ITV's No 1 show, Coronation Street, is threatened by more than just EastEnders, writes ex-producer David Liddiment
Coronation Street took the No 1 slot in viewers' all-time ITV Top 50 the other week, but the Street no longer looks quite so all-conquering. Serious competition is on the horizon. With a bit of help from the dead and the long departed, underdog EastEnders is back on its feet and fighting. Its two years in the doldrums coincide almost precisely with Barbara Windsor's absence from the show due to ill-health. Now that her battling matriarch Peggy Mitchell is back - and we are promised the return of her delightful progeny Grant and Phil soon - ratings rejuvenation is on the cards. In fact, it is already happening, courtesy of a slow-burning storyline about who really killed the Square's most enduring character: Dirty Den delivers, even from the grave.
Windsor is not the only absentee returned to rejoicing in Albert Square. After a stint at Channel 4, John Yorke is back as EastEnders supremo, re-establishing his grip on the soap with a new "writers' academy" and an audit of the cast of characters - hence the return of the Mitchell clan. Yorke recognises one of the key qualities that has kept viewers watching the southern soap: no matter how much crap you throw at the characters, the audience wants to see how they overcome it.
Coincidentally Granada announced last week the appointment of former Emmerdale producer Steve Frost to oversee Britain's oldest soap, taking over after the highly successful two-year reign of Terry Wood. He has got a job on, as they say.
As a former executive producer of Coronation Street I have a professional interest in the ongoing battle between Britain's premier soaps, but first and foremost I am a fan. I have been a viewer of the Street since I was a kid and have seen it go in and out of fashion, hit high spots and low, and grow from a twice-weekly treat to today's five-episodes-a-week monster. That it still retains the particularity of Tony Warren's 1960 prototype in spite of its industrial scale production schedule and a regular cast four times as big, is testament to the skills of the production team and the quality of the writing over the years. There have been moments in recent memory as good as any in the show's 45-year history. Despite its recent barnstorming run, episodes in the past weeks are not among them.
THE RECENT CLAIRE Peacock do-gooding storyline is the culprit. Claire - taxi-driver and wife of Ashley - got involved in clearing the Red Rec (Weatherfield's version of the green belt) of the detritus of modern inner-city living, namely abandoned shopping trolleys and dumped sofas. In the spirit of good citizenship, Claire recruited the Street residents to join in with, as they say, hilarious but ultimately uplifting consequences. Just another slice of life down Weatherfield way. But hang on. At the end of each episode viewers were invited to find out more about volunteering by contacting ITV's Britain on the Move campaign. This, apparently, is the Year of the Volunteer. So Claire's storyline was really a bit of social action working undercover in Britain's most popular show.
Nothing wrong with that. All the soaps from time to time offer viewer helplines on issues raised in storylines: Sarah Louise Platt's teenage pregnancy was a classic example. The crucial difference here is one of timing and of editorial integrity. Not only was the Red Rec storyline created specifically to support a corporate campaign, it was introduced at the behest of ITV CEO Charles Allen who, we are told with some trumpeting on the ITV website, helped devise it.
Times must have changed. For many years Granada fiercely protected the editorial integrity of Coronation Street in the face of persistent pressure from government and voluntary organisations to harness the powerful relationship the programme has with its audience in the service of public policy objectives and other good works.
The Street's creative vitality is why it has endured so successfully and at its heart lies the unique relationship the show has always had with its writers. Coronation Street is a writer-led show and the enormous logistics of producing two-and-a-half hours of drama a week notwithstanding, it is their voice which has kept the Street on top. Socially purposive storylines are at their best when they emerge from the writer's imagination and grow organically out of the life of the characters. Imposing ideas - however good the intention - risks undermining the integrity of the programme's relationship with its audience so carefully fostered over many years.
Some observers see a more sinister motive than mere do-goodery, linking Britain on the Move's surprising breach of the Street's editorial defences to the recent sizeable reduction in ITV's tax burden. Could such a crude quid pro quo be possible? I have no idea, but I can understand something of the pressure.
SOME YEARS AGO, shortly after I took over as ITV's director of programmes, I was invited, with my chief executive Richard Eyre, to dinner by Lord Puttnam and the UK's then education secretary David Blunkett. The purpose of the dinner was to persuade us that we should support the British government's campaign to improve the perceived status of teachers in society by introducing a storyline into the Street which presented a positive role model for teachers. After expressing disappointment that they had failed to recognise serial womaniser Ken Barlow, the Street's longest running character and then (he has retired now) perhaps Britain's most famous fictional teacher as such a role model, I politely declined.
It seems ITV is finding it harder to resist in today's more difficult climate.
With so much to be done on the social policy agenda and so many soap hours hungry for "real-life" storylines, is it not just a bit precious to engage in a bit of teeth-gnashing about editorial integrity? I don't think so. Television, and ITV in particular, has a sterling record of social action campaigns on- and off-air. But soap, corporate agendas and politicians make a heady mix best avoided.
It all comes back to a basic rule for successful soap that Yorke will be conscious of in his efforts to rejuvenate EastEnders, and one I am sure Frost will bring to bear in his new role overseeing the Street. However talented your cast, the characters and their storylines are only ever as good as the people who create them.