Last week, the Coronation Street storyline featuring the sexual grooming of Bethany Platt by her older fiance, Nathan Curtis, to sleep with other older men at sex parties, reached even greater intensity. In one episode, not only was Bethany (Lucy Fallon) burnt by Nathan (Chris Harper) with a cigarette, but the inference was that she was about to be sexually assaulted (as several men entered her bedroom, the door was closed).
The scene was shown after the 9pm watershed, but there were still complaints, as there have been all along. People are saying that Coronation Street is being controversial and irresponsible and the sexual grooming storyline has no place in a soap, where young people, even children, might be watching. This attitude, for me, prompts a recurring question: if most would agree that culture has a duty, when appropriate, to shine a light into the darkest corners of life, then why is there endless disagreement about who or what is permitted to hold the torch?
I’m a fan of Coronation Street but, even if I weren’t, I’d struggle to see how it has been irresponsible. Some older people sexually groom younger people – why shouldn’t it be covered? The story has been handled appropriately for its normal early time-slot. And it wasn’t as though Bethany suddenly pitched up, screaming: “I’m being sex-groomed, innit!”
For the uninitiated, Coronation Street simply doesn’t work like that. This storyline has been carefully building for months and, off-screen, the actors have been giving interviews and talking on daytime television to discuss the themes and appeal to anyone in a bad situation to seek help.
What’s wrong with any of this? Indeed, sometimes this kind of fretting seems to be less about concern relating to a controversial theme and more of a covert attack on the “prole” medium. Too often, it seems that these kinds of cyclical furores (Hayley Cropper’s euthanasia storyline was another) are fundamentally about Coronation Street being “just a soap” and, by extension, about how all soaps are at the mercy of a deeply embedded cultural snobbery that refuses to accept that a quintessentially working-class art form could ever be trusted to handle important issues properly.
The recent harrowing drama Three Girls, about the real-life sexual grooming of underage, mainly white girls in Rochdale, was widely praised. However, while people found Three Girls disturbing and some asked wider questions about the ongoing focus on sexualising young females, at no point, interestingly, did anybody seem to question the inherent right of Three Girls to exist or fret that anybody involved in the production was being tacky, flippant or ratings-grabbing.
By contrast, it’s as though soaps have to beg to be “allowed” to cover controversial topics and are endlessly monitored and criticised when they do – in a way that transcends mere concern about the early evening time slots. Time and again, it’s as though soaps daring to tackle big issues are placed on the level of jumped-up school plays, operating out of their depth, with ideas above their station.
In reality, soaps are among Britain’s most popular and enduring dramatic forms, and mainly populated on both sides of the camera by adult professionals who presumably know what they’re doing.
In the case of the Bethany grooming storyline, this resulted in it reaching more vulnerable people than any amount of worthy documentaries, or even excellent dramas such as Three Girls. Handled properly within the longer soap timeframe, certain storylines have an even better chance of developing into something special.
Everything on-screen has to be accountable, but isn’t it time that people stopped automatically doubting and effectively infantilising the medium of soap when it comes to darker storylines? Just as bad things such as grooming aren’t going to conveniently melt away because popular culture ignores them, an unofficial embargo on who is allowed to deal with serious issues smells of cultural snobbery.
