IN THE week ending October 27th, Coronation Street slipped to number four in the ratings. A strong, sexy storyline about an affair between David and Cindy, wife of Ian, put EastEnders at the top once more. To add to the humiliation, the Street was also beaten by You'd Been Framed at number two and Heartbeat at number three. Meanwhile over on RTE, Glen roe continues at its own gentle pace, and Fair City has had sparky storylines of late.
ITV's live football coverage, which regularly puts the Street back to 9.30 p.m., inevitably affects the viewing figures but it is not the only explanation for what is now being billed as the Coronation Street crisis. Departing characters, most significantly Bet, Reg and, imminently after this week's traumas, Raquel, have left a large hole in the cast the humour, once the Street's best feature, has given way to tedious dialogue between arguing couples and the plots have simply become more and more ridiculous.
The long running saga of Ivy's ghost, which Vera believed to be hovering about her, was breathtaking in its banality, as was the kidnapping of Mavis and Derek's garden gnome, which included an episode in which the hapless couple received a gnome ear in the post. More recently, an absurd, Masonic like organisation called the Square Dealers has occupied huge chunks of the plot with its ramblings about recruitment and sacking procedures and the sanctity of Inner Rectangles. As someone who hates football, I have to say it now comes as welcome relief.
The Sun, which has launched a Save Our Street campaign, believes the missing ingredient is sex. Certainly the other soaps are thriving on it, but then they always have. In Brookside, brother and sister Nat and Georgia have been having an affair and Jackie Corkhill and Ron Dixon are becoming intimate once more. In EastEnders, viewers have been gripped not only by Cindy's adultery with David, but Alan's with singer Frankie and Alan's wife Carol's with David Wicks.
Emmerdale, with audiences of 12 million, is never out of the top 10 programmes, with its storylines of lesbian sex, teenage sex and adulterous sex. Kim Tate, played by Claire King, bears more resemblance to Dynasty's Alexis Carrington, and the cast's younger members, like Ian Kelsey (who plays Kim's ex-toyboy lover) and Jacqueline Pirie as Tina Dingle are walking sex machines.
Sex in Coronation Street, meanwhile, is pretty much as it has always been. Ken and Deirdre race for the Weatherfield bus in a desperate attempt to pull anyone alighting from it and both Ken and Mike mysteriously still manage to get more sex than all of Bettabuys young staff put together.
When Des Barnes was living with Raquel and sleeping with barmaid Tina ratings increased as viewers tuned in to see Raquel suffer another emotional battering. Ditto when viewers waited to see when Gail would find out about her husband having sex with the mad Carmel.
But while sex may be a ratings puller, the lack of it is not the reason the Street is falling behind its rivals. The reasons for its decline are twofold first, it gas stopped doing what it does best and second, it has failed to respond to the changing nature of the way soap is affecting our lives.
The Street's greatest strength has always been its couplings. Alec and Bet, Derek and Mavis, Ken and Deirdre. The writing is always at its strongest when a couple, whether they are arguing or enjoying themselves, explore the dynamics of their relationships in conversation.
Many of those couplings still exist, together with few ones, like Jim and Liz McDonald or Lothario Des and new love Claire, but these days the conversations feel as if they have been imposed on the characters from a great height and not like natural behaviour patterns rooted in the different personalities. The McDonalds, in particular, just shout at each other the conversations between Fred the butcher's nephew, Ashley, and his nanny girlfriend, Kelly, sound more like playground banter than adult communication and Derek and Mavis, whose banter was once the linchpin of so many episodes, are no longer funny, just sad.
The problem is that, with the exception of the brilliant Mallets, the Street has explored relatively few pairings among its younger characters and it is less successful than its rivals in their introduction. Youth has never been its strength. It was several years before the McDonald brothers, Steve and Andy, looked and sounded at ease in the demanding roles thrust upon them. The writing for the younger characters is considerably weaker than for more established characters.
The Street knows it needs young blood but it has little idea of what to do with it once it starts flowing. Fiona and Maxine in the salon are greatly underused and, for young, intelligent women, are distressingly lacking in any conversation outside the realms of "Just a shampoo and blow dry" and "D'you wanna go out with me, or what?"
It is in relation to young people our reaction to and demands from soap have most changed. When Neighbours and Home And Away arrived on the scene, they were popular because they featured lots of young people who behaved like most young people do behave, rather than the way newspapers would have us believe they behave. They worried about whether they would get their homework finished in time to go to the school dance they had arguments with their parents but quickly made up they worried about their hair, their clothes and their acne.
Junior school children would rush home to catch Neighbours, not just at lunch time but tea time too. They loved Kylie and Jason they cried when they left they bought their records and paid to see them in theatre shows. Although soap had always been a popular genre, this was the first generation to be so utterly obsessed with it.
That generation grew up it is the generation which now watches the so called adult soaps, and EastEnders, Emmerdale and Brookside have responded well to the demands of an audience in the throes of growing from children into adults with all the pains and pressures that accompany those changes.
Sexual development is just one of those changes but there are other aspects of growing up that, when given prominence in a soap, attract equally good audiences. Dealing with separation, either through death or desertion, is one particular change EastEnders has explored in the lives of its young characters. Nine year old Clare lost her mother, Debbie, who was killed by a car and the relationship between her and step dad Nigel was explored with a degree of sensitivity worthy of the greatest drama series.
Currently, it is being equally brave with its exploration of the mental state of Joe, who is desperately trying to come to terms with the death of his sister and his relationship with his neglectful father, David And when Bianca discovered David was her father, the scenes between Patsy Palmer and David French were among the most moving you could ever see in any dramatic medium.
COMPARE such scenes with the Street's offerings. With the exception of Alec's grand daughter Vicky and the McDonald boys, there has been precious little excitement for the young people. The plot there has centred on how awful young people can be, as with Steve's criminal activities, or how tedious they are (Andy's many bland girlfriends). They may think and talk about sex and alcohol, as young people are wont to do, but alongside their EastEnders's counterparts, they are about as deep as a birdbath.
The Street has never even come close to matching EastEnders's scenes and though it remains brilliant in many respects (when it is good, it is still very, very good), it needs to address the needs of its young audience and, as a result, its young characters, if it is to regain its lost ground.
The world of soap is one in which adulterers suffer because of their actions (Cindy, Carol, Alan and David in EastEnders), criminals are punished by law (Grant Mitchell in EastEnders) or by their own consciences (Grant's brother Phil) a world in which nothing good comes of people who sell or take drugs where families support each other and come together after often long periods of falling out (EastEnders's Mitchells and Fowlers, Emmerdale's Tate and Dingle clans) and children are well looked after.
Coronation Street, however, has a one dimensional moral framework. Apart from the occasional affair or minor criminal offence (and all offending parties are soon removed from the scene), its world is, a staid, uneventful one. No one says the Street has to make us feel better about the crumbling fabric of society, but it is another reason particularly in Britain, where the subject is occupying minds and screens and nauseum why Emmerdale, EastEnders and Brookside viewing figures are rising at a time when those for the Street are declining.
Coronation Street will bounce back it always does. It just might have to consider bouncing back to a different place from where it started.