Corrie’s Dad.
Farewell then, Tony Warren, you served us well. They announced your death on Twitter – thus neatly spanning the two worlds you inhabited.
You brought the flat and raucous tones of the wildings south; displayed the wit and the wisdom of a thousand indomitable women – the underbelly of men who stoked the furnaces and consumed the Thwaites dark. You did more to heal the North/South divide than a bus load of politicians.
You made it possible for actors and actresses to find work without contorting themselves into the chiselled vowels, manicured diphthongs, and enunciated consonants that were the staple of broadcasting life.
The tortured articulation that flew out of our radios at five to six every night…‘Cumberland, Westmoreland, Lancashire and Cheshire, Yorkshire Pennines and East of the Pennines, Northumberland, Durham, North Derbyshire, North Nottinghamshire, and Lincolnshire…’ might have spoken of the rain expected to fall on our heads, of the winds to howl round our ears, but it was spoke in the strangulated voice of a foreign invader in the kingdom of Rheged.
Coronation Street made it so normal, so everyday, to betray through voice your heritage of cobbles and corsets, flat caps and ferrets, and scrag end of lamb for Sunday dinner, that within a few years the South was ringing to the flattened vowels of northern pop singers, and we had a Prime Minister who sounded as though he still had shares in a cotton mill.
Why there were even people south of Crewe Junction who knew what a Ginnel was.
That is a remarkable achievement.
Why wasn’t he Sir Tony Warren?
- Mudplugger
March 3, 2016 at 5:48 pm -
At the time Coronation Street started, my family lived in a terraced back-to-back ‘slum’ in an industrial textile area, albeit at the other side of the Pennines. The surprise and delight of early Coronation Street was that it was our lives, our people, our places, our attitudes, rather than the dinner-jacketed TV formalities which went before. Around our cluster of identikit streets we had our own models of Ena Sharples, Minnie Cauldwell, Albert Tatlock, Ken Barlow and Elsie Tanner (who lived next-door, actually) – it was as real as that.
The most amazing thing is that Tony Warren was only 23 at the time – just how such a young bloke managed to capture all that ‘real life’, translate it into a completely new medium and then persuade timid TV bosses to run with it, must be one of the miracles of broadcasting.
But in those days gay northerners didn’t get knighthoods, even well-deserved ones. - Stewart Cowan
March 3, 2016 at 6:09 pm -
I ‘grew up with it’ but sadly, the soap is now just another tool of the mind controllers who use the telly as a Trojan Horse to gain entry into people’s homes and deep inside their psyches, where they deposit their ‘equality and diversity’, ‘human rights’, materialism, infidelity and atheism all washed down with lashings of booze.
These soaps don’t reflect life; they manipulate it. They have helped damage what was a better society.
If I remember correctly, the bloke who played Percy Sugden left the show years ago because it was becoming so dirty.
I imagine that Ena Sharples and Albert Tatlock would have seizures at what goes on in t’Street these days.
- Henry Wood
March 6, 2016 at 12:36 am -
Every single word you say about modern soaps is absolutely true – may I say that BBC soaps are even more “truer” than others, in that they broadcast to the land the way that we should all see each other. Including the *HUGE* advantages of absolute multi-culti ways of life that we should now enjoy if we know what is good for us, *AND IF WE DON’T ENJOY IT*? Well that exact same BBC tax which grabs us all as soon as we have an address to prosecute us from, well, they will soon have you up in the magistrates court and with their punitive fines (and maybe jail sentences!) Why! they will soon have you as a member of the party. And you too, just like me, will vote to stay in the EU because of what the BBC tells me. BBC IS GOOD FOR ME!
- Henry Wood
- The Blocked Dwarf
March 3, 2016 at 6:27 pm -
Aged Mother was, and no doubt still is, a regular follower of the weekly shaggins of Gail Tilsley -whilst Brian was oggling the Bett’s tits down the Strangled Whippet or whatever the local hostelry was called…something about a dead dog if I recall aright? Somewhat surprisingly as Aged Mother is from Windsor and had rather nice vowels (legs too from the few box brownie photos that exist).
I remember watching it as a kid, a Southern lower-middle class kid in Norfolk, and marvelling that people (I assumed they were human) could live like that, with dustbin filled dirty alleys, stray animals, eating ‘tea’ instead of ‘dinner’ and, what sounded like, severe malformations of their adenoids. I think my parents once threatened me at the dinner table to ‘send you to live with Jack Duckworth if you don’t hold your knife and fork properly’.
Fortunately Eastenders came along, which while still rather too working class and with more ‘darkies’ than I would see in a year in Norfolk, at least stared people who spoke something akin to English (well at least the Lambefff h’english ov me Ol’ Man, alweady…Mother having married somewhat below her class)….and I appreciated that they drank down the ‘Rubba’ not down ‘tpub’.
When the Zombie Apocalypse does finally come upon I pray Wetherfield will be the epicentre….if that isn’t already scripted in for after the next mono-rail crash/Earthquake/Alien invasion
*taps foot. Waits. Surely an Allegator must appear soon….Don’t tell me TW wasn’t buggering whippets and boyscouts from dawn til t’pit siren blew*
- Ho Hum
March 3, 2016 at 6:39 pm -
‘*taps foot. Waits. Surely an Allegator must appear soon….Don’t tell me TW wasn’t buggering whippets and boyscouts from dawn til t’pit siren blew*’
SHHHHHH! You’re spoiling my fun….
- Ho Hum
- Eccentric
March 3, 2016 at 6:50 pm -
Not forgetting the earlier Rockin ’50s brave Brit ‘Kitchen Sink’ BIG dramas from which TV Corrie’s creator Tony Warren and Canadian producer Harry Elton both borrowed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_sink_realism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Elton - nisakiman
March 4, 2016 at 4:22 pm -
What’s a Ginnel?
I never managed to work up enough enthusiasm to watch Coronation Street, I’m afraid. Or East Enders, for that matter.
- Mudplugger
March 4, 2016 at 4:51 pm -
Depends exactly which northern dialect you acquired at birth whether you use ‘ginnel’ or ‘snicket’ – basically it’s a narrow passageway, usually between two buildings or walls/fences. Usage is very localised – I’m a ‘snicket’ person, but others from as little as five miles away are ‘ginnel’ folk. It all helps to confuse Johnny Foreigner – i.e. anyone from south of Sheffield. Hope that helps.
- The Blocked Dwarf
March 4, 2016 at 6:04 pm -
I think that’s what Norfolk speakers refer to as ‘a loke’. I leave to your imaginations what the phrase “a pook in a loke” refers to….
- Jeremy Poynton
March 5, 2016 at 6:14 am -
I was told that if you cam get a grand piano down it, it’s not a ginnel. Friends in Oldham used “ginnel”, I recall.
- The Blocked Dwarf
- Mudplugger
- Billy Marlene
March 4, 2016 at 5:47 pm -
The Scouse ginnel is a jigger.
As my mother was oft to say when seeing a bow legged person ‘they couldn’t stop a pig in a jigger’.
- Mudplugger
March 4, 2016 at 6:10 pm -
‘Jigger’ is also the term used in the hospitality trade for those annoying little single-portion containers of UHT milk and cream which the parsimonious hotels give you with your hot drinks and which are designed to be almost impossible to open without splashing suspicious looking stains onto your clothing – maybe Monica’s blue-dress stain was really a result of jigger rather than a jiggler.
- Mudplugger
- Billy Marlene
March 4, 2016 at 8:42 pm -
Jizzer, more like.
- Jeremy Poynton
March 5, 2016 at 6:13 am -
Quite so, Anna; with Mancunian connections back to the Victorian age on both sides of my family, I was raised on Corrie.
Never the same after colour TV, tho’.
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