Corrie and coincidence

Guest post from Coronation Street Blog reader John McElroy

(This post was originally posted by Flaming Nora on the Coronation Street Blog May 2013, reposted to this blog with permission.)

I’ve watched Coronation Street continuously since 1975, apart from a six month break around the time of the Linda Sykes/Mike Baldwin romance. My favourite character by a country mile was the quite wonderful Annie Walker, and oh how I wish ITV would show those early years again before it is too late.

I’ve loved some characters, hated others (mainly Dev!), but one thing that has always irritated me about the show is the ludicrous overreliance on “coincidence” to further plots. Apart from being an (original) Crossroads devotee for many years (which God knows, had its own problems), I’ve never watched any other soap, but from what I hear I don’t think any of them play the coincidence card anywhere nearly as often as Corrie.

The most recent example is how every single time Katie and Ryan get within 10 feet of each other, sure enough Chesney comes out of the house or around the corner or up through a manhole to witness it. Done once it would add tension to the plot, but since you know it will happen each time, instead of the intended drama, it is instead just entirely predictable.

Another good example recently was when Fay’s father, (I had to look up her name, as I always think of her as “the brat”), was hanging around every single time she left the house, came out of The Kabin etc., even though at that point he didn’t leave anywhere near the street. That might have been OK if it was written as if he was intentionally hanging around, but it wasn’t. And I swear if Anna had taken her on a trip to the moon, her dad would have bounced into view in a spacesuit.

But these are just two recent examples. Whenever there is a “love triangle” (yuk!), the same catching-them-in-the-act scene gets acted out over again and again. Am I the only one that wishes the script writers could be a bit more inventive in their writing?



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