Ruined Characters

Further to my Monday Post about Sean giving Frankie and Jamie hell for their affair, i think i mentioned how this storyline has ruined the characters for me. That doesn't happen very often on Coronation Street. Usually the characters remain pretty consistent to their personalities and day to day comings and goings. If a character starts off nasty they stay that way or maybe they are redeemed. There aren't too many characters that start off great and turn into cowards or sneaks or something else that's not in character for them. Everyone has the potential to lie and manipulate given the circumstance, but the character themselves, overall, isn't often "ruined".

One early instance of a character's "ruination" happened off screen when Peter Adamson was fired. He played Len Fairclough for almost 30 years but shot his mouth off too often to the press and was summarily sacked. On screen, they had Len die of a car crash off screen. And then revealed that he'd been visiting a before-unheard of mistress. Huh? Len loved Rita. There were no hints that he was cheating on her nor were they rowing any more than usual or going through a bad patch. The producers well and truly ruined Len's character out of spite.

Having said that, sometimes the Personality Transplant Fairy has changed a character's core personality and some people might consider that a ruination. One instance i can think of was the character of Tyrone Dobbs. When Ty first appeared, he was streetwise and cool. He was the son of con Jackie Dobbs who pulled every scam possible. He knew what was what. But he wasn't too bright either. We accept that. Then he got involved in a scam that someone pulled on him, to do with selling car cd players only he paid money for what turned out to be empty boxes. I never thought that Tyrone would have fallen for that. Ever. Tyrone in his younger days would probably be the type to mastermind a scam like that. Fall for it? no way. But they dumbed down Tyrone (not that he was Einstein to start with) and made him dumb but loveable. Kirk is thicker still but was always portrayed as such.

The personality transplant fairy jumped into Maria's stilettos too. After she walked out on Nick in Canada and returned to Weatherfield, she started dressing like a tart and became the town bike, bedding man after man and she's still doing it and choosing men that hurt her over and over. Sometimes rewriting a character's back history takes them down a peg or two. Martin Platt had had a couple of affairs while married to Gail and dated a few different women after they were divorced. But having him fall for a schoolgirl young enough to be his daughter ruined him for me. I really didn't believe Martin would have done that and by the time he left the show, i said good riddance to a character i used to like in spite of his faults and bad decisions.

Now there's this Jamie and Frankie debacle. I was never all that fussed about Jamie. He seemed like a nice boy but they really didn't develop him all that much. I liked Frankie a lot. She really grew on me as the wife of womanizer Danny. She was devastated by his affair with Leanne was was Jamie. It was the straw that broke the back of their marriage for good. She had lingering feelings but was intent that he would not hurt her again. Jamie was gutted when he lost the woman he loved to his father. I swear that this new found love for the woman that pretty much raised him from a child was more motivated in getting his father back for Leanne than it was falling genuinely in love with Frankie. I think Frankie was rebounding. She's been waffling, back and forth between wanting Jamie and knowing it was wrong. Jamie has turned into a manipulating, lying prig, happy to rub his father's nose in it, chuffed to bits that he was doing this behind his father's back. You almost get the feeling he's saying "See how you like it!"

Last night's show had he and Frankie jump into bed in Danny's flat. They had no idea if Danny was out for the night or would come back, as he did, early. Thus Danny found out in the worst possible way after Jamie has spent the last week or two pressuring Frankie to tell Danny about them. I think he did it on purpose, hoping his father would come back home and catch them. Maybe she did too, subconsciously. Watching Danny's stunned reaction, exploding with anger, that was awful. As bad as it was that he ran around with Leanne behind Jamie's back, we knew it was a lark, they weren't serious about each other then. It doesn't make it right, what they did, but that's no reason for Jamie and Frankie to do this to him either. He seemed to enjoy stabbing his father in the back all this time, whereas when Danny cheats, he does it more for the chase than to deliberately and vindictively do it to hurt Frankie. Jamie is not sorry his father was hurt by what they'd done though Frankie was.

I really dislike this storyline for that as well as the general ick factor of the mother-stepson thing. I don't buy that either. I might have if Jamie had been a teenager when Frankie joined the family, and developed a crush on her then and harboured it all these years. But he was 7. She raised him like her own, just like she did Warren. Wiped his tears and his nose, went to school concerts and defended him from the bullies.

This is the worst character assassination i've ever seen on the Street. Bar none.