Why I love Coronation Street women
Glenda Young, also known as Flaming Nora, is editor of Corrieblog and here she explains why she’d love to be a Coronation Street woman.
It’s no secret that I’m a Coronation Street fan. I’ve been writing online weekly updates on the soap for 12 years and have a bit of history with Corrie that you can read here if you like. My involvement with Corrie isn’t an anorak one, I can’t tell you how many girlfriends Ken Barlow has had or who Elsie Tanner was married to, well, not without looking it up online or in one of the many Corrie books that I own (and one that I am proud to have been involved with). I retain a certain distance from my favourite soap, I have to, otherwise I’d be pulled into the Weatherfield world even further than is normal for a sane person to admit. That’s why I enjoy writing about it, commenting on it, blogging the news and reviews and why some of my post-grad essays were on Corrie’s women, most of whom I adore. Soaps come in for a lot of stick for being low-culture, low-brow with low aspirations, especially for women. But there are reasons I love Coronation Street women and while you may not agree, I’d truly be interested to know what you think. In fact, I could talk for hours on Corrie’s women as the subject fascinates me, perhaps more than it should.
Firstly, when you’re a woman in a soap you have a real sense of place. You know where you belong, there’s never any doubt, no soul searching for something different, or better. Whether it’s the Street or the Square or the Farm or the Close, you know where your friends are, you know where you work. It’s all there close at hand. Your workplace is across the road from your house. Your shop is next door. Your pub is on the corner, next to your Post Office. For special occasions, you might “pop into town” on the Weatherfield Wayfarer, but heaven forbid you should ever drive there yourself.
Driving, you see, will always get women into trouble on Coronation Street. Worse still, it’ll kill them. Any woman attempting to control her destiny by driving a car on Corrie will come to a sticky end and should be persuaded, always, to take the bus. You can read my take on Corrie’s women drivers on Corrieblog here.
Soaps are among the few telly programmes that are women-led. The grand matriachs of Coronation Street like Ena Sharples, Bet Lynch, Annie Walker, Hilda Ogden, have gone down not just in soaps history but are part of British culture and heritage. Parts for older women are encouraged on soaps with the likes of Betty and Rita still going strong with the actresses well into their 70s. You don’t get that on Desperate Housewives, now, do you?
You’ll always have a friend, or a mother who loves you, when you’re a woman on Coronation Street. Close-knit cobbles communities can breed murderesses like Tracy Barlow but by ‘eck, she’s still loved by her family. And look how quickly transsexual Hayley became a classic Corrie woman – strong, emotional, a shoulder to cry on, a trusted friend.
Women in Coronation Street will always be let down by a man. Men in Coronation Street are feckless losers, the lot of them. Even when they start out all honest and trusty, they’ll let you down in the end either by having it away with a boozy floozy, spending your hard earned cash on the gee-gees, or drinking in the Rovers when they said that they wouldn’t. An exception to the rule of the feckless fella, perhaps, is Roy Cropper.
Coronation Street women are no better than they ought. If they get designs above their station, they’ll get knocked back again. They don’t leave the Street as their work and lives stay firmly on the cobbles. Any notions of career can fly out of the window unless it involves running a small business on the Street. The women who work outside of the Street, like Deirdre’s job at the council, has been forgotten about and never referred to again. Career women – lady lawyers, estate agents, solicitors, policewomen – are brought into the street temporarily, but never allowed to stay and certainly don’t live there.
So, they’re complex characters, these Coronation Street women. On the one hand they’re tough as old boots, strong, emotionally supportive of each other, hard working. And on the other, they’re limited in what they can do by the constraints of the cobbles and five episodes a week. We’ll never see Janice Battersby leave knicker stitching to become a mature student at Manchester Uni. But we will see Leanne become a woman of the Street working in the world’s oldest profession, and we’ll not be too shocked or surprised. One woman I’ve got my eye on in Corrie is Fiz Brown, she could do great things, could Fiz. She’s already kicked out more than once at her life on the cobbles so Kirk bought her a scooter but give a Corrie woman a set of wheels, as I’ve said before, and bad luck with befall her. Fiz has ambition, there’s a driving force inside her. Remember when she started at the factory with dreams of becoming a designer? She’s definitely one to watch – but then, aren’t they all? [Flaming Nora]
Very intriguing thesis. I wonder how Annie Walker fits in to all of this though... there was always something ineffably "other" about the queenly Mrs Walker. Like she'd descended onto the street from some higher plain. She was certainly one of the grandest of the Corrie matriach's but I think she fitted into the female sisterhood of the street in a manner different from most. She was never on the same level as the other women... a superior, wise woman as opposed to a fellow mucker.
Posted by: Steve | April 6, 2007 9:50 AM