Sweetcorn

 

 Coronation Street #1096 (19 July 1971) materialized on YouTube the other day, reminding me that something about the eighty-second domestic scene of Elsie and Alan Howard that starts at 12.15 snagged against my imagination. Indeed, when I first saw it three years ago I had to transcribe the dialogue:

ELSIE: Well, what's wrong with it?

ALAN: Oh, come on, Elsie! You know damn well, what's wrong with it -

ELSIE: I just put a bit too much water in the potato, that's all.

ALAN: It's running off the plate!

ELSIE: Well, I managed to eat mine.

ALAN: Well, I'm not going to eat it.

ELSIE: Oh? Well, we'll soon settle that, won't we?

There! I suppose you can manage to eat the sausage, can't you?

ALAN: Yes! I can manage to eat the sausage.

ELSIE: You know, I'm not a miracle worker. I can't cook you a four course lunch in the time I've got!

ALAN: I don't expect a four course lunch.

ELSIE: Well, you obviously expect more than you get. Every time I put a meal in front of you I get a long face.

ALAN: I'm just getting a bit tired of these interminable fry-ups. That's all!

ELSIE: Look, that's all I've got time for! I've only got an hour for lunch, you know!

ALAN: So it's not your fault?

ELSIE: No, it's not my fault!

What would you like me to do instead?

ALAN: Well how do I know?

ELSIE: Well you must have some preference!

ALAN: Look, I don't mind a fry-up -

ELSIE: OH I WISH YOU'D MAKE UP YOUR MIND!

ALAN: If you could make it interesting! Just a little attractive -

ELSIE: HOW CAN YOU MAKE A FRY-UP ATTRACTIVE? A fry-up's been a fry-up ever since Adam was a lad!

ALAN: Well you you could use vegetables.

ELSIE: VEGETABLES?!

ALAN: Vegetables!

ELSIE: WHAT DO YOU SUPPOSE SPUDS ARE?

ALAN: OH COME ON, ELSIE! I mean peas and beans and carrots and sweetcorn -

ELSIE: SWEET WHAT?

ALAN: Sweetcorn.

ELSIE: WHERE AM I SUPPOSED TO GET THAT FROM? THIS ISN'T THE WEST END OF LONDON, YOU KNOW! AND I'M NOT A CHEF! I'm just a supervisor of a warehouse who is trying - trying! - to help her husband get solvent. Sweet-flaming-corn!

END OF PART ONE

 Two details that I'd forgotten watching this again, at the start and end of the scene. Props are clearly having fun providing unappetizing instant mashed potato. And the director (Paul Bernard) has elected to end the scene on an irritated Alan listening to a chiding Elsie, rather than the speaker. (This is reminiscent of Philip Saville's disturbing close-ups on Tom Bell's frustrated face as he listens to Madge Ryan's endless nagging as his mother in Pinter's A Night Out, eleven years ealier)

 This is clearly very functional dialogue, created at the behest of the storyliners needing to show the strains on the Howards' marriage at this point in the episode, rather than any particular inspiration or invention on the part of writer (Leslie Duxbury). Showing the two of them rowing in their lunch break will do fine, and is easy to set up.

 Knowing that Pat Phoenix and Alan Browning were a (combustible) real-life couple enhances one's appreciation of the natural-sounding rhythm of the argument. Pat Phoenix sometime used to skim through and paraphrase her lines, but it all seems to be as written here - we don't see her frequently deployed trick of banging her hand down on the furniture to call for assistance from fellow performers. Alan's word choice of "interminable" fry-ups is inaccurate - it should surely be something like "unending" - but has a certain authenticity to it in how one's vocabulary does start to get more imprecise when you begin to feel real anger rising within yourself.

 But the reason why this ordinary scene immediately lodged in my memory is because the details are far more interesting than what is going on between the characters. For a start, it supports one of my dramaturgical maxims that there is no scene in any drama set at a mealtime that cannot be improved by making some reference to what the characters are eating. It's almost the only activity that can be shown on screen that everybody watching has an active interest in, and imagining the taste and texture of the food consumed encourages an easy empathetic understanding of something of what the characters are feeling at the moment.

 But most of all, its the unintended, escalating, comedy that lies in the example given of an supposedly outlandish foodstuff. I know that Weatherfield was a bit of a backwater in the early days, but you would have thought that at least tins of sweetcorn would have been easy to come by. Perhaps even sold in the Corner Shop, though they would have to have had the Jolly Green Giant obscured by a label reading "KEY" (the unique to Coronation Street brand) in 1971.