even know what I’m talking about do you? You never did!”
After being roughly thrown aside, Val goes back downstairs. Ken continues to lie on the bed and starts smoking a cigarette.
...Wow, I was struck by what a prat Ken was – and incidentally, how he spoke for so many of us Bright and Angry Young Men who entered the 1960s with a most distasteful combination of chips on our shoulders and extraordinary expectations / entitlements of the homage that we were owed by the less educated in general - and women in particular.
BACK TO ‘THE LIBRARY BAR’
As I mused over my bottle of best Emmerson’s beer in lone splendour on a two couch enclave on Wednesday, I was startled to find the entire cast of the ‘COROnation Street’ Stage Show plonk themselves down next to me for a wind-down drink at The Library Bar.
And I suddenly found myself addressing Bill Roache as Ken – how many times must that happen?
He is a charming guy who will talk to anyone and we chatted briefly about his school days at Rydal School in North Wales where he was a contemporary of my brother-in-law, and his home at Wilmslow, Cheshire.
Like many Northern men who were passably good-looking when we were young, I owe a lot to Bill and the Beatles for stamping my passport to Lothario. There was a time when we were fashionable. But, come to think of it, he still is.
As Bess Manson explains of the Auckland Show:
‘A giggling gaggle of women a third his age cluster around William Roache at the bar. Freshly lipsticked and highly coiffed, they hone in on the star of the COROnation Street stage show after its opening night like birds do to prey.
'They want another photo with him. They want to snuggle up real close for their own personal encounter with the tousle-haired actor.
‘Roache, a glint in his 80-year-old eyes, obliges.
'The older audience members - and there are many many pensioners - are equally fawning.
‘Loitering in the Auckland Civic Theatre's lobby to catch a glimpse of him, their adulation is palpable. He's been in their front rooms for half a century. His unyielding dullness filling our screens and, apparently, fuelling some pretty intense fantasies for some viewers. Seeing him in the flesh must be quite surreal.
'Roache links arms with one after the other, smiling, kissing, signing. Maybe the actor really has bedded the thousand or more women he alluded to in the press last year.
‘As Roache himself said: "There's life in the old dog yet!"
'Any thought to the controversy Roache stirred up in recent weeks - he implied victims of sexual abuse are paying for past sins - appears to matter not to any of these Street-struck fans.
‘His second newsworthy comment, flirting with a daytime TV presenter last month telling her of his urge to smack her bottom "You naughty girl", seems only to have added fuel to this playboy's fire.
‘Eh oop, there's nought as queer as folk.
'While his alter ego, Ken Barlow, has had a pretty good innings with the ladies over the past 50 years in sunny Weatherfield, Roache's popularity is perfectly astounding. For the women of Auckland, he's hotter than one of Betty's famous hot pots’.
But I’m a pale imitation of the real thing and I decided to finish up my beer and get home to the kids. Val and I have as much in common nowadays.
And I have subsequently made a vow to can the line: ‘I’m trying to do something with my life – is that why I’m going through all this?’
After all, I’m generally the one who has to mither about dinner.
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