Music: {allcanada} Doc examines Corrie Street phenomenon

Monday, December 6, 2010

{allcanada} Doc examines Corrie Street phenomenon

On any given evening in Canada, close to 800,000 people may be watching the legendary British soap-opera Coronation Street on CBC. Which begs the question: Why?

That is not a loaded or sarcastic query. Any TV show that has been around for 50 years - and has been shown in Canada for almost 40 - deserves our respect.

An examination of this cross-ocean connection lies at the heart of the light-hearted documentary Corrie Crazy: Canada Loves Coronation Street. Hosted by Debbie Travis, it debuts Thursday, Dec. 9 on CBC - that's 50 years to the day that Coronation Street made its debut on British TV.

"There are a lot of people from England who've emigrated (to Canada)," says actor Malcolm Hebden, who plays Norris Cole. "It's a nostalgic trip for them, I think, to see how we're still living in nasty little terraced houses in smoke-filled streets."

That has to be part of it, yes. But it's obvious to anyone in Canada that with each passing year, as is the natural order of things, the country gets a little further removed from its British roots.

One interesting theory about why Coronation Street speaks to Canada goes back to the show's beginnings.

When Coronation Street first hit the airwaves in Britain, there was a fear it would be too Manchester-ish, too Northern, too dreary, too real-life for wider audiences in the U.K. But the fact that creator Tony Warren's boss at the time was a Canadian helped the "translation" process, according to Warren himself.

"I knew that I was writing it for a Canadian, so I spelled it out," Warren says in the doc, referring to his former boss at Granada Television, producer and Toronto native Harry Elton. "And in spelling it out for a Canadian, I also explained it to the Midlands, and the south of England, and that made a big difference."

Canadian-TV staple and design guru Travis hails from the part of England where Coronation Street is set, so she is uniquely qualified to moderate this debate. But we actually would have liked to hear a little more opinion and analysis from Travis herself.

In the doc, Travis travels back to the Manchester area to interview the Coronation Street cast, tour the set, and take a brief walk down her own memory lane with her sister.

But the doc also spends a lot of time with Travis back in Canada interviewing Coronation Street devotees and attending fan events. That stuff is okay is small doses, but the featured Canadian fans really don't have that much more to say than, "The show's great, we love it."

Personally we've never been drawn to soap operas, so we've seen only occasional snippets of Coronation Street. But anyone with an interest in TV history - us included - will be fascinated by the bits in Corrie Crazy that deal with the origins of the program and how it developed.

The doc could have used a few more old clips - for example, we know Davy Jones (later of the Monkees), Peter Noone (later of Herman's Hermits) and Ben Kingsley (future Academy Award winner) all appeared on Coronation Street in the 1960s. But hey, one of the main themes of Coronation Street through the years has been that you don't always get everything you want.

Coronation Street still is giving Canadians what they want, often to the tune of three-quarters-of-a-million viewers per day.

"Other countries in the world love it," Warren, the creator, concludes. "But nowhere quite like Canada."