Options
It will be lucky to last 6 weeks
This was the reaction to Coronation St in 1960 and Granada certainly didn't have that much faith in the show as they only commissioned twelve episodes. My grandparents, on first seeing the soap in 1960, found it depressing with a mournful theme tune and a cast of elderly unknowns. Most people on seeing it, or so I've been told, had the same opinion, but by dint of luck people started to recognise what the show was about( Northern people) and slowly warmed to it, but for soap fans everywhere The Street survived more than six weeks.
0
Comments
Oh yes it took a few months for people to warm to The Street as it was the first drama of its kind- most drama in this era tended to involve police, fantasy figures or history- and fans are lucky Granada didn't cancel it in March 1961. However, by about 1962 it was always in the top ten and viewers had warmed to the characters.
Also another well known fact, the Street nearly was cancelled in 1973 when ratings fell to 8 million, but a change of scriptwriter and lighter plots saved the old stager.
Even more fascinating.
I didn't know this until I checked Wikipedia. In the seventies it wasn't always top dog, sometimes the BBC would put on a strong import like The Rockford Files, and CS would be dented by this. However, when Auntie was weak, the show would pull in 17 million and the 1973 ratings slump was a blip really.
Shoking.
You sound like Alan Hansen, shocking!
Wikipedia is wrong about the 1973 ratings as it reproduces an error made by Daran Little in the 40th anniversary book. Coronation Street's highest rating that year was 8,250,000 homes, which translates to 18,150,000 viewers (it's lowest was 4,884,000 homes - 10.7 million viewers, although this was on a bank holiday when it always rated lower). Corrie was in fact a solid performer all through the 1970s. No crisis here!
So Wikipedia were making things up again. I know it did dip from time to time on Mondays, Blakes 7 managed to pull in 10 million against it, but there was no real reason for concern.
However, I do recall a crisis in the summer of 1984 when a cull of cast members and some weak storylines saw ratings fall below 10 million and the ever charming Nina Myskow decided to tear it to pieces in the News of the World, calling its fans geriatrics and calling for the Street to be axed. Yet this was a blip and the show was back up to 18 million by the end of the year.
Yet the departure of characters through death or old age like Annie Walker, Stan Odgen and Albert Tatlock meant the show was never the same to me and I drifted away.
I've had a look at the ratings for summer 84 and they're all around 12/13 million, and 1st/2nd place in the charts, so if the tabloids were attacking Corrie, it didn't have an effect!
It's weird that the ratings for 1983-5 are so high - going purely by numbers, it's Coronation Street's most successful period (hitting 21 million in Dec 84/Jan 85), and yet a lot of the big names in the cast left at that time and new characters hurriedly introduced so it must have been chaos behind the scenes.
Thank you for your contribution.