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.
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;
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,
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.
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 8
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).
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 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.
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