Coronation Street: Feminism, The Gay Creator, Misandry And Rita Fairclough The Liar...

The scriptwriter of a Coronation Street episode in the early 1990s had no qualms in rewriting history to make our Street favourite Rita Fairclough out to be a victim of an insensitive husband, while actually making Rita seem like a downright liar, touting for sympathy, to those of us who knew the plot.

Back in 1981, Rita suddenly discovered a strong maternal instinct. True, she had looked after Harry Bates's kids some years before, but streetwise Rita had always seemed quite happy without kids of her own, telling Mavis there would be no patter of tiny feet at No 9 after she married Len.

In 1980, when Rita walked out on Len, her concerns were for a 'decent' house and a dishwasher - not kids.

But in 1981 Rita babysat Nicky Tilsley, and suddenly went all broody. She told Len she wanted to adopt, and Len, at first stunned and incredulous, very quickly agreed. Then the couple found out they were too old, and fostered instead.

But in the early 1990s, Rita told Sally Webster that by the time Len had agreed on adoption, they were too old.

A huge difference.

Also in the 1990s, Bet Gilroy and Rita had a huge barney in the Kabin. Bet pointed out that it was Len's money that got her started. Rita stated: 'Len left me a tatty little shop!'. Yes. And money in the bank, a brand new house at No 7 Coronation Street, the builder's yard in Mawdsley Street...

We adored Rita, but the Street's scriptwriters and producers sometimes did her no favours at all. The watering down of this fabulous, feisty character in the 1980s and her subsequent victimhood at the behest of Alan Bradley dd not convince us. Rita simply did not suit that storyline. She had far too much pride to fling herself at Alan in the way she did, her tears of horror ('Just like Len!') when Alan punched somebody in the Rovers (she hadn't been averse to walloping people herself, including Len, in the good old days) and so on, partially destroyed one of the show's best ever characters and seemed to be taking chunks out of the Feminist Guide To Misandry rather than presenting real life.

Corrie making victimised heroines out of its female characters is farcical. The women are at their best when being strong, human and frequently awful, seeing the faults of their spouses and partners, not their own. Audrey telling Alma she'd married a 'big baby' in the 1990s was a classic example of this. Our beautiful Aud had been selfish, childish (locking herself in the loo in a sulk after she and Alf had been forced to move into the Corner Shop flat when the chain on the house they were hoping to buy collapsed) and generally a lazy shopaholic for years. And we loved her for it. The fact she could see none of her own faults made us love her more.

I have to say that many of Coronation Street's women are at their best when following the template laid down by the show's creator, Tony Warren, himself a gay man and not averse to a bit of camp.

Let's hear Mr Warren on the subject: 'I'd known all these queens [gay men with a penchant for camp] in the village. Some of their dialogue was too good not to use. I remember giving Elsie lines that they would say. When you think of some of the things she came out with, how many straight women have you heard say that?'

The original template - women talking like camp men. The genius - the late Mr Tony Warren.

The original scripts, with their apparently ordinary but slightly tweaked dialogue (witness Ena in the Corner Shop in 1960!), were very much this man's tribute to northern English femininity. But far more evocative of a witty evening in a gay pub with a number of camp men present than ordinary female conversation. The world was really not ready for a soap about gay men!

Coronation Street has become self consciously feminist - and as that ideology is now being questioned far and wide (men oppressed women - oh, really?!) is straying far from its roots and has been growing progressively worse since the 1970s (the Susi Hush era). Ideologies are not facts.

The Street went from being a lovely matriarchy (as many such streets are) to being the misandry mile. A great difference, relying on warped Feminist dogma to score points and create female victimhood.

So, Rita, love, don't tell lies, eh, chuck? Don't forget your marriage was under the microscope on our TV screens - we were there too - so it really doesn't wash.

For years, Feminism was not questioned. But now it is. Chivalry should not allow riding rough shod over facts and demonising an entire gender, and the facts about the vote - suffragettes bombing and harming working class, vote-less men with acid, the SCUM Manifesto, the Duluth Model and the horrors experienced by Erin Pizzey in the 1970s are being examined at long last. As are the true facts about the gender pay gap and the workplace death gap.

About time too.

So, pack it in, eh, Corrie?

The misandrist nonsense (often created by 'white knight' chivalrous men) still goes on and was one of the things which drove me away from the show many years ago.

Remember your roots.

Questioning Feminism? Heresy, eh? Misogynistic or not? Not. Read what Karen Straughan has to say on the subject and just how this hate ideology has infested every nook and cranny of our lives: 
https://antifeministpraxis.com/2017/03/31/feminism-was-never-not-rotten/

1989: Trailer For New Coronation Street Omnibus Edition...

Alf Roberts seems really excited about opening the Corner Shop on a Sunday... but he isn't really! It's early 1989 and the pics above are screen grabs from a trailer for the (then) brand new Coronation Street omnibus edition!

By the magic of YouTube, see it below!

1983: Fred Gee, Bet Lynch, Betty Turpin, A Car And A Lake...

Sunday Mirror, May 1, 1983:

Looking ahead to the week's TV:

Coronation Street, (ITV, 7.30). It's time for a Bank holiday spree. Fred Gee (Fred Feast) takes Bet Lynch (Julie Goodyear) and Betty Turpin (Betty Driver) out for a whirl around the countryside and a picnic lunch. But it doesn't work out quite as it should.

One of my favourite Coronation Street story-lines of the 1980s was the "Car In The Lake Outing" of May 1983.

Rovers potman Fred Gee (Fred Feast), trying to be a wow with barmaid Bet Lynch (Julie Goodyear), tempted her with an afternoon out - a picnic somewhere "nice". He'd take her in his Rover 2000 motor car - the one which had once belonged to Rovers landlady Annie Walker (Doris Speed).

Bet was quite keen on the idea of a picnic, but not at all keen on being alone with "Fred Face", and so invited her trusted colleague Betty Turpin (Betty Driver) along for the ride.

And a "ride" it certainly was, with the Rover ending up rolling into a lake - with Bet and Betty inside it.

And when Bet finally made it back to dry land, it wasn't that dry either - because dear old "Fred Face" dumped her down in a cow pat!

Of all the women Of Weatherfield in 1983, Betty Driver and Julie Goodyear were the most called upon in the courage and endurance stakes.

Recalling the filming of the "Car In The Lake" scenario in the book The Coronation Street Story (Daran Little, 1995), Julie Goodyear said:

"I had on a pink skirt, a jacket and a very flimsy T-shirt and some plastic beads and a pair of white high-heels, and they gave me a brown plastic bin-liner with two holes in it for my legs. I stepped into that and it was tied round my waist. And of course the water went up as soon as we went in and the bag was immediately filled with lake-water. The car sank and we were both waist-deep in very, very cold lake water."

Betty Driver gave her account of the watery saga:

"Now, me wellies were full of water to start with, and I said to Julie, 'There's a stickleback in the water here, dodging all around me. I hope to God it doesn't go anywhere else!' We were terrified and there was a swan swimming by and every time it passed the window it hissed at us and I thought it was going to attack us."

The sequence took two days to film, and Julie Goodyear and Betty Driver received congratulatory bottles of brandy from producer Mervyn Watson, with notes thanking them for their hard work.

1980s: Anti-Thatcher Propaganda In The Street...

Eee, the 1980s! The decade when we split into two camps - LOVE THATCHER or HATE THATCHER and our soaps developed a Left Wing bias. I fell into the second camp, very firmly, and a glimpse of Margaret on my TV screen would have me screeching for the remote control.

Brookside bravely showed us what a rotten country it was under Thatcher, and EastEnders followed suit.

The realities were far more jumbled (I hope one day somebody writes an unbiased study of the turbulent, multi-faceted '80s) but it was a shame when Corrie stooped to silly anti-Thatcher propaganda, and put absolute nonsense into the mouth of Bet Lynch (Julie Goodyear), briefly making a mockery of the character.

It happened in 1986. Hilda Ogden (Jean Alexander) asked Bet to reinstate Sally Seddon (Sally Whittaker) to her full-time post as Rovers barmaid, as Bet had just employed Betty Turpin (Betty Driver) to make the pub food, and cut Sally's hours.

Said Bet: "We're not living in the '60s and '70s now, Hilda, when the problem weren't getting the jobs, it were persuading folk to turn up and do them. Nobody were a bigger skiver than me - never worked Mondays and Fridays for years. But them days have gone, Hilda - and nobody can fetch them back..."

Say WHAT?

Firstly, whilst Bet was known to skive off under Annie Walker's regime at times, she didn't often get away with it, often ended up shouldering more work than she thought she should, and sometimes worked when she wasn't scheduled to - to suit Lady Walker's whims.

So, it seemed the scriptwriter didn't know Bet's history very well - or was very forgetful.

But worse was the absurd notion that the 1970s were a time of full employment.

Let's trek back briefly. In the 1970s, unemployment passed the million mark before we were midway through the decade, and stood at around one-and-a-half million by the end of the decade.

And Coronation Street fully reflected the fact.

In the mid-1970s, there was much publicity about graduates leaving universities and being unable to find work. Coronation Street featured this issue in 1975, when Annie Walker was threatened by two young men in her bedroom, seeking to rob her. She was informed by one of them that he had been through college, but there was no job for him.

In 1976, Gail Potter (Helen Worth) and Tricia Hopkins (Kathy Jones) faced losing their jobs at the Corner Shop. They tossed a coin for the chance of a job at Sylvia's Separates, and Gail won. Trisha could not find employment, and left the Street to live with her parents.

Also that year, Alf Roberts (Bryan Mosley) was terrified at the possibility of redundancy at the sorting office where he worked.

And 1976 brought us the grim tale of Ernest Bishop's photographic business going bankrupt and his and Emily's desperate searches for work. Emily was forced to take a job as an orderly at the infirmary, Ernest spent several months in the wilderness before being employed by Mike Baldwin.

Another epic tale from '76 involved a dastardly plan devised by Annie Walker (Doris Speed) to cut Betty Turpin (Betty Driver) and Bet Lynch's wages, rather than give them a pay rise! Both walked out, but walked back in again, glad to have their jobs back, when Annie dropped her plan. The pay cut would not go ahead, but they wouldn't get any pay rise that year either, Annie decided!

Fred Gee (Fred Feast) told Annie Walker that he was well aware he was lucky having two jobs when a lot of folk didn't have one!

Not long before Christmas 1976, Terry Bradshaw (Bob Mason) lost his job with Fairclough and Langton. Despairing of finding another job in the district, and romantically rebuffed by Gail Potter, he went back into the Army.

In 1977, Steve Fisher (Lawrence Mullin) decided to go abroad to find work when he was sacked by Mike Baldwin (Johnny Briggs), saying he was going "because there's no jobs here." Fortunately, Mike reinstated him.

In early 1978, Ernest Bishop (Stephen Hancock) was accidentally shot and killed by two unemployed young men in a wages snatch at the denim factory.

In late 1978, unemployed Gail Potter and Suzie Birchall (Cheryl Murray) decided to seek work in London, although they were warned that it might not be easy. In the end, Gail chickened out, and Suzie set off for the bright lights alone, only to return in early 1979, disillusioned. Her failure to find permanent work, and her drift into a tacky relationship with a wealthy older man, note wealthy (Suzie did!), made fascinating viewing.

If Bet Lynch had been a real person she would have never have made such a barmy comment about full-employment in the '70s. The Bet we saw on-screen in '70s Corrie knew the realities.

But there she was, in 1986, basically stating: before Margaret Thatcher, we had full employment!

Maggie was obviously to blame. Before her, everything in the UK employment garden was peachy.

It was a shame. The illusion briefly fizzled. It wasn't Bet speaking, it was some well paid scriptwriter, who obviously did not know his/her facts.

Now, if Bet had said: "Things haven't been easy for a long time, but they've got a damn sight worse since Thatcher came to power - unemployment's more than doubled!" I'd have risen from my armchair and cheered.

But in 1986, when the grim realities of the '70s were far too recent in memory to have been hyped and rewritten, her comment simply brought a puzzled "EH?!!" from yours truly.

I well remembered my step-father's time on the dole back in the '70s. And still do.

Bet's boob qualifies as one of the battiest comments in Corrie history.

But it's an interesting manifestation of the "EVERYTHING WAS FINE BEFORE THATCHER" ethos of many TV scriptwriters in the 1980s.

Intruder: "I've worked very hard, been to college, but there's no job for me, nowhere. So I've decided that what I can't get legally, I'm prepared to take.."

Emily: "What's wrong with us, Ernest, why CAN'T we find work? I mean we're reasonably well-educated, responsible adults..."

Tricia: "I've 'ad a sickener round 'ere just lately - no money, no job..."

Alf: " 'New Staffing Levels', they called it. I never thought it'd work out like this."

1978 - Ernie was accidentally shot and killed when two unemployed youths tried to snatch the wages at the denim factory.

Screen Capture Request - Bet Lynch

Beverley says:

Have you a nice screen cap of Bet Lynch (Julie Goodyear) with her beehive hair in the '70s or '80s?

Certainly, Beverley. Here's the Street's beloved blonde (and buxom) barmaid in 1980. Looks a bit miserable, doesn't she?

Perhaps it was something to do with that swine of a lorry driver, Dan Jackson?

First, he was with Elsie Tanner. Then Bet made a play for him. The fur flew furiously when Elsie found out and she lambasted Bet across the Rovers bar. But Bet had landed herself (she thought) a fine catch with brash, macho Dan.

Dan wasn't with Bet long. She befriended a "fella" who lived across the landing from her bedsit, all completely harmless, a bit of company.

But Dan didn't like it. He punched the aforementioned "fella", and then took off when Bet remonstrated with him. He made it plain that he didn't regard Bet as anything very important in his life. There were plenty more women like her.

"Be lucky," he said.

Poor Bet.

She never was.

We Wish You A Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year!

A very festive looking invitation card to Coronation Street's 25th anniversary party: "Denis Foreman and David Plowright invite ................ TO DRINK A TOAST TO CORONATION STREET - Friday 6 December, Stage One, 5.30pm to 730pm. Fireworks 7.15pm".

Back On The Street would like to wish everybody a very happy Christmas and all the best for 2009.

Have fun, but try not to over-indulge during the Festive Season. And if you do happen to over-indulge, I hope you don't have to put up with a boss like Mrs Annie Walker, one-time landlady of The Rovers Return Inn, Coronation Street, whilst you're suffering the after effects...

After all the Christmas and New Year revelries which saw an end to the not-exactly-golden year of 1976, Hilda woke up to the start of 1977 feeling distinctly delicate. She had attended Bet Lynch's party at No. 5 the previous night, and had rather over-indulged herself on the alcohol. But of course she didn't confess to her booziness - she blamed Bet's "dinky pies" for her throbbing head, unsettled tum and general lethargy.

Stan was not convinced. Hilda dispatched him to The Rovers to inform Annie Walker that she was ill and would not be at work that day.

Stan relayed Hilda's message - "She can't come for 'ealth reasons," and Bet pounced on it...

"What do yer mean, 'for 'ealth reasons'?! She got smashed last night, she's got 'angover!"

Bet became irate: "Well, for your information she's not alone! I've got 'angover, everybody's got 'angover!"

Mrs Walker smiled smugly: "Not everyone, dear!"

In all fairness, Annie did participate in helping with the morning chores in Hilda's absence: whilst Bet did Hilda's cleaning on top of her own work, Annie took her beloved Rover 2000 out for an airing!