Credit: ITV Maria Connor as played by Samia LongchambonCredit: Rex I still only have to hear the theme tune to Emmerdale and it makes me want to commit a minor crime against property. But in adult life, I discovered Coronation Street — and loved it. Much of the dry northern humour — especially the exchanges between Deirdre Barlow and her mother Blanche Hunt — was worthy of my favourite playwright, Alan Bennett. The women in general were wonderful and I sought out the ones I'd missed from ITV2's Classic Coronation Street series. No more I wrote here in March about the woeful way the women of Weatherfield have changed — be they brawling sex bombs or humbug-sucking acid drops — into a variety of drips, drabs and dreary doom-mongers. As I previously noted, sexy Maria quit bed-hopping to worry about climate change, jolly delinquent Gemma spends her entire time fretting about The Quads while smokin' siren Carla only ever seems to 'pop in' to a scene to pick up her car keys — she's way too 'hot' for Corrie now. Women are the first casualties of woke; see the #BeKind motif on girls' clothing, never on boys', though boys could benefit from the advice more, and the way we are encouraged to give up everything from toilets to trophies. The Corrie girls are no longer sparky humans but interchangeable issue-havers dealing with anorexia, bullying, cyber-stalking, early menopause, diabetes and sex-tape-shaming as a kind of tag team of trauma. In a recent scene, three gay men barked at a teenage girl (Summer — suppo){kind=link}
AS a temperamental teenager growing up in the 1970s, one thing my mother did would have me slamming doors like no other.
Her nightly settling down to the soaps, which seemed to sum up her preference for watching drama rather than causing it – the opposite of me.
I still only have to hear the theme tune to Emmerdale and it makes me want to commit a minor crime against property.
But in adult life, I discovered Coronation Street – and loved it.
Much of the dry northern humour – especially the exchanges between Deirdre Barlow and her mother Blanche Hunt – was worthy of my favourite playwright, Alan Bennett.