OLD SOAP TIME

When I was sixteen years old, the other thing that I was most interested in, and the thing which, to be honest, I had far more success in pursuing, was old television. In subsequent years I became that dullard who could rattle off facts and figures about old TV shows and their airdates and their actors like a walking edition of “Spotlight” but without the pictures.

This would come in useful in later years when I could win the champagne on the Granada Studios tour trip we did as a works outing due to my superior knowledge of all things “Corrie” even though I didn’t actually watch it then and hadn’t done for years at that point.

Nowadays, people carry mobile phones which can do much the same thing, but back then, I kept all of that obscure data in my mind to amaze/bore to tears my so-called friends. Once upon a time I had hoped to be able to make a living at talking about such things but, like so many of my other bright ideas, this came to naught, although my later accumulation of a vast videotape archive grew out of those ridiculous plans.

This fascination meant, however, that when that ancient old TV series “Coronation Street” reached its almost unheard of twentieth anniversary in 1980, and ITV decided in its wisdom to show a week’s worth of old episodes from the 1960s, I was utterly rapt and mesmerised and swallowed down the classic opener, the viaduct collapse and the coach trip disaster in all their grainy black and white glory as if I’d just discovered the dead sea scrolls.

Later on, there was a new kid on the soap block and, in a flurry of misguided loyalty towards the BBC, during its early years, I became an avid follower of “EastEnders” and stuck with it through thick and thin, from the discovery of Reg Cox’s body, Andy the nurse getting hit by a truck, Den and Ange’s messy divorce, Meechelle’s pregnancy, Pete and his ruddy stall, Arfur’s breakdown, that sleazy geezer at the Dagmar pub, and all of the rest.

I’ve not watched either of these shows for decades now. The last time I watched an episode of “Coronation Street” all of the way through and by making the choice to actually do so was Stan Ogden’s funeral (A lone flower in the gutter and an acting tour de force from Jean Alexander) and the last “EastEnders” I saw was when Michelle Fowler took that long, lonely ride out of there under and through the railway arch to freedom in a black cab.

Judging by the trailers which I see from time-to-time when I’m watching other things, they both seem to have become far more shouty since I used to watch them, and everyone’s become far more melodramatic in their interactions with each other, so that the everyday stories of ordinary life seem to have been swamped by the kind of convoluted madnesses that we would run away from screaming if they were happening in our own streets.

There have been other soaps I’ve dabbled with, of course; I got quite involved with “Emmerdale Farm” for a time when Dolly Skilbeck was still around, and the first year of “Neighbours” sucked me in twice a day during my post-graduate year of unemployment, but I never really stuck with either of those much beyond that. I did listen to “The Archers” for far more years than I care to think about, but still I haven’t forgiven them for throwing the delightful Nigel off a roof a few Christmases ago and I have not returned.

So, why am I thinking about soap operas this morning then?

Especially as I once promised that talk of such things would never darken these very pages...

Well, the thing is, I was lying in bed, wide awake and fretting my way through the night as usual, when it suddenly struck me that next year, “EastEnders” will be thirty – count ‘em… thirty!! – years old and, whilst this is no doubt some kind of benchmark in colossal wastes of time, it just terrifies me that I can remember being there at the beginning of this national madness.

But the real thing that intrigues me is that, when I sat down and saw those retrospectives of  “Coronation Street” as a sixteen-year-old, the society that was being shown, despite being a little over a decade ago in some instances, seemed like it was from a completely different world, and I wonder whether someone that age watching old “EastEnders” repeats, should there be any during the “anniversary” year, will find the world of  mid-1980s just as peculiar as I found the early 1960s?

Because, the thing is that, to me at least, the 1980s only seem like five minutes ago and, to be perfectly honest with you, I suspect that if I was persuaded to sit down and “enjoy” the “rosy nostalgic glow” of memories of Margaret Thatcher’s strife-torn Britain, it would probably look perfectly normal to me and not strange or peculiar at all.

And that is bloody weird...