Coronation Street timeslot change absurd

With the removal of Cronation Street from its traditional time slot, TVNZ’s most loyal viewers are being treated like units to be delivered up to advertisers.

"Hello? We're on at 5.25? God, why? Why?!

Coronation Street began at 7.00pm on Friday, December 9, 1960. The first episode was transmitted live. Nearly 7500 episodes later, Coronation Street continues to be a ratings success, captivating audiences worldwide,” raves the TVNZ website, under the heading “Fascinating Coronation Street facts”.

And now this faithful friend, still rating its heavily darned, working class socks off, is to be relegated to 5.25pm. So we can watch MasterChef Australia. In the name of all that is fair and right, why? The build-up to the big finale of MasterChef will have all the nail-biting suspense of our forthcoming election. Anyone remotely interested already knows the result (though, in the case of the election, there may well be a late run by John Key’s cat. Or, possibly, the Mad Butcher). Certainly, neither MasterChef nor the election will offer such deathless dialogue as Corrie veteran hairdresser Audrey’s brisk “I can’t stand around all day talking about heroin!”

I’m in mourning already. First that absurdist masterpiece, The Bold and the Beautiful, a daytime soap that ran so long some characters grew older than their own parents, disappeared. Now this. As many have pointed out, scenes involving lesbian kisses, brutal rapes and/or Janice Battersby are hardly 5.25pm fare. You are in danger of passive smoking just watching this show. And the employees at the dark, satanic mill that is Underworld undergarments regularly knock back lunchtime pints at t’Rovers, raising the spectre of a worker drunk in charge of a runaway knickers overlocker.

We’ve been told the obvious: further cuts to the programmes will be necessary in the new time slot. We are being treated like children. Even more so than usual. The people most affected are TVNZ’s longest-standing, most loyal viewers. Many programmes screened on TVNZ are funded by taxpayer money. We deserve better than to be treated like units to be delivered up to advertisers.

At times of great affliction, aficionados of t’Street often ask themselves, “What would Ken Barlow do?” This offers a range of options, though grabbing Deirdre by the throat, while no doubt satisfying, would do little to help the present situation. But there is a Ken-related precedent for fighting oppression. Back in 1961, Ken was a floppy-fringed maverick, full of promise that was doomed to remain unfulfilled. In one episode, he and his mates occupied that monument to Establishment authority, the Barlow living room, to make Ban the Bomb signs. As the hapless activists (one of whom was a young Beryl Bainbridge, the late great novelist) told Ken’s enraged mum, “We’re marching in a torchlight procession. Tomorrow night. With guitars.” That’s the spirit. Once more to the barricades. It worked last time. I’ll bring my ukulele.

I have to admit to combat fatigue when it comes to the Underbelly franchise. The first series was brilliant and edgy, with a star turn by New Zealand’s Roy Billing as Bob Trimbole. The body count was astronomical. By the time it was our turn, with Underbelly: Land of the Long Green Cloud, it all seemed to be getting a bit repetitive. But who can resist a series set in the Roaring Twenties, featuring more cat fights than Corrie and all set off by a Pomeranian? Underbelly: Razor cannot be accused of false advertising. It’s about a bunch of lowlifes continually slicing each other up.

Kate Leigh (a frostbitten Danielle Cormack) takes care of the sly grog end of things. Tilly Devine (Chelsie Preston Crayford, nostrils permanently aflair, cockney accent slightly askew) is a madam. They are the 1920s Darling-hurst version of Eileen Grimshaw and Gail Platt, only with more weaponry. The series is freighted with stylistic tics – coy narration, cartoony captions – that prove so distancing it’s hard to care about any of these people. And there’s an over-reliance on the bard. “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. The Scottish play,” explains a police officer, in the midst of the mayhem.

When the narrator shuts up and the cast just get on with it, the action becomes more engaging, disturbing and occasionally quite lyrical, in an only-in-an-Aussie-period-crime-drama kind of way. “I found him wandering willy-nilly in Woolloomooloo,” says Leigh, of the wretched pooch that helps kick off a blood bath. The bits where young women of the night get their faces cut up are mercifully offset by a bit of humour. “Right you are, then. F—ing off as per instructions,” says a cheerful cart man in the street, after a chilly encounter with the increasingly scary (remember her in The Cult?) Cormack. So far, Razor has yet to decide if it’s a slightly Brechtian 42nd Street or Boardwalk Empire with more broads. I’ll be tuning in for a while, at least, to find out.

CORONATION STREET, Tuesdays and Thursdays, TV1, 7.30pm (for now).
UNDERBELLY: RAZOR, WEDNESDAY, TV3, 8.30pm.