"There's Something Different About Blanche..."

During the cold anti-social months when I was a teenager, my days were moulded around three things; Neighbours, Emmerdale and Coronation Street. You could even throw Home & Away into that mixer until the very bizarre ‘Alf has psychosis’ storyline rendered it unwatchable. Not that the others were of a better standard of course…

I remember one Neighbours episode which revolved entirely around a dream sequence. This of course is not immediately unusual until I add that the whole thing was done from the perspective of Bouncer the dog.

Also, as much as Emmerdale and Coronation Street are ripe for ridicule, it would be a sin to write on this theme and not pay special credence to Neighbours’ ‘evil Harold’ storyline. For those of you not in the know, Harold Bishop is a God-fearing moral mentor played by a God hating bike loving party addict called Ian Smith.

His descent into evil occurred after he became convinced that that BASTARD Paul Robinson was responsible for the plane crash (ahem…) that killed his family. Of course, everyone but Harold was happy to know his family was dead as they were rotten to the core as characters and as actors.

I don’t watch Neighbours any more of course. The move to channel 5 rendered it unwatchable given that I live in Aberdeen where the only signals we receive are those from the Lord above telling us to have sex with our livestock and then marry our cousins.

My discontent with the more TV signal friendly soaps such as Emmerdale and Coronation stems not from their unbelievable storylines, but from their insistence on cutting and pasting reality into fiction.

This week, Coronation Street viewers ‘will be shocked and saddened’ by the surprise death of Deidre’s mother; the Gillian Duffy-like prejudiced windbag Blanche. I’m sorry but have these fucking people been living in a wind tunnel? The wonderful actress who plays Blanche, Maggie Jones, passed away about a year ago!

For the TV bosses of course, this is television gold given that the actors and actresses express the rawest emotion imaginable. Those who wouldn’t normally watch the show, do so out of intrigue to follow up on what they’ve read in the news. For others, it’s an opportunity to see which cast members bleat so weakly that you can tell they thought the person was an arsehole.

I hate this kind of shit though! For me, if they are going to augment fiction with reality then they have to go the whole hog. Entire Coronation Street storylines would be neutralised if, instead of someone saying ‘Eddie, I had sexual intercourse with your brother and a duck and now I’m not sure whether our son’s big nose is because of that or the radiation leak from the plane that crashed on t’ street the other day’; the characters would simply say ‘Shut the fuck up Doreen… I’m trying to watch Eastenders!

Similarly, characters should be given license to rip the pish out of each other. For example, if she’s still in it, the cast of Emmerdale should just turn round and say to Patsy Kensit something like ‘I got an erection once watching your sex scene in Qaudrophenia’.

Ultimately, I prefer my soaps to stick with absolute hyper-nonsense. Such as in Neighbours when Harold’s adopted son Paul went off to become a big star playing Australian rules football for a team that doesn’t actually exist; after negotiating an addiction to steroids of course! Or there was the storyline where his neighbour Jack Scully returned from a less than successful spell playing professional football for the great English Premier League; the likely reason for his lack of success being that the team he was playing for (Barnsford) doesn’t actually exist.

So to all those who write for television soaps, I beg you to reconsider when you prepare an in-show homage to your dead. Instead of burying them for all eternity, follow the Australian model of complete ridiculousness and employ a new actor to take the place of the dear departed. If you want to follow the Australian model, perhaps you could replace the deceased with an actor who looks nothing like the person or go nuts and change their gender or species entirely.

When you see past the jocular racism, those Australians have got it bloody all right!