YOU have to go a long way back into the past to find the future of television. December 9th, 1960. Sixty years ago, exactly. A profound change was starting to happen in TV and film and a young writer at Granada Television, Tony Warren, was at the heart of it. He had just created a series called Coronation Street.
If you haven’t seen that first episode from 60 years ago – or you saw it the first time and can’t remember the details – I urge you to go and have a look at it online. It was extraordinary then, and it’s extraordinary now. Suddenly, the TV screen was a reflective surface and viewers could see their own faces and experiences in it – for the first time. It had pretty much never happened before.
Right away, the series also featured some of its greatest characters. Like Pat Phoenix as Elsie Tanner. Look at her: cocky and confident, but with the cracks showing. "Eee, Elsie," she says, looking at herself in the mirror. "You're just about ready for t'knacker's yard."
Then there’s Ena Sharples. That face. Made of stone. Hair like a storm cloud. Lips a thin line of disapproval. "I'll take a packet of baking powder," she says, fixing shopkeeper Florrie with one of her stares. "Where are you being buried? Think on't, you don't go to that crematorium down the road – while coffin's rolling away they play Moonlight and Roses."
You can see at once what Tony Warren was trying to do: he was recreating the cadences and patterns of the women he’d listened to when he was a kid growing up in the north of England. But it’s only when you look around at other TV shows – then and now – that you realise what The Street was really doing, and is still doing 60 years later.
First, and most obviously, the programme was reflecting the lives of working-class men and women, and in that sense it was a direct riposte to the drawing-room dramas written by Terence Rattigan and the like. It also dealt with class directly in the tensions between the university-educated Ken Barlow and his parents.
But it was doing a few other things too that were a bit more subtle. First, from episode one onwards, it featured women talking to each other realistically about their lives and worries rather than being the wives, girlfriends and secretaries of more important male characters. In that sense, Coronation Street passed the famous Bechdel Test on the representation of women in film and TV on its first day, and it would still pass the test today.
However, Tony Warren was doing something else with Corrie that was even less obvious and a bit more hidden beneath the surface. Warren was gay and his great female characters were not only representations of the women he knew, they also reflected the gay men he knew. When Elsie Tanner complained about her latest failed romance in her colourful, northern and slightly camp vernacular, she wasn’t just a woman, she was a gay man as well, because that’s the only way it could be done on television in the 1950s.
Remarkable as all of this was, it’s also a bit worrying because the revolution which Coronation Street appeared to be ushering in 60 years ago never really happened. All this week, there have been special programmes celebrating Corrie’s anniversary, and they’ve been great, but what’s noticeable still is how few of the other programmes on ITV and the other channels feature working class characters, particularly white working-class characters.
Even the BBC’s own head of diversity, June Sarpong, has acknowledged the problem. The BAME audience gets a lot of focus, she says, but she admits the BBC has also struggled to connect with working class audiences and I would suggest it’s because of the problem Tony Warren was trying to address 60 years ago: there’s no one like them on television.
I am not confident it’s going to change either. Broadcasters have tried to tackle the lack of diversity on TV, but they’ve done it, largely, by ensuring mostly middle-class characters, and presenters, and couples in adverts, represent a range of racial backgrounds. It’s become a visible, and automatic, way of trying to be equal.
But it’s not enough. The solution is to show more of the kind of characters Tony Warren created. They still exist, and they are not all Brexiteers. But TV drama has become so high-concept and escapist, you’re more likely to encounter a dragon or a Dalek than someone from a working-class background. We should make TV real again. Like it was on Coronation Street. Like Tony Warren imagined. Like it was when the programme tried to change the future 60 years ago.
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