Walling Off The Stairs At Emily's...

Emily had a rotten time, didn't she? The swinging '60s saw her stuck behind the counter at Gamma Garments with Mr Swindley - although she did break out later, having a blissful interlude with Miklos Zadic. The savage '70s (as Corrie writer and producer HV Kershaw called them) saw Emily enjoy brief happiness with Ernest Bishop. Until he was shot and killed. The turbulent '80s sent her mad Arnold Swain and Percy Sugden.

Poor Emily.

And yet she managed to keep going, managed to keep a level head.

But, like every other character in The Street, she never seemed to realise just how architecturally impossible her surroundings were. For instance, that huge Select bar at the Rovers must have extended clean out of the building and across Rosamund Street. Annie Walker's sitting room and kitchen were just the same. The Rovers loos appeared to lead into Albert Tatlock's, until 1982, when the Street suddenly appeared to grow larger, lose its graffiti and smashed viaduct windows, and sprout a tiny passageway between the Rovers and No 1. It still didn't leave space for the loos, but never mind.

The Street's front doors stood side by side (with the exception of the Rovers, No 13 and the Corner Shop), with only a drain pipe and a tiny expanse of wall between them. However, there were often quite large expanses of wall beside the front doors inside each house, and these expanses of wall were sometimes larger than others.

Albert Tatlock was poorly in 1979, and his bedroom and landing were featured in a couple of episodes. At the top of Albert's stairs was a door which, if the architecture was at all logical, would have opened into Emily's house.

The Corner Shop flat sometimes seemed to have a kitchen and sometimes not. It had a number of windows which were invisible outside.

And so on.

Of course, we accepted all this. The Street was made in a studio, sets were erected when needed and taken down afterwards, and not a great deal of attention was paid to the interior architecture. It corresponded to a degree with the exterior (although the houses were impossibly small on the outside from the '60s to the early '80s, and even the 1982 Street was rather on the small side), and we were interested in the characters.

So what if architectural abnormalities abounded?!! Who cared?

My mother certainly never noticed anything amiss.

Until some episodes which appeared in 1979.

Deirdre and a weird wall...

It was the lead-up to the Rovers lorry crash story-line, and the scene was Emily Bishop's back room. Suddenly, my mum cried: "Emily's stairs must run into her living room wall!"

And it seemed they did. Usually, the stairs ran alongside the wall, but for a few episodes, including the lorry crash itself, a new expanse of wall appeared at No 3, blocking off the stairs.

We laughed quite a lot over it, but were soon caught up in the horrors of the lorry crash story-line.

And after the lorry crash story-line, immediately afterwards, the strange new expanse of wall at No 3 disappeared.

And its occupants could use the bathroom and bedrooms again.

To this day I wonder about that wall. Why did it suddenly appear? And where did it go?

Back to normal: "I can assure you, Deirdre, there's nothing in the least odd about the walls in this house. Now, I'll make us a nice cup of tea."