They called him the axeman - the Sun even called him Freddie Kreuger - for his tendency to slaughter characters willy nilly in Britain's cosiest soap. Brian Park's axe fell on many old favourites when he took over as producer of Coronation Street 18 months ago, injecting new blood and new storylines, but spilling blood and breaking eggs into the bargain. But it brought the series back from the granny-oriented trough it had fallen into. "People thought that the Street wasn't the soap your mother watched, it was the soap your granny watched. So we weren't getting the younger viewers," Park said this week. So it was out with Mavis and Derek, Maureen, Percy, Bill, Don, and in with transsexual Hayley and the Battersbys, who were introduced as the family-from-hell. "They probably got the biggest reaction from the public," said Park. "Yes, they did shout. Then we broke them up, and showed another dimension to them, because you can't just shout forever."
The enduring appeal of Coronation Street lies more with the strength of the characters than with the storylines, which Park capitalised on with his new broom approach. Only in Coronation Street could student grinds have a feelgood factor - the tutor/teen relationship between boring Ken Barlow, former teacher and Street prig and bratty kid Toyah Battersby, who wants to prove she's not thick, is one of the best backgrounder stories at the moment.
Then there's the Hayley and Roy saga. "It's amazing," said Park, "the number of blue-rinsed viewers who write in saying Roy and Hayley are the most wonderful couple, and aren't they sweet . . . It's a subversion that it's very brave of the Street to have tried." Brave because Hayley is a transsexual and the series has dealt very touchingly with her sex change operations and how she copes with her changing status. In Brookside or EastEnders it could have been tacky and over the top, but in the deft hand of Corrie's writers and with the sure acting of Julie Hesmondhalgh and David Neilson, the character of Hayley has been created with warmth and feeling, and the burgeoning, supportive and complex relationship she has with strange egg Roy, could not but soften the hardest of hearts. (Take note Mike Baldwin, who callously sacked her from his factory this week.) But Mike's lack of understanding just underlines the audience's empathy with Hayley;, even while laughing at what he says to his wife Alma, who's trying to explain how Hayley had, even as Harold, always felt she was a woman: "Well, in my head I've been a millionaire all my life, but that doesn't make me one."
"Mike's more human sometimes than he seems," says Alma to Hayley, more in hope than conviction, we sense. And after he sacks Hayley her co-machinist Ida Clough rages: "He can't do that to one of th' lasses." The real test of how successful the humanising of Hayley has been will come when the girls in the factory find out she hasn't always been one of the lasses.
Soaps have a cyclical nature, and Park stimulated an upward curve for the Salford saga. But now the Axeman's off - Park is leaving Granada to set up an independent production company - but for others the Axeman Cometh.
EastEnders's new executive producer Matthew Robinson moved to Walford in March ("Massacre in Albert Square", went the headlines), and the rumour mill is grinding out whispers about who has run their course; three new characters are promised, but 10 regulars are on the way out - Sanjay and Gita (hardly back a wet weekend after a year's absence when she forgot to call - no spare change) are set to follow his ma's exit this week, and Ruth will also be history. If there is a god she'll take estranged husband Mark and his furrowed brow with her. Gangster George is seemingly also on the way out - via a real hitman, I'd bet, hired by ex-paramour midget landlady Peggy.
These days Brookside is also in the mire, with a nest of boring characters making the series' ever more outlandish storylines tedious. Apart from shedding characters, I have it on unreliable authority that the show itself may be under consideration. So who's for the chop? Sinbad was paranoid this week about someone being out to get him, and he was right (cars continually drove straight at him, so it was not a difficult deduction); meanwhile Are Linds approached a potential hitwoman in a beauty parlour (looks to die for) to try and have her estranged hubbie, the evil eyed Gar-ee, bumped off - will this lead to another body under the (very same) patio scenario? Thing is, Sue Jenkins, who plays Linds, is no Anna Friel (former Brooksider whose Dad ended up under the patio, Beth Jordache). It might put an end to Are Linds and her Dad Jimmy (newly reformed as a boring teacher) having the same conversation over and over, week after week, about how Gar-ee is "doin' me 'ead in". The storylines may be sensational, but the conversations are banal and repetitive.
Brookside could also do with wiping out a few of the more useless characters - what on earth, for example, is Mike Dixon still doing on Brookside Close? We are expected to believe the boy has a university degree and the serious possibility of a career in film-making (is this an injoke in Channel 4?). This despite the clear absence of a brain cell in his head, an expression (or indeed sign of life) on his face, or a storyline of any interest since he was banged up in a Bangkok prison a few years ago. Even Linds was supposed to have rewritten his godawful book. And he's supposedly one of the bright, creative, young characters.
And the later arrivals are so bland - the Shadwick children each trying to persuade dodgy builder dad to let them off on holiday, and Eleanor mooning about her passionate youth with ecocriminal Marcus, while her current partner Ollie - of the pasty face, worst shirts on television and droning voice - seems to hang interminably around the barbeque. Yawn. We could do with a dose of charismatic bad guy Barry Grant to liven things up.
But Brookside also has sudden arrivals, and the Instant Farnham Family Fhenomenon. It looks like official middle-class Brookside man Max is about to have another two-child family - instantly. First he had two children with his wife Susannah, then he left her and had two children with Patricia (whom he later split with, then remarried). Then they split up again (she was shacked up with a foreign bloke in France, the last we heard, which was ages ago) and Max got back with Susannah and their original two kids. Then those children were killed in a car crash. Now he and Susannah have remarried and are having a replacement surrogate baby with Jacqui, who is by now heavily pregnant (which seems to be affecting her hair colour and dress sense). Only now they've discovered they can have children and Susannah is simultaneously pregnant. Voila, just add (broken) waters and pour for an instant two-child family. I wouldn't give those two kids long . . . There seems to be a lot of departures in Fair City too - Ann has done a runner from Carrigstown following her discovery that her business partner was a bit of a madam. ("You mean not just awkward to work for?" asks Barry incredulously.) And for a while this week it looked like it might be curtains for Helen following an accident. The complex inter-relationships around the hospital waiting room were worthy of the convoluted connections on an EastEnders boat trip. If she had popped her clogs we might have been lucky enough to see her partner, the self-absorbed Paul, do himself in with remorse for drink driving.
So, if the axe were to fall on Glenroe when it returns from its summer holidays, where might it fall? Would Stephen Brennan be hit by a ball from his crazy golf course (or does he still have that anymore?), and go into a coma for several months before dying? Would Teasy get a job as a travel courier on one of her many trips to Spain with Dinny, while he donates his gammy leg to medical science? Will Mister Devereaux jet off to Ecuador to take up the job vacated by Eamon Casey? Can't wait.
Fair City's Mister Malachy is clearly not too well schooled in the complexity of civvie relationships - it was up to the barman to tell the ex-father Kay might like him to be a real father. And it led to a decidedly odd - though refreshing - proposal: "I want you to be my next of kin." I suppose it beats "Do you want to be buried with my people?"
