More '64:
Part of the fascination of watching these early years of DOCTOR WHO and CORONATION STREET is seeing both series gradually take shape in front of your eyes. The final episode of ‘Planet of the Giants’ marks the first time the TARDIS gang as a whole have been motivated by anything other than self-preservation. Barbara has been infected by a deadly something or other, the only antidote for which is back in the TARDIS, but rather than returning to the ship straight away, the gang agree to expose the insecticide-related wrong-doing they’ve stumbled upon first, even though the delay means putting Barbara’s life at risk. Meanwhile, Coronation Street itself is still literally half-formed — only one side of the street physically exists as yet — and I’m not sure if Weatherfield, the fictional town in which it is set, has even been invented at this point. By contrast, THE STREET’s American equivalent, PEYTON PLACE, another twice-weekly half-hour evening soap opera, arrives fully-formed. Sitting down to Episode 1 feels more like taking a novel down from a shelf and embarking on its opening chapter rather than tuning into the beginning of a series that has yet to wholly discover its identity. Of course, the fact that PEYTON PLACE previously was a novel, and as well as a couple of films, has more than a little to do with that.
Production-wise, PEYTON PLACE leaves both CORONATION STREET and DOCTOR WHO in its dust. No one ever fluffs a line the way actors occasionally do on THE STREET and poor old William Hartnell regularly does as the Doctor. It is slickly filmed and combines interior and exterior scenes with ease, with none of the studio-bound feel that the British shows have. Cars drive down real streets and characters come out of what look like real houses. There are lots of interesting and surprising camera angles and some really impressive end-of-episode crane shots where, as a character is shown leaving or arriving in the town, the camera pulls up, up and away from them until you’re seeing a bird’s eye view of them in the wider context of the town square. Over on Coronation Street, if a character was to keep walking in a straight line past the corner shop, they’d end up bumping into a hand-drawn picture of Viaduct Street.
While the focus of CORONATION STREET is specifically on the street itself (the side of the street that actually exists, that is) and its occupants, the geographical and dramatic parameters of PEYTON PLACE are vaguer. This allows the town to expand or contract as the storylines require. The workplaces of the most important characters — the offices of Dr Rossi, Leslie Harrington and Matthew Swain, as well as Constance MacKenzie’s bookstore — are lined up conveniently next to one another in the town’s main square. When a major story about Elizabeth Carson’s death eighteen years before is introduced towards the end of the year, we are suddenly made aware of other business holdings on the same street: the chandlery owned by Eli Carson (father of Elizabeth’s husband Elliot who is presently serving time for her murder) and the drugstore owned by Calvin Hanley (father of both Elizabeth and her brother Paul, who as a child provided damning evidence against Elliot as his trial). Beyond the square, there is the seemingly idyllic, white-picket-fenced home of Constance and her daughter Allison, the rather more imposing Harrington manor and Dr Rossi’s beach house, which alternates between being a groovy ‘60s bachelor pad and the ghostly scene of the Carson murder. There’s also Doctors Hospital, the setting for so much medical drama, intrigue and romance that it could easily have been spun off into its own serial. Unlike on THE STREET, where everyone’s houses and hang-outs are within walking distance of each other, we don’t get a firm sense of where these places exist in relation to one another.
Whereas CORONATION STREET’s USP is its ordinariness — it’s about the little things — PEYTON PLACE’s sense of saga and the size of its characters’ emotions are big enough to fill a widescreen technicolour movie, but the constrictions of the medium means they must be squeezed into a 4 x 3 black and white TV screen. This creates a feeling of intensity and claustrophobia at times reminiscent of a film noir. In the best way possible, the story feels hemmed in, just as the characters — particularly Allison the dreamer and ambitious, discontented Betty Anderson — feel hemmed in by the parameters of the small town they inhabit.
If ‘60s CORONATION STREET is about the shared experiences of a community, PEYTON PLACE is, from its opening scene, a series about secrets — secret pasts, secret yearnings, secret romances. In the first episode, rich boy Rodney Harrington stumbles on one of these secrets when he walks in on his (married) father Leslie in a clandestine clinch with his (also married) secretary Julie Anderson, who just happens to be the mother of Rodney's own girlfriend Betty. Rodney immediately dumps sexy, earthy Betty without explanation and falls instantly in love with the ethereally virginal Allison. The resultant triangle between Rodney, Betty and Allison, which fuels the next thirty or so episodes, sometimes feels like an intense psychological drama disguised as a slushy teen romance and sometimes feels a slushy teen romance disguised as an intense psychological drama, but mostly feels like both things at once.
As well as secrets, everything in PEYTON PLACE is about sex. This being a TV series set in New England and made in 1964, however, no one comes right out and says so, which only makes the subject more potent. When Rodney and Betty recall the idyllic hours they spent by the pond over the summer, they’re talking about sex. When aspiring writer Allison laments the lack of life experience she has to draw on, she’s talking about sex. When Constance frets about Allison making the same mistakes she did as a teenager, she is also talking about sex. When Matthew Swain describes the young woman, three hundred years earlier, who “was drummed across this square to do public penance in the Pillory” before her head was shaved and she was banished from the town forever, you can bet whatever she did to warrant such a punishment had something to do with sex (and/or witchcraft). But it isn’t until Episode 5 when Betty says to Rodney, “I’m going to have a baby,” that the series unequivocally confirms that the subject everyone’s been alluding to so euphemistically is ... sex.
It’s open to interpretation, but sex — or more specifically, sexuality — could also be the not-in-so-many-words reason behind Emily Nugent’s decision to leave Leonard Swindley standing at the altar on CORONATION STREET in July. It’s not because she doesn’t love him, she explains, but because she knows that deep down he doesn’t desire her. Again, this being 1964, there’s no way the series is about to address what lies behind his lack of desire, which makes the situation all the sadder. The fact that the would-be bride and groom never address each other as anything less formal than “Mr Swindley” and “Miss Nugent” is both comical and heartbreaking.
“What will the neighbours say?” is a constant concern on both soaps. On THE STREET, the gossip is on display for all to hear, as characters openly speculate about and pass judgement on each other’s business as they go about their day. On PEYTON PLACE, the whispered conversations and dirty looks are mostly left to nameless extras and bit players — yet the consequences of scandal and disgrace feel far graver, as symbolised by the Pillory in the town square. Indeed, Constance Mackenzie’s whole adult life has been built around keeping a terrible truth from her daughter (as well as the community at large): that the man in the framed photo on the Mackenzie mantlepiece isn’t her late husband and Allison’s father as she has always claimed, and that Allison is, in fact, illegitimate.
The CORONATION STREET party line has always been that the show’s only irreplaceable star is the street itself. Annie Walker and Ena Sharples may both like to think of themselves as the leader of the community, but whenever either gets too big for her boots, she is inevitably brought down to earth with a bump. Not so on PEYTON PLACE where no-one questions the moral authority of newspaper proprietor Matthew Swain (although, as Carly Simon might put it, sometimes I wish someone would). Not only does he make a habit of bestowing words of advice upon everyone he comes into contact with, but each episode opens with his disembodied voice delivering a few words of scene-setting narration. His all-knowing overview of the town and its inhabitants imbues his character with an almost celestial wisdom. Here at least, the voice of the press is also the voice of God. In addition, his frequent hints of what lies ahead for the characters (“X is about to do Y, little knowing that their actions will have consequences for everyone concerned”), adds to the sense that PEYTON PLACE is much a televised novel as it is a day to day serial.
Unlike CORRIE’s opening titles which, democratically, feature none of the actors, PP’s include flattering close-ups of its star players. In this regard, as well as the episodes’ dramatic musical score which regularly swells to a cliff-hanging crescendo, it anticipates the prime time super soaps of the ‘80s. Indeed, a lot of the ingredients of PEYTON PLACE feel familiar from DALLAS, only assembled in a different order. Betty Anderson loses a baby in the show’s fifth episode just as Pam Ewing will, but this occurs before she and Rodney have run off to get married. Leslie Harrington offers Betty money to get out of his family’s lives in the same way that JR does Pam, but again does so prior to her marrying Rodney rather than afterwards. Indeed, Betty’s angry, humiliated response to Leslie's offer is what pushes her into marrying Rodney under false pretences, i.e., pretending she is still pregnant. In today’s nutty soap universe, faking a pregnancy pretty much passes for normal behaviour, but when Betty does it in 1964, it’s a breathtakingly audacious act of both desperation and ambition that feels almost heroic. Consequently, instead of kicking off the saga with an elopement between a boy from a rich family and a girl from the wrong side of the tracks the way DALLAS and THE COLBYS will, PEYTON PLACE waits a full thirteen episodes before detonating the same bomb, by which point we’ve gotten to know all the players well enough for the subsequent explosion to have maximum impact.
Had Rodney and Betty been created for an ‘80s soap, they might easily have been reduced to juicily enjoyable archetypes: the playboy stud and the gold-digging slut. But however unsympathetic their behaviour may look on paper, both are depicted on screen as sensitive, complicated characters wrought with inner conflict. Meanwhile, Constance Mackenzie does her best to project a permanent Krystle Carrington-style serenity from behind her bookstore counter, but her nervous, Sue Ellen-style twitchiness indicates that she has Something To Hide. Even her enormous eyelashes look guilty.
When CORONATION STREET, began, only fifteen years had passed since the end of World War II. Despite, or perhaps because of this, there are surprisingly few references to the war in the series’ first few years. Admittedly, I’m only basing this on the episodes I’ve seen, but it's certainly less than in the early days of EASTENDERS where reminiscences about the Blitz, rationing and doodlebugs were very much part of that show’s DNA. Perhaps that’s because wartime memories had grown less raw by the mid-1980s, and most of those memories belonged to the wives and children of the men that had gone off to fight — when ENDERS began, there were very few Walford residents left who had experienced armed combat. This wasn’t the case for Coronation Street’s inhabitants when their show began, of course, but such experiences are spoken of only tacitly (such as when Albert Tatlock gently chides Ken Barlow for his magazine article where he criticises his neighbours for their complacency and indifference despite the threat of nuclear war and other social ills: “You must understand, Kenneth, that these people have had it rough in the past and now because things are better, you can’t blame them for making the most of it”) or at moments of strong emotion (an angry Len Fairclough, during the same storyline: “There’s one little thing you don’t seem to understand, Kenneth Barlow. It’s that Harry and me were scrapping for you during the war — you know, when you were still running round in little nappies — with rifles and bayonets and all that kind of stuff, only you wouldn’t understand that. We had no time to write articles, did we, Harry?”). Len’s words are echoed in PEYTON PLACE by salesman George Anderson. Despite being hailed a hero when he returned from the war, George still bears the psychological scars of killing thirteen men in action. In contrast, his childhood contemporary, Leslie Harrington, sat the war out and is now the richest man in the town — as well as George’s employer. “When I was face down in the mud, he was selling war bonds and marrying the boss’s daughter,” broods George. George's clammy desperation, his feeble jokes and phoney bonhomie as he refuses to acknowledge his life and marriage falling apart are hard to watch at times.
Violence towards women manifests itself in various forms throughout 1964. In Goldfinger, Bond uses a young (albeit duplicitous) woman as a human shield when someone fires a gun at him as well as, notoriously, forcing his attentions on Pussy Galore “until she likes it.” “There’s no prettier sight than a young couple courting,” observes Jim Dale in Carry On Cleo as a Flintstones-style caveman walks past, casually dragging a woman along the ground by her hair. And the film ends with Dale doing the same thing with his bride as he walks down the aisle on their wedding day. (It’s such a crazy mashup of anachronisms, it’s impossible to take seriously, much less be offended by.) Even Barbara on DOCTOR WHO is obliged to fend off a couple of would-be rapists (one in 18th-century France, the other in the icy wastelands of the planet Marinus). But only on PEYTON PLACE is the subject treated as the same kind of gravity as it would be today. When George Anderson lunges towards his wife Julie, the episode ends with her terrified scream. What happens next is neither shown nor directly described, but when Julie walks into Connie’s bookstore with bruises on her face, everyone knows how she got them, even if they don’t say so. The town’s collective denial makes the storyline all the more powerful.
Not only is PEYTON PLACE ahead of its time in treating domestic violence as wholly unacceptable, but it manages to do so without demonising the perpetrator. The depiction of George as a broken, pathetic figure is altogether more nuanced than that of either BROOKSIDE’s Trevor Jordache or EASTENDERS’ Trevor Morgan some three decades later — both Trevors were violent husbands portrayed as a cross between an evil bogeyman and a pantomime villain.
Given CORONATION STREET’s seeming reluctance to discuss WWII up to this point, the story in September where the residents are evacuated to the mission hall following the discovery of an unexploded bomb in Albert’s backyard, leading to an episode full of nostalgic reminiscences of wartime, is surprising. (Ena Sharples’ transformation from “malevolent bitch” to “OAP whose cantankerous exterior conceals a heart of gold” can be measured by contrasting the hostile reception she gave the residents in a similar mission-based episode in 1960 with her behaviour in this ep, where she gamely dons her old air raid warden helmet to dole out cups of tea and lead the rest of the cast in a good old-fashioned sing-song.)
Nervous breakdowns in CORONATION STREET are fast becoming an annual occurrence. This year, it’s the turn of the previously perky Florrie Lindley, whose lonely single life appears to have finally got the better of her. She undergoes the same kind of Big Soap Meltdown that Arthur Fowler famously will on Christmas Day ’86 and which has since become quite commonplace — she trashes her own shop, breaking a window in the process. While Florrie’s distress feels quite real, the reactions of the rest of the street and a no-nonsense district nurse who attends to her are amusingly insensitive. Indeed, the tone of the storyline as a whole is noticeably lighter than those dealing with Christine Hardman’s and Doreen Birtles’ mental problems. Comedy and drama collide in the unexploded bomb episode as Florrie refuses to leave her sickbed to take shelter with the rest of the residents, insisting she’d be better off dead. Stan Ogden’s response is to matter of factly barge into her bedroom, throw her over his shoulder and carry her over to the mission hall, where she ends up having quite a nice time despite herself.
In 1961, Ken Barlow, feeling stifled by life on Coronation Street, set off for London, only for a chance encounter with Christine Hardman on a train platform to change his mind. In 1964, Betty Harrington, feeling stifled by life in Peyton Place, makes it as far as the bus station from where she also plans to flee to the big city (New York). Her chance encounter is with Allison Mackenzie who likewise manages to change her mind. The irony of Ken’s situation was that Christine had no idea of either his plans or the effect of her words on him; the irony of Betty’s is that Allison, despite being Betty’s rival and having everything to gain by her departure, knowingly persuades her to stay. At the end of the year, having faced up to the fact that both her and her parents’ marriages are over, Betty again decides to leave and is again discovered at the bus station by Allison who again tries to dissuade her. This time, however, Betty’s mind is made up and off to New York she goes. There’s a strong sense of finality to the scene and for all we know that’s the last we’ll ever see of her. Nor is Betty the only young female character to depart her series at the end of the year.
For its final adventure of ’64, the TARDIS makes its first trip into Earth’s future — 2164, to be exact — where the Daleks, making their first return to the series almost exactly a year after their debut story, have pretty much conquered the planet. (New York, the city Betty Harrington was so anxious to see, is just one of the cities they have destroyed.) The unusual amount of location work in this story means we get to see still thrilling scenes of the Daleks amidst familiar London landmarks: gliding along Westminster Bridge, patrolling Trafalgar Square, even emerging from the Thames. This is an early example of what Jon Pertwee would later describe as the “Yeti on the loo” effect, i.e, the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the alien, which would become a hallmark of WHO in the '70s. ’The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ is also the first WHO story to include a variety of regional accents among its supporting cast, as opposed to the standard posh BBC pronunciation with which all aliens and historical characters have spoken up to now, and it’s remarkable what a difference it makes: the people the TARDIS gang encounter suddenly feel like real individuals, and whenever one is killed, it matters. Among the survivors is David, a Scottish freedom fighter, whom Susan falls for. As the TARDIS crew are preparing to leave at the end of the story, having conquered the Daleks, he asks her to stay, but she sadly explains that she could never abandon her grandfather. So the Doctor takes matters into his own hands, shutting her out of the TARDIS and taking off without her. It’s the first unequivocally selfless thing we’ve seen him do and it’s a heartbreaker.
Another memorable departure takes place in May on CORONATION STREET. The sudden death of Martha Longhurst introduces two now well-established soap tropes. The first is “the tragedy set against the backdrop of a celebration.” The residents of the street are busy celebrating Frank Barlow’s recent windfall with a knees-up in the Rovers when Martha, sitting alone in the snug, quietly collapses and dies without anybody realising. When Jerry and Myrna Booth catch sight of her with her head on the table, they assume she’s had one too many and passed out. (Fifty-four years later, during the celebrations to mark Harry and Meghan’s wedding on EASTENDERS, Mick Carter will jump to a similar conclusion when he sees Shakhil Kaseemi stagger past the Vic and presumes him to be drunk, not realising he’s just sustained a soon-to-prove fatal stab wound.) This trope has become so commonplace on British soaps that it is now unthinkable for a wedding or a Christmas Day episode to take place without some terrible disaster to accompany it. The second trope is a bit more subtle and possibly more applicable to THE STREET than the other soaps. Periodically, a character will envisage a fresh start beyond Coronation Street — for Ken and Valerie Barlow, that means emigrating to Jamaica, for Alf and Renee Roberts, moving to the countryside — only to be cruelly cut down on the eve of their departure, almost as if fate were punishing them for getting ideas above their station. Martha wasn’t planning to move away from the street, but the fact that her death occurred on the same day as she received her very first passport and she then proceeded to brag to anybody who would listen of her plans to holiday in Spain with “our Lily and her Wilf” is surely no coincidence.
So it is, with this infusion of fatalism and dramatic irony, that THE STREET is very gradually moving beyond its original remit of reflecting the everyday lives of its viewers back at them to evolve its own mythology, complete with unspoken tropes and boundaries. When Stan and Hilda Ogden move into No 13, Ena enjoys informing them of the fates of its previous occupants — the mentally ill May Hardman who died alone, her occasionally suicidal daughter Christine, Jerry and Myra Booth whose marriage lasted a matter of months — before concluding that the house must be cursed. The same explanation will be offered during the early ‘80s to rationalise the succession of tragedies that have accumulated at No 10 Brookside Close: an abrupt and fatal brain tumour, a miscarriage, a suicide and an unjust arrest and prison term. Sudden death, suicide, marital breakdown — these are no longer merely random events that befall the ordinary person, now they have acquired an almost mythical significance because they happen within the confines of Coronation Street.
By chance, someone recently posted this remarkable clip from Martha Longhurst’s funeral episode on Twitter. I’d never seen it before but it seems to combine these two aspects of THE STREET: its mythology (the music, the cortege) with its social realism (what looks like documentary footage of the city the series was based on).
Martha’s natural successor is Hilda Ogden. Another birdlike gossip, she also steps into Martha's shoes as the Rovers’ cleaner. The Ogdens are noticeably more “larger than life” than previous residents. Stan in particular, with his greased-back hair and shirt proudly unbuttoned to reveal a large beer belly, looks like a cartoon caricature of the work-shy layabout come to life. Paving the way for the Duckworths and Battersbys in ‘80s and ‘90s CORRIE, the Jacksons then Corkhills of early BROOKSIDE, the Dingles on EMMERDALE and most recently the Taylors on ENDERS, the Oggies represent a lower-class archetype so "common" that even their working-class neighbours can look down on them. Such families also pander to the prejudices of viewers who, even as they enjoy the soaps, nonetheless regard those at the lower end of the social scale as thick, loud, boozing scroungers. Hopefully, over time, such preconceptions are subverted as the characters evolve into more rounded and sympathetic figures (either that or the shows simply rub off their more abrasive edges and sentimentalise them). All that said, and while my enduring memory of the Ogdens during their '70s heyday is Hilda constantly nagging Stan while the two of them served as the butts of everyone else’s jokes, back in ’64 they are welcomed into the community without judgement. There's no sign of Annie’s future disdain towards Hilda, nor Elsie’s contempt. And at this point, Hilda is still an adoring wife, blind to her husband’s faults even as he casually boasts about his extra-marital conquests to his new mates over a pint. Thus far, all derision directed towards Stan and Hilda comes from their wisecracking daughter Irma.
If the Ogdens’ immediate function is to provide light relief then they succeed. During the episode where a terrified Stan is pitted against a real-life wrestler in the ring, I laughed more than I did during the entirety of Carry On Regardless (1961), which includes a sequence where Charles Hawtrey finds himself in an almost identical predicament. Another notable episode captures Stan’s extremely short-lived career as a chauffeur. As he pulls up outside the Rovers to give his pals an unsanctioned ride in his new boss’s Rolls Royce, continuity is scattered to the four winds: this real-life pub might display a sign that says the Rover’s Return, but it bears no resemblance to the one that’s been regularly seen on screen for the past few years.
The last (available) STREET episode of the year features the Christmas Day pantomime. When Lucille Hewitt’s Cinderella tells one of the Ugly Sisters s/he’s “got a nose like Ringo”, it isn’t a compliment. “Oh yes you have!’ insist the excited kiddies in the audience. Both the panto and the episode conclude with a rousing rendition of ‘She Loves You’. As the credits roll and the camera roams amongst the “yeah, yeah, yeah”-ing kids, any attempts at maintaining the fourth wall are abandoned as the children gaze directly into the lens while singing. It’s very sweet and weirdly moving (and, bearing in mind that they’d all be pensioners now, kind of mind-blowing). Beatlemania is such an integral part of the cultural landscape by 1965 that it even permeates the timeless world of Bond, with the unintended effect of making 007 seem a bit of a square. “My dear girl, there are some things that just aren't done, such as drinking Dom Perignon '53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit,” he teases the soon-to-be asphyxiated Shirley Eaton. “That's just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!”
And the Top 7 are …
1 (3) 007
2 (-) PEYTON PLACE
3 (2) CORONATION STREET
4 (4) DOCTOR WHO
5 (1) CARRY ON CLEO
6 (1) CARRY ON SPYING
7 (1) CARRY ON JACK