Coronavirus Finally Comes to Coronation Street – The New York Times

The way British soaps organize time is important, said Christine Geraghty, a professor of film and television studies at the University of Glasgow. They take place on a day-to-day basis. Characters wake up in the morning and go to bed at night. British soaps keep going: you dont always start a new episode at the exact place the last one finished. Cliffhanger endings, she said, tend to be deployed only for major plotlines.

Mostly, the postman comes in the morning, and the day ends with a drink in the pub, she said. The rhythms in a soap make it a recognizable world. You might know, as a viewer, that things like that dont quite happen in real life, but you can place it all within the scope of your own experience.

The stories can, of course, be outlandish planes crash on the Yorkshire village where Emmerdale is set with alarming frequency but the landscape, too, is constructed to feel familiar.

It is our world, but it is not our world, said Carole OReilly, a senior lecturer in media and television studies at the University of Salford. It looks and feels recognizable: a heightened version of the world we see.

She picks out the backdrop of Coronation Street based on Salford itself as authentically northern: the architecture of back-to-back terraced housing and cobbled streets, the social life revolving around the pub. But so, too, is the tone of the characters interactions. Direct and to the point, according to Geraghty, or gregarious and outgoing, to OReilly: all of it distinctly (if not uniquely) Mancunian.

But while British soaps set out to reflect the world, they are selective about which elements of the real world are allowed to seep in. Coronation Street has taken on a lot of social issues, Geraghty said. It has dealt with racism, domestic abuse, violence, trans rights. But it doesnt do current events; soaps are filmed too far in advance to deal with real events in real time, and besides, theyre too political.

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Coronavirus Finally Comes to Coronation Street - The New York Times