For Thomas Berger, the ontology of television’s representation of space revolved around its depiction of rooms:
One of the things it [television] is is rooms. It is the squad room of Hill Street Blues and You’ll Never Get Rich: It is the flight deck of the starship Enterprise; It is the Long Branch Saloon of Gunsmoke; It is the tent of Hawkeye Pierce: it is the barroom of Cheers; and it is the composite living room of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Rob and Laura Petrie, and Cliff and Claire Huxtable. But most of all it is the kitchen of Ralph and Alice Kramden. (1989: 238)
Although the programmes cited are American, any equivalent list for British drama and comedy of the same period would include similar interior locations familiar to regular television viewers; living rooms, workplaces and pubs. The episodic nature of much television fiction and comedy trained the viewer to understand characters through the rooms that they inhabited, to the greatest extent in soap operas, where audiences form emotional attachments to characters who spend decades in the same houses. This familiarity encouraged sophisticated readings (even if largely unconscious ones) of character, situation and programmes themselves on the part of soap opera viewers, as demonstrated in Dorothy Hobson’s pioneering study of the Crossroads (ATV/Central for ITV, 1964-88) audience:
One woman commented that it was about time that Kath Brownlow had a new three-piece suite because the one which she had was getting old to look at, and she added the comment, ‘She will be able to when she’s having the digs money off Kevin.’ (…) She knew that a woman of Kath’s class would not be content with the old three-piece suite which the production tolerated. It was a nice example of the realism in the woman’s experience being in conflict with the reality of the budget which constrained the production from buying Kath a new suite. (1982: 129)
This article examines the representation of space in soap opera, presenting examples of three recurrent tropes that derived emotional resonance from the space of the familiar room. I shall examine the use of these tropes through the depiction of one long-running (1964-87) Coronation Street (Granada for ITV 1960-present) character, Hilda Ogden (Jean Alexander), explaining some of the ways in which her character was understood through the spaces of the drama.
As a drama almost entirely predicated around interiors rather than exteriors, 1970s Coronation Street forms an ideal case study for understanding the studio space in television drama. Although live transmission ceased a few months into the programme’s run in 1961, the series was still being recorded ‘as live’ with no opportunity for postproduction up until the mid 1970s. Use of filmed inserts was minimal and generally used for exterior scenes in the Street, rather than for locations further afield. The purpose-built Coronation Street exterior set familiar to present-day viewers was not opened until 1983 (Podmore, 1990: 63).
Hilda Ogden has a real claim to be the most popular fictional character in the history of British television. The character remains remarkably well remembered to this day, having been voted the greatest ever soap opera character by readers of the Radio Times in 2004, a full 17 years after the character left the series.[1] Jean Alexander’s performance as Hilda was also recognised within the TV industry, winning a Royal Television Society award for best actress in 1985, and nominated for a BAFTA in 1987. Such recognition for a soap performer was unique in the twentieth century, and is still exceptionally rare in the present day.
Hilda Ogden served (at least) four narrative purposes within Coronation Street, all of which define the character by her relationship to other people; as a long-suffering housewife, married to Stan (Bernard Youens), a slobby and workshy husband; mother to two grown-up and generally unsupportive children[2]; cleaner of the Rovers Return and other peoples’ homes; and general gossip and busybody.
The character of Hilda generally operated within a comic register, regularly seen in curlers, headscarf, pinny, brandishing a mop and smoking, an iconic image that lodged in the memories even of non-viewers,[3] often speaking in non-sequiters (“Drop dead, Stan! And then get up and do it again!”) and malapropisms (“No one can say that my Stanley has been corseted”).
Studio television drama was a form that was primary located in the room. For Raymond Williams, this created a form of television drama that bore strong affinities to the naturalist theatre of the nineteenth century, particularly the plays of Ibsen, in which the environment of the room comments upon the situation of the characters:
[T]he room is there, not as one scenic convention among all the possible others, but because it is an actively shaping environment - the particular structure within which we live ... the solid form, the conventional declaration, of how we are living and what we value. The room on the stage ... [is] a set that defines us and can trap us: the alienated object that now represents us in the world. (Williams, 1989: 12)
Writing about Upstairs Downstairs, Helen Wheatley describes how within studio television drama the room could function as "an eloquent and expressive space that is permeated with meaning; as a structure it is declamatory and active". (2005: 145-6)
An acute form of understanding of the room within studio drama, was held by viewers of Coronation Street, where the same rooms have been seen by the long-term audience for decades, most often watched from within the space of their own living rooms, the accumulated emotional resonances of the two spaces reflecting back upon each other.
Three recurrent visual tropes dominate Coronation Street’s presentation of the domestic room, which we briefly outline before identifying instances when each of these tropes occur in the story of Hilda Ogden.
Retreat: The room as an intimate and private space.
This occurs frequently in Coronation Street, most often in stories of heartbroken middle-aged women “who put up a tough front in public, before closing their front door, drinking vodka and sobbing until thick rivulets of mascara flood down their faces and the closing titles begin to roll” (Dent, 2005). This image is often presented in the narrative in contrast with the character having put on a brave face to the exterior world, especially in the public space of the Rovers Return, before collapsing when finally alone at home, a familiar rhythm of emotional composure and eventual release recognised and shared by the viewer to cathartic effect.
This
convention is illustrated by Elsie Tanner (Patricia Phoenix), seen alone on New
Years Eve (2061, 31 December 1980) at a dimly lit 11 Coronation Street (Figure 1),
distressed by her grandson’s departure. The unhappiness of Elsie’s situation is
presented in juxtaposition with other scenes of revelry at the Rovers Return, and
in counterpoint to the offstage bells of Weatherfield, chiming in 1981.
Disruption: The room as a space that can be violated.
As the room is understood by the viewer to be a space of sanctuary, by the same coin it can also function a space that can be disrupted or violated, frequently through the presence of unwelcome guests and relatives. The convention is illustrated here (2) in its most extreme form, as Elsie discovers that her home has been broken into by the angry wife of a man with whom she has had a one-night stand, and that all of her clothes, her most prized possessions, have been slashed (2095, 29 April 1981).
This trope of the violated space just as often takes a comic form, as often seen through Stan and Hilda Ogden.
The
room as a space of memory.
Figure 3 (1647, 27 October 1976) shows a Chekhovian moment where Ena Sharples (Violet Carson) is left alone in the home of her old friend Minnie Caldwell (Margot Bryant) at No. 5 Coronation Street, after Minnie has decided to leave the street for good and the house is about to be sold. Such overt uses of the room as a space of memory are infrequent, usually seen when characters depart or return. But a sense of memory is encoded into the familiar space of the room, seen in properties such as the photographs of relatives seen on mantelpieces, but also in the accrued décor and visual style of the rooms in Coronation Street.
Hilda Ogden and the room
How the character of Hilda Ogden was seen by others, how she perceived herself, and what she aspired to be, were all mediated through the space of the room in Coronation Street, a role encapsulated by Hobson: “Hilda Ogden scrubbed, cleaned and kept other people’s property clean, and she longed to be seen as ‘respectable’ herself.” (2003: 108) This tension between aspiration and shabby reality, can be seen right from Hilda’s very first appearance in Coronation Street (episode 381, 08 July 1964, Figures 4 and 5)
The scene only lasts ten seconds but a sequence of four events establish how the next twenty years of scenes within this house are going to operate in Coronation Street. Firstly, Hilda initially appears emerging from underneath the sink, the unexpected angle defining the character through the space in an expressionist style. Secondly, Hilda derives sensual pleasure and sense of worth from the space (“Ooh Stanley, look! We’ve got two taps!”), before nemesis immediately follows hubris when one of the taps fails to work. Finally, Stan laughs at Hilda, establishing their relationship through the different value that each derives from their domestic environment.
This narrative pattern is frequently repeated in the series on a grander scale through more substantial plots and more striking motifs than the taps, continually generating misunderstanding and conflict between Stan and Hilda. For example, in one plot Hilda expresses her desire for a serving hatch in the home. Stan thinks that he obliges her by building a vast serving hatch, much larger than in any other home in the street, but unfortunately he builds it in between the living room and hall, rather than the kitchen (episode 1116, 27 September 1971).
Hilda’s desire for respectability through redecoration is synonymous with one interior feature of the Ogden’s room – the large scale decoration of a mural, or as she calls it, ‘muriel’.
When the ‘muriel’ is first unveiled (Figure 6, episode 1617, 14 July 1976) Hilda is clearly pleased with the effect of her new feature, but the reactions of her tea guests Bet Lynch (Julie Goodyear) and (especially) Annie Walker (Doris Speed), the refined landlady of the Rovers Return, tell a different story. The pleasure that the viewer derives from this scene incorporates the theatrical convention of observing events through the invisible fourth wall, with a heightened artifice in performance stemming from the implausibility of Annie Walker not immediately noticing the feature when first entering the room, building a comic tension when asked to turn around and face the ‘muriel’, with Annie politely asking to look away from it (“Oh my word Mrs Ogden! Do you know, dear, I feel just a little giddy? Would you mind if I sat facing the other way until I’m acclimatised?”).
Having established such a memorable feature, Coronation Street went on to exploit the dramatic potential of the ‘muriel’ in many narratives, incorporating all three recurring visual tropes that we have outlined. A humorous example of violation of space that focuses on the ‘muriel’ occurs in a comic strip sequence (episode 1684, 7 March 1977) that depends upon the cognitive connection formed by viewers between rooftop exterior and domestic interior scenes. In the mistaken belief that she’s cleaning Elsie Tanner’s chimney, Suzie Burchill (Cheryl Murray) drops a brick into the fireplace of the Ogdens’ room, causing a cloud of soot to ruin Stan’s tea, although Hilda is much more upset by the despoiling of the ‘muriel’ than her husband’s discomfort.[4]
Even fifteen years after Hilda left the series, viewers’ memory of the feature of the ‘muriel’, and through it the character of Hilda, could still be triggered, in an archaeological storyline when a decorator working for subsequent owners the Websters uncovers the ‘muriel’ when stripping wallpaper.
Disputes between Hilda and Stan were one of the most popular regular features of Coronation Street in the 1970s, with lodger Eddie Yeats (Geoffrey Hughes) often mediating between husband and wife. The ways in which the room could be disrupted dreamt up by the scriptwriters became ever more ingenious and bizarre; an argument about pigeons entering the roof through loose slates culminates with an episode (1781, 8 February 1978) where a stuck Suzie Burchill’s leg through the Ogden’s ceiling creates contesting claims over damages between the ceiling and the leg; or the house becoming invaded by chickens, a money-making scheme of Stan’s pursued in Hilda’s absence (episode 1900, 4 April 1979).
The way that comedy derived from the Ogden’s room was even-handed, where either Stan or Hilda could be the object of the joke. In episode 1867 (6 December 1978) the laugh is clearly on Stan, who arranges to look after a fruit machine, unwisely feeds it with all his savings and Hilda’s housekeeping money, and cannot get rid of it until it pays out, the incongruous contraption dominating the living room, obscuring the ‘muriel’ and, eventually, swallowing all of the electricity for heat and light.
While the comic downfall of Stan in the home frequently derives from his susceptibility to ill thought-through get-rich schemes, it is Hilda’s desire for respectability that often causes her to be presented as ridiculous. Episode 1264 (26 February 1973) is mostly devoted to such a comic plot, in which she invites her neighbours to what she believes to a sophisticated cocktail party at No. 13, and treats them to a display of ballroom dancing. The comedy in such plots is drawn as much from details of mise-en-scene (Hilda’s costume, wig and false eyelashes, outsized even by early 1970s standards, and properties such as her approximation of quail’s eggs in aspic, hard-boiled eggs in lemon jelly) as it is through the contrasting expectations and behaviour of husband and wife. Figure 7 illustrates the potential range of inappropriate comic responses that Hilda’s social pretensions can draw from a large ensemble cast; derision (the three standing women), polite embarrassment (the two men on the right), and senile bewilderment (Minnie Caldwell, seated).
How Hilda reacted to her own domestic room affected in turn her responses to other spaces. This understanding added a level of complexity and depth to the viewer’s understanding of scenes when Hilda visited other rooms, particularly the sense of pleasure and yearning that she derived from beautiful and orderly places, such as when employed as cleaner for factory owner Mike Baldwin’s (Johnny Briggs) flat.
Coronation Street Episode 1756 (14 November 1977 w. Leslie Duxbury d. Jonathan Wright Miller). (“Hilda and Stan Ogden arrive at a posh hotel for a "Second Honeymoon" competition prize” TV Times, 11 November 1977)
This sense of Hilda’s aspirations becoming shown when placing the character in unfamiliar rooms is seen in operation in this exceptional (and very well-remembered) episode, in which the Ogdens stay at a luxury hotel (having won a newspaper competition for being Weatherfield’s most happily married couple). Hobson explains that, “it was the sheer luxury and respectability of the hotel, and the fact she was part of it, even for a short time, which gave her [Hilda] such pleasure.” (2003: 108).
Construction of a new studio set for limited use in one or two Coronation Street episodes was a very rare occurrence, with scenes set away from the Street and its associated workplaces usually recorded on film on location in order to save studio space and costs (Smart, 2014: 74-5). In order to extract maximum dramatic value from the Suite No. 504 set, 17 of the episode’s 25 minutes happen within the room, shown in four scenes of between three and five minutes. The second of these hotel sequences runs for five minutes, recorded with three cameras and told in thirty shots.
The scene functions dramatically through showing and contrasting Hilda and Stan’s incompatible understandings of space alongside each other. Hilda is introduced in harmony with the space, framed in the doorway of the en suite bathroom and declaring, “Do you know what? I’d be quite happy to spend the next 24 hours in that bathroom. Its perfect!” with Jean Alexander’s eye line sharing the viewer’s observation of the vase of flowers placed in the foreground of the picture (Figure 8). Her journey across the room is shown in one fluid shot, a movement in which both the camera motion and the performer pause at the same moment before taking one final step, preparing the viewer in advance for the next shot when they learn what disrupts Hilda’s reverie.
Figure 9
It is, of course, Stan (Figure 9) placed (within both the frame and the space) in defiance of the room, rather than at harmony within it. This is seen in a static wide shot that allows Stan to impose himself upon the space where Hilda responds to it, drawing attention to his posture (slouched), costume (dishevelled - in an earlier scene he has complained to Hilda, “This top button’s choking me!”), properties (the cigarette) and activity (watching television).
The television acts as a catalyst for the subsequent discussion between husband and wife, its significance within the scene such that it is afforded a brief shot of its own. In a witty meta-textual touch, the colour screen watched intently by Stan is playing a luxurious romantic sequence (of a clinching couple on a beautiful bed) such as the Ogdens are not experiencing themselves. Despite Stan’s protests (“It’s different in colour!”) Hilda switches the set off. When Stan asks what else there is to do, Hilda makes a pass at him (“Second honeymoon, Stanley”), which Stan fails to register. Defeated, Hilda sits down and ruefully reflects on marriage (“What happens to a fella when he’s marries? […] It’s just as though somebody had switched him off. Like a bicycle tyre what’s gone flat.”). Stan’s response (“You get comfy, don’t you?”) emphasises the little importance that he attaches to smartness and appearance (“Show your braces if you want to, throw the Brylcreem away, too”).
This sequence, with Stan and Hilda facing each other, is shown via two cameras in a simple back and forth sequence. Each performer is shown from the other’s POV, either in close-up or seated in mid-shot. Each of these four shots is telling, working as a visual contrast to the opposite partner; close-ups of Hilda highlight the animation of Jean Alexander’s facial movements, while those of Stan underline an impassive stillness (except when he rubs his face).[5] Mid-shots of Stan in his chair expose a clutter on the table in front of him of a full ashtray, five miniature bottles and two glasses, as well as his jacket hanging on a corner of the back of the armchair (and possibly about to fall off). When Hilda is seen behind the table, the chief property visible is a vase of yellow, white and pink chrysanthemums, the two shots presenting two different interpretations of the room, as site of either informal practicality or harmonious decoration.
Hilda’s awareness of the elegant space and frustration at Stan’s imperceptions provokes a speech that articulates the significance that the character attaches to the room, reflecting back from the idealised space to the flawed, quotidian, world of the domestic home:
I just wish you was a bit more sensitised. To this place, for instance. Can’t you see the difference, Stan, between here and Number 13? It’s nicer, brighter, you know? There’s nothing tatty about it. No paint peeling or carpets fraying. And everything works. The doors close proper and the cupboards and all that. Ooh, just look at them beautiful curtains! No, it’s that better life what we’ve never had, chuck.
On “brighter” in this speech, Hilda herself brightens up and rises from the chair, to walk around the room, noticing details of the décor, stopping to stroke the curtain with great delicacy. This movement is shown in a wide shot that lasts for 80 seconds, the camera slowly following Hilda around the room, the stately motion and full-body reactions allowing her a minute of grace and sensuality, distinct from the back-and-forth rhythm of dialogue with Stan.
The design of this one-off set is distinct from any of the regular sets of 1977 Coronation Street. Lighting is warm rather than bright, with subtle shading. The colour scheme is of dark pink and pale yellow, picking out the warm, bright, details of the flowers. The décor has many pleasing details (lamps, ferns, small pictures of flowers and animals) but evenly arranged, rather than cramped. Hilda’s appreciation of this room is aesthetic, seen in her sensual pleasure in the bathroom suite and the curtains, but Stan only sees the room in practical terms. Being in each other’s company in this neutral, tidy, space away from home encourages wider reflection on the part of the Ogdens of the state of their marriage and understanding of each other, a discussion that they would be much less likely to have in the everyday Coronation Street sets of home or the Rovers Return.
Coronation Street Episode 2469 (28 November 1984, w. H.V. Kershaw, d. Brian Mills). (“Residents turn out to say a last farewell to a much-loved neighbour.” TV Times, 24 November 1984)
Bernard Youens’ death in 1984 meant that the character of Hilda, and her function in the programme, had to change. Because the familiar plots used for the married Ogdens that I have outlined could no longer continue, the ways in which the widowed Hilda was shown to understand her life and herself changed. These changes were still dramatized through the use of space and the room, using variations of the three tropes.
Stan Ogden’s death was commemorated in one of the most celebrated and well-remembered moments in British television drama of the 1980s. The episode of Stan’s funeral includes three sequences set in Number 13 Coronation Street; Hilda being greeted by two neighbours in the morning, Hilda in a crowded room full of mourners as the hearse arrives, and Hilda with her son Trevor (Don Hawkins) after the reception, then alone as Trevor (rather unsympathetically) leaves her. The third sequence ends the episode and is formed of two parts, of 110 and 95 seconds. These two parts are separated by a swift 40 second Rovers Return sequence that concludes the episode’s B plot: another heartbreak for Bet Lynch, seen disconsolate and drinking silently behind the bar, while Vera Duckworth (Liz Dawn) callously gossips about Hilda’s conduct at the funeral, “She’s not all there. You know what they say, where there’s no sense, there’s no feeling”.
The first section is shown in a single, mobile, shot that zooms in on details and then rolls back from them. The scene starts with an extreme close up of a telegram, gradually rolling back to a conventional mid shot of Hilda and Trevor behind the back room table, as the dialogue explains that the telegram is sent from daughter Irma, far away from the funeral in Canada. When Hilda encourages Trevor to leave (“Oh now, look, you must get off. Its half past eight and you’ve a long way to go yet. You go on”) and he rises up, the effect of the camera’s quick upward movement to take in the standing figure is abrupt. Passing the mantelpiece in front of the ‘muriel’, Hilda notices a brown paper parcel, which Trevor explains contains Stan’s personal effects from the hospital, given to him when he collected the death certificate. While Hilda sees Trevor out, the camera takes twenty seconds to close in on the parcel. Hilda’s back enters the shot, as she picks up the parcel and turns towards the table. The camera then moves upwards from the close up of the parcel to a close up of Hilda’s face, deciding whether to open it.
The unconventional single camera rhythm of this sequence concentrates on two properties, directing the viewer’s attention towards a different, stark, perception of Hilda’s situation than that of the story told through the prosaic dialogue in which Hilda copes and mediates. The (impersonal, uniform) telegram emphasises the familial absence and lack of support that Hilda faces (although the excuses that she gives on Irma’s behalf to Trevor are warm and reasonable), while the parcel (a property that Hilda only registers as her son departs) forms a literal representation of the baggage of grief, as a property that must be acknowledged and dealt with. The sequence ends with the moment when Hilda realises the full implications of her widowhood, at the first instance when she is alone. The full significance of this moment and its dramatic importance is designated for the viewer by the close-up, the first afforded to a face (rather than prop) in the scene. Jean Alexander’s performance in this scene features two brief, almost imperceptible, eye movements that prime the viewer towards the point when she will be left on her own: noticing an offstage clock on the forth wall prompts her to ask Trevor to leave, and registering the parcel on the mantelpiece before asking Trevor about it. Both moments show Hilda’s responses to the room, rather than the other person in it. Similarly, Trevor’s action of drumming his fingers on the table before swiftly rising to leave acts as a non-verbal insight into the character’s true feelings for the viewer, as well as a cue for the abrupt upwards movement of the camera.
The second part of the sequence is composed of three shots, recorded by two cameras; a frontal shot of Hilda seated and toying with the string of the parcel; a close-up of the parcel from Hilda’s point of view as she unwraps it, removes a pair of pyjamas, lifts up and opens a glasses case; and a return to a closer frontal shot of Hilda with the glasses case, crying (Figure 10) and resting her head on the case, while the camera again focuses in, first on the case and then on Hilda’s wedding ring.
Although the sequence is small-scale and intimate, the patterned combination of recurrent camera movements, concentration on specific properties, use of sound and nuances of Jean Alexander’s performance has a symphonic effect. Offstage sound of the closing door and the car leaving plays during the close-up of the parcel, a concentration on sound rather than dialogue continued in the scene’s silent conclusion, when the only sounds heard are crackling paper, the snap of the glasses case and Hilda’s sobs. Use of vision and sound compliment each other where, as the camera necessarily intrudes upon Hilda’s grief, the soundtrack holds back, withholding use of the Coronation Street theme over the end credits until thirty seconds later than usual, leaving the audience with a minute’s silence to mark the departure of a character that they have enjoyed watching for the last twenty years.
The use of slow zoom onto objects in the first section is an unconventional device for Coronation Street, allowing the viewer to register its use, and notice when it returns at the end of the scene. The final zoom shot magnifies the effect of previous close-ups, concentrating on a smaller detail (the wedding ring), an effect supported by Hilda’s movement. When Hilda turns inwards to rest her head on Stan’s glasses case, it allows the viewer and camera to scrutinise first her agonised face, then the case and then the ring in the same movement: the present widow, the absent husband and the symbol of their union.
Although the subject matter of the scene makes it affecting to watch even when seen out of context, for the long-term viewer it functions through the simultaneous layering of two of the visual tropes of the room in Coronation Street; the room as a private space of retreat for Hilda to grieve in on her own (the episode withholds leaving her alone until the final minute), and as a space of memory, for viewer as much as character. Stan is omnipresent in this scene. This is most obviously apparent in the property of the parcel, with the action of unwrapping unlocking greater awareness of Stan’s absence through each object handled, but is also encoded in the space of the room itself. The ‘muriel’, source of many amusing plots featuring Stan over the years, backs Hilda throughout the scene. As the camera advances upon the parcel three framed photographs of Stan, dating back to the 1960s, can be seen on the mantelpiece. Most significantly, the only words in the silent last sequence are those that can be clearly read on the label of the parcel (“Mr Stanley Ogden, 13 Coronation Street, Weatherfield”), linking the character of Stan to the home and the room.
Hilda Ogden left Coronation Street in 1987, and the circumstances that led the character to take this decision were again presented in terms of space and the room. Hilda was employed as housekeeper to Doctor Lowther and his wife, a well-to-do couple outside Weatherfield, a job in which she was shown to be well suited and highly valued.
The visual terms in which the Lowthers’ house (‘Goldenhurst, Oakfield Drive’), a spacious and gracefully furnished place, is presented to the viewer are unlike those of Coronation Street’s familiar locations (episode 2505, 3 April 1985). The home was shot on 16mm film on location and is therefore a real-life house, accentuating its sense of difference to the Street. Filming the home on location, rather than building a standing set in the studio, had the practical advantage that four rooms could be used in the one episode, the Lowthers’ kitchen, hallway, panelled dining room and living room, presenting Hilda with a range of different rooms to react to. Use of a real-life home also gave the programme the opportunity to show attractive conditions impossible to achieve in studio sets, such as natural light, or a view of an expansive leafy garden through a window. Visually, the Lowther’s home looks more like the spaces that viewers could expect to see in the commercials transmitted in the middle of Coronation Street than in the programme itself.
Recording on film, with its greater opportunities to set up individual shots, as well as postproduction editing, means that Hilda’s resposes to the attractive space are clearly choreographed and shown to the viewer; the pleasure that she takes in arranging a tray, or handling a napkin. The most significant moment for Hilda of the sequences in the home, is captured in a short medium close-up to camera. Eating breakfast alone in the Lowther’s dining room, Hilda says to herself, “Ay chuck. This is what we should ‘ave had.” In Hilda’s epiphany, brought on by the gracious experience of “that better life” in an elegant home, her thoughts, and the viewers’ are brought back to Stan.
In the scene immediately following from the idealized space of the Lowthers’ home, Hilda returns to number 13, and discovers that she has had a break-in, ironically while housesitting for the Lowthers. Hilda’s own room (shown in a wider shot than usual) has been turned over, with chairs overturned, ornaments knocked over and armchairs taken apart. The contrast between the two homes (film/videotape, unfamiliar/familiar, elegant/shabby), already stark and inescapable, is accentuated by the trope of the violated space. Worst of all for Hilda, Stan’s photo, the most important locus of the room as a space of memory for her (as seen in the funeral episode), has been smashed. Much of the scene’s emotive power for the regular viewer lies in this combination of tropes, where the familiar room functions as site of simultaneous violation and memory.
When Hilda eventually leaves Coronation Street (episode 2790, 25 December 1987), her sense of the value of her surroundings to herself had become restored. Hilda’s final scene in number 13 connects the character to the room almost symbiotically, as she explains "I've come in here more times than I care to remember. Cold. Wet. Tired out. Not a penny in me purse. And seeing them ducks and that muriel... well they've kept me hand away from the gas tap. And that's a fact”. This speech reiterates the role of the room in Coronation Street as both intimate and private space and as a space of memory for both viewer and character.
This chapter demonstrates how the Coronation Street audiences’ empathy with, and perception of, Hilda Ogden was achieved through the character’s understanding of the rooms that she inhabited. This particular, spatial, understanding of character was unique to the studio form and regular domestic reception of the television soap opera.
Berger, Thomas, ‘Review: Shakespeare on Television’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40, 1989, pp.237-9.
Dent, Grace, ‘Crowned with glory’, Guardian, Saturday 30 June 2005.
Hobson, Dorothy, Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera, London: Methuen, 1982.
Hobson, Dorothy, Soap Opera, Bodmin, Polity, 2003.
Podmore, Bill, with Reece, Peter, Coronation Street: The Inside Story, London: MacDonald, 1990.
Wheatley, Helen, ‘Rooms within Rooms: Upstairs Downstairs & the Studio Costume Drama of the 1970s’, in Johnson, Catherine, and Turnock, Rob (eds.) ITV Cultures, Maidenhead: Open University, 2005, pp.143-158.
Williams, Raymond, Raymond Williams on Television, London, Routledge, 1989.
[1] ‘The Great Soap Survey’, Radio Times, July 17 2004, pp. 18-21.
[2] In addition to Irma and Trevor, two further children (Tony and Sylvia) were mentioned in the Ogdens’ earliest Coronation Street appearances, but these characters never appeared nor were they referred to subsequently.
[3] Literally, an iconic image, as the Liverpool artist David Knopov has created a series of Andy Warhol-style silkscreen prints of Hilda.
[4] A variation of this visual gag is most famously seen in the Only Fools and Horses episode ‘A Touch of Glass’ (BBC, 8 December 1982).
[5] Bernard Youens had suffered a stroke in 1975.
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