The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has announced that a Corrie fan from Newfoundland in Canada has sadly passed away after a long struggle with colon cancer. But he left behind a master class on how to go out with style.
Shannon Churchill, who was living in Cole Harbour, Nova.Scotia, when he died, addressed his death head-on by writing his own obituary.
"My advice to you all is to make those bucket lists and to start filling them in. Life is short and it only runs out; I should know, I was only 44. So get off your butts and live those lives while you still have them and make sure you really think of what you want to matter on those last days."
Both Shannon and his wife Melissa were big fans of Corrie. Melissa said he joked about the show in his obituary because as fans know, having first started in 1960, it's not likely to end in any of our lifetimes. (CBC Media Centre)
His only (tongue-in-cheek) regret in a life lived to the fullest? That he'll never find out how his beloved Coronation Street will end.
Coronation Street fan Deborah Cyr in Canada was once named Canada's No. 1 Corrie fan. She's a lovely lady who I've had the pleasure of meeting while she's been over here in the UK on visits to the Coronation Street set.
And now, if you're in Canada and within distance of Oshawa Libraries you can meet Deborah and hear all about her involvement with ITV as Canada's No. 1 Corrie fan.
The event takes place on July 25 at 6:30 PM. You can meet Deborah, ask her all kinds of questions about Coronation Street and try the trivia challenge to win prizes.
(This post was originally posted by Tvor on the Bluenose Corrie Blog January 2017, reposted to this blog with permission.)
Here in Canada, Coronation Street airs on CBC every week night with a repeat omnibus on Sunday mornings. Most Canadians know that we're about two weeks behind the UK air dates for the show. In the UK, on ITV, Coronation Street airs for one half hour per episode, with commercial ads at the start and end, and one break in the middle for ads. Just one. It seems astonishing to us North American viewers when network television breaks for ads every 5 to 8 minutes (it seems like more!). Coronation Street in the UK is filmed for the way ITV airs the show, sometimes with cliffhangers just before the mid show break.
In Canada, though, because of the extra ad breaks, there is too much Coronation Street to fit in 30 minutes. How do they fit it? CBC cuts out scenes or the last bits of scenes. Many of us have been aware of this for years. If you watch Corrie through the week and again on the Sunday omnibus, you may see something on Sunday that you didn't see on the weekday episode. The reason for that is CBC doesn't have to fit the start and end show credits in for each half hour segment like they do through the week so there's a little more room though there are still things that stay missing.
That's why some of us are left scratching our collective heads in puzzlement, wondering how the storyline got from A to C. CBC cut has out the B. There doesn't seem to be very much we can do about it but help is at hand.
There's a new YouTube channel that airs all the bits that were cut from the show each day. It's called Coronation Street Canada Extra. In the evening after the episode airs, or the next day, you can check it out and see what you missed and fill in all those B scenes. No more will we Canadians wonder how we got from A to C. I don't know if a concerted campaign of complaint all over social media can persuade CBC to show more Corrie and less advertising, because that advertising dollar is life's blood to tv stations
This is the video for the scenes that were missing from January 12's broadcast in Canada.
Check out the YouTube channel and support their efforts. They're big stars for doing this for the Canadian fans! And thanks to the folks at Conversation Street who alerted me to the Youtube site.
A long-time Coronation Street fan in Canada and a huge fan of the Coronation Street Blog has emailed in with some great pictures to share.
"While searching through an online catalogue from the City of Toronto Archives for photos, I came across a whole slew of photos of Coronation street actors visiting Toronto for a number of Brit events. These photos, though undated, are most likely from the mid 80s, judging by how everybody looks.
This Corrie fan likes to brag about a very tenuous (to the point of totally fragile) connection with Corrie. As a music producer with CBC Radio in the 80’s and 90’s in Toronto, I often had contact with (and for reasons now unimportant, turned down an opportunity to work in Ottawa with [though ironically live here now!]) Harry Elton. I did not know his Corrie importance, however, until reading his obituary when he passed a few years’ back. It was something he didn’t talk much about!"
Hope you enjoy looking at these pictures of some of the Corrie cast signing autographs for fans in Canada. Do any of you Canadian fans recall this event?
This one had us stumped - and it took a bit of time before we realised it was actress Louise Harrison who played Dawn Prescott.
The Manchester Evening News report today that Canadian Coronation Street fan Steve Pearce has covered his wife Lindsay in tattoos of the soap's cast.
Steve, who runs his own tattoo studio in Calgary, has tattooed Corrie character faces onto his wife Lindsay’s leg.
The pair, who say their shared love of Weatherfield helps keep their marriage together, took on the project ahead of a visit to Manchester this year. They will be finishing the inky masterpiece in front of an audience at the Tattoo Tea Party, held at Event City near the Trafford Centre over three days from February 28 to March 1.
Well, that's inspired me! I'm off out to get my Fat Brenda tattoo done, she's going all the way down my smoking arm.
