SURELY the Baileys should be billed as a new family on Coronation Street – not a black family.
Why should a black family on a TV show that’s been running for six decades be news?
Why should there be any kind of triumphalism over the longest running soap in the world finally realising there are black families in Manchester?
Are the makers of Coronation Street really expecting praise for finally accepting the need to reflect reality?
Or is it that they’ve sat in a production meeting and said: “We are missing out on a young demographic because black people don’t see themselves within a family unit in our show.”?
EastEnders introduced their first black family, the Taverniers, nearly 30 years ago in 1990 – 25 years after Corrie had been created. Hollyoaks debuted the Valentines, their first black family, in 2006.
Are you telling me that penny didn’t drop for Coronation Street’s writers in all that time?
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As a child I can still remember family members calling up the stairs in excitement to tell the rest of us that The Fosters, the first British TV show to have an entirely black cast, was on.
I remember the fascinating (back then) Mixed Blessings, based on an interracial marriage between a white man and a black woman, launching in 1978.
No Problem, the hugely popular sitcom focusing on the Powell Family, debuted in 1983.
Corrie can’t say they’ve been short of inspiration.
Clearly with their investment in other cultures (a Muslim family since 2014) and a number of black characters stretching back to Shirley Armitage in 1983, there is nothing sinister.
But I remember spending many a summer with my aunt (who loved Corrie) and uncle who – like many Caribbean immigrants – chose Manchester instead of London when they came to this country in the Sixties. We existed.
It’s just a shame that Coronation Street didn’t even consider us as a unit for so many years.
Asked what had taken the show so long, Coronation Street producer Iain MacLeod said: “I don’t really know. Manchester has a large proportion of black residents so it did feel overdue we did this and represented modern Manchester a bit more accurately.”
Overdue? That’s some understatement.
