Last week, Bafta honoured the end of Downton Abbey – the jewel in the crown of ITV and one of the channel’s biggest dramas ever. But enough about Lord Grantham and poor Lady Edith; I’m more concerned by the drama of ITV’s other big show, Coronation Street, a classic that has been ignored by bosses even though it has underpinned the entire channel for more than 55 years.
Forget the car crash that is True Detective’s second season, Corrie is going wrong even more spectacularly. Once a byword for excellence, envied by everyone in TV for its killer mix of drama and comedy, the soap has lost its way. After months of poor plots, stunt casting and increasingly bad acting, it is in serious danger of turning off viewers. Ratings recently fell to 4.9 million, believed to be a record low.
For me, a dyed-in-the-wool northerner who has been watching religiously since Ernie Bishop got shot at Baldwin’s Casuals in 1978, each episode now makes for painful viewing, like watching a much-loved friend waste away. Each week, the plots get even more pathetic: Carla’s gambling addiction should be powerfully reflecting her frenzied guilt but feels banal and forgettable, especially when coupled with some less than believable acting. (Carla’s mental state is portrayed by glassy-eyed staring, lip-biting and wine-gulping – not to mention frantic laptop-closing whenever another character enters a room.)
But while poor acting can be put down to cost-cutting, with overworked actors not getting enough rehearsal time, there is simply no excuse for Corrie’s obsession with casting “names” such as ex-Girls Aloud star Sarah Harding, rather than using their tried and tested formula of old northern club comics and Mancunian character actors.
Harding’s involvement in the show now looks like a cruel in-joke for bored TV execs; her stilted accent, rabbit-in-the-headlights glare and wooden delivery was the final straw for fans, who complained in droves. Corrie does still manage some admirable pieces of casting – Liam Bairstow, an actor with Down’s syndrome, has signed up to play Cathy Matthews’s nephew Alex – but worryingly, the show is continuing this stunt-casting policy by bringing Paddy McGuinness and former X Factor winner Shayne Ward into Weatherfield in the next few episodes.
Elsewhere, things are getting plain weird. The arrival of Sarah-Lou and her 15-year-old daughter Bethany after seven years living in Milan should have been a welcome change for the writers. But, yet again, no one bothered with the backstory and cast Lucy Fallon, who not only looks far too old for her part, but sounds as if she’s never even eaten a Cornetto, let alone become fluent in Italiano.
Annoyingly, even the big “dramatic” moments are now being wasted. Deirdre Barlow’s funeral (something, remember, the writers had six months to prepare for) was a letdown, leaving many viewers unmoved compared with, say, the emotional sendoff of Betty Turpin in 2013.
So how do ITV fix it? Easy – and I don’t mean by crashing a helicopter into the set at Granada Studios and wiping everyone out. Stop casting celebrities who can’t act. Forget outlandish plots, remember realism and concentrate on the nuances of character first and last. Stop obsessing over the younger cast who cannot carry a plot on their own, and concentrate instead on the grownups. Bring back some of the show’s legendary battleaxes – re-hiring Stephanie Cole as Roy Cropper’s mum would be a good start – and some of the old cast too.
Oh, and can someone please buy Bethany an Italian phrasebook, capisce?
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Steven D Wright is an independent TV producer and former
Channel 4 commissioning editor for factual entertainment.
