A comic look at Corrie

Corrie!, Lowry Quays, Salford

WITH the sort of crush once reserved for a new batch of Betty’s hotpot at the Rovers, current cast and fans alike packed into the Lowry for the official opening of this “Coronation Street” 50-year tribute.

Playwright and Corrie scriptwriter Jonathan Harvey’s compilation of Corrie: the Best Bits, ploughs up stories from over 7,300 half-hours as he stitches together fragments of plots from the very beginning — in fact the first scene, with Ena Sharples and Florrie Lindley in the corner shop — to pretty much the present day.

Along the way he has fun with the genre, with the characters and with the storylines themselves: the Mad World of Tony Gordon, for example, is told in a silly dance. And why not?

Over the decades Corrie has gone from being creator Tony Warren’s idea of weekly high drama, warts and all, to one of the funniest examples of heightened reality on the box. It was too good, Granada believed, to call a soap.

These days, the search for ever-more dramatic storylines might have taken it into the preposterous realms of a Weatherfield Dynasty and Dallas, but it can still make compelling viewing. Which makes Harvey’s work something of a curate’s egg: very funny, and at the same time not at all what one might expect of a “celebration”.

This is a sort of two-hour mickey-take of everything and everyone involved. It might be an affectionate mickey-take, but there’s no denying that’s what it is.

Charles Lawson — once Jim McDonald — narrates and his lines are Harvey’s chief contribution, along with linking dialogue, some nifty side-steps down the years and odd little scenes in which Ena, Martha and Minnie — and Elsie Tanner — inhabit a little corner of heaven.

Pretty much everything else is the enjoyable cast of five quick-changing through dozens of characters as they run down classic snatches of dialogue, from Raquel’s French lesson with Ken to Hilda’s heartbreaking goodbye to Stan and evil Terry’s sale of his son.

Deirdre is born in the mannerisms of Katherine Dow Blyton, for example; Jack Duckworth lives in the voice of Simon Chadwick and Leanne Best is a funny Gail, whose next marriage is always going to be the best one. But you can’t single out any of the cast specifically, Josie Walker and Matthew Wait are just as strong.

As for the show, well, it will be a huge success, given its history and fan base. But it comes to make fun of Corrie, not to praise it.