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Oliver Cross: Coronation Street and a night at a gay bar
Oliver Cross - Woodhouse resident and YEP columnist - rambles on about life.
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Corrie wobbles
The Coronation Street splinter-group of the Chemic Tavern Soap Watching Discussion Exchange is getting a bit worried.
This is more serious than it sounds because Coronation Street seems to be the only soap anyone round here cares about, the only one they worry about as if they had shares in it.
Which is strange because both EastEnders and Emmerdale have, like Corrie, been around since time began for anybody under 30 but none has achieved anything like the same gravitas; people don't worry much if the junior soaps seem to be going off but if Corrie has a bad patch, the Chemic has to call special meetings to get things sorted out.
The worry is that there has been a failure of the impermeable membrane which is supposed to separate Corrie from the rest, so that the dreadful Windass family seems to have leaked in from Emmerdale and the homicidal, gangsterish Tony Gordon seems to have leaked in from EastEnders, although I think Corrie is doing a better job of producing a complex, tortured villain than EastEnders ever did.
Generally, if you've got complex, sensitive problems in Walford, you react by screeching like a banshee and smashing something up, usually your own 'ed.
In Emmerdale, of course, nobody has complex problems because it's a pantomime.
Which, again crossing the soap boundaries, is how Becky and Steve's non-wedding turned out in Corrie. I really think the writers treated Becky –blonde, warm, loud and fearless in the great Street-girl tradition – badly by getting her hopelessly drunk then leaving her to jibber and weep as if she had walked in from the Home Counties rather than Manchester.
Becky's comedy wedding ensemble, including ludicrous beehive hairdo, also went a step too far; it was too cheap a joke for a soap which, as in Blanche's acid asides or Roy's sweet wrong-headedness, can serve up laughs two or three grades above The Chuckle Brothers.
(And now I feel guilty, because I'm a fan of The Chuckle Brothers – it's just that at its best, Corrie is not only broad-brush but also grown-up, fit for showing after 7.30pm).
I'm also worried about Corrie's new comedy (well, I think that's the idea) Indian character, Dev's fat uncle Umed, particularly as both Dev and his gloriously stroppy teenage daughter Amber are rounded, engaging characters, whereas Umed is mainly just rounded.
So, to put it starkly, the message from the Chemic Tavern to the Coronation Street producers is this: Either get your act together or we'll, er, keep moaning about you and possibly boycott Harveys The Furniture Store, even though most of us would have to start shopping there first.
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My big night at the gay bar
At the weekend I was honoured to be invited to open one of the smartest cocktail bars in Woodhouse, Leeds.
OK, it's possibly the only cocktail bar in Woodhouse, Leeds, but it's still extremely smart and when did you last open anything, pal?
Actually, clever clogs, I've officially opened two things because a couple of years ago I opened the very distinguished Caring Together in Woodhouse and Little London summer fete. Not very well, I admit, but I would be very surprised if your opening rate was higher then mine unless you're Nell McAndrew, which is highly unlikely considering how ugly you are.
Yes, it's possible all these official openings have gone to my head and made me start fights with people who aren't here, but I think it's more likely to be the cocktails which are to blame – really, if you insist on giving me pink and yellow alcoholic drinks when it's well known that all sensible alcoholic drinks are brownish, you can expect Consequences.
Anyway, let's bury the hatchet (although I don't think we should be mentioning hatchets at the moment, not until things have calmed down a little) so I can talk about the cocktail bar I officially opened.
It was built by my friend Kimberly Jane in her small but well-appointed kitchen (and if you were to ask me what the opposite of well-appointed was, I would be tempted to say the Home Secretary, or my old physics teacher).
Kim, with great skill, has built a thick, circular corner shelf completely covered in a mosaic of broken mirrors recovered from skips and topped by shiny chrome accoutrements, so the whole thing is so dazzling it makes you gasp.
This is what she calls (as I told you last week) her gay bar, as opposed to her cocktail bar, on the grounds that she thinks, after all her efforts, that it's not quite straight.
Well to me it looked perfectly straight, even before the cocktails started interfering with my concept of horizontal, not to mention my sense of proportion.
The thing that's really disturbing me is the realisation, on visiting Kim's flat, that you don't need money to create a charming, original home, just talent and hard work. Which is me out.
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Weather for Leeds
Tuesday 07 February 2012
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