Hi, I’m Steve and I watch Coronation Street. I have tried to give it up many times but I just keep going back to it.
It is probably very apt that I keep going off the Street and then coming back as the show itself is not averse to revisiting fertile storyline ground. At the moment we have Kevin and Sally in marital dispute, we have Leanne Battersbee and Nick Tisley revisiting their old romance (Nick to Peter Barlow last night: “first love, you don’t forget that”, not even, it would seem when the man you fell in love with metamorphosises more often than Dr Who), we have Peter Barlow getting on and off the wagon more often than a rag and bone man on a council estate, we have John/Colin, fresh from prison for kidnapping Rosie Webster, on a Harold Shipmanesque killing spree, we have Tracy Barlow generally being horrid. Honestly you can stop watching for a year or two then tune back in and after a few moments working out X has left Y and moved in with Z you could be right back where you were,
One of my favourite programmes at the moment is Charlie Brooker’s How TV Ruined Your Life (best line, to the ‘Dorrito gang’, ‘just eat your crisps and f**k off’) where he argues, with his usual blend of wit and force of personality, that TV has completely distorted our view of the world. This is a view I share, we have an idealised, stylised view of everything that bears little resemblance to our actual experience and yet we fall for the ‘dream’ every time.
And so it is with Corrie, every time I see Sally and Kevin split up I hope that one day they may be reconciled (like the Jews and the Arabs?), I hope that Peter can beat his demons and stay off the booze and that one day Tracy will actually say something nice with some sincerity.
If there is one great thing about a programme like Coronation Street it has to be the message that redemption is possible no matter how much you screw things up.
And so I will stick with it in the forlorn hope that one day they will actually give the role of Nick Tilsley to someone that can act.