They say Tony Warren went on to the roof of Granada TV and saw, like a Manchester Moses, the city revolving around him like a wheel. Spoke after dizzying spoke of back-to-back terraces, a promised land flowing with hotpot and backchat.
It was a vision of quite astonishing truth. I thought Coronation Street was a documentary, for I grew up in a pub like that with people exactly like that.
I knew Ena Sharples, who blew in like a sharp wind demanding four fancies and NO ECLAIRS. She was a God-fearing woman and eclairs had, one suspects, an erotic connotation for her. Ena, Martha and Minnie always sat together like Eeny, Meeny, Miny. There was no Moe. In my parents’ pub elderly ladies always sat in the snug. Their husbands drank in the public bar and sometimes one of them would call out “Is ’oo theer?” If she was there, he might stand her a port and lemon. I was at university before I realised that ’oo was the Anglo Saxon heo, meaning she. The chap in the flat cap was speaking the language of Beowulf.
And I knew Annie Walker, the landlady, who scattered aitches with a liberal hand. She was my mother. Like Annie, she never stopped trying to upgrade the pub into an ’otel and was particularly proud of the shifty men in trilbies who paid an extra penny to have their drinks brought to them in the billiard room. They were, she said proudly, a better class of customer altogether.
Elsie Tanner, who was no better than she ought to be, seemed to be in Technicolor even when Coronation Street was black and white. She was once described as the sort of woman a travelling salesman always hoped would answer the door. Ena Sharples was the woman who actually did. Their collisions loosened your back teeth.
Lancashire was matriarchal and Tony Warren, who was openly gay long before it was safe, really relished women.
I was rather ashamed of it all. When, at my mother’s instigation, I was sent to school at Roedean I kept very quiet about the pub. I didn’t realise how glorious it had been until I saw Coronation Street. How indomitable and funny and throbbing like a bunion with colour and warmth.
Thank you, Tony Warren, for that.
.png?w=600)
