Skip to main content

Cheers Bill

I came here to write something completely different, but as I was signing in I heard that Bill Tarmey has died. Bill played long-suffering husband and pigeon fancier, Jack Duckworth in the classic UK soap Coronation Street, which I've watched since I was knee high to a grasshopper.

My mum used to let me stay up to watch the cat in the opening sequence before I was packed off to bed. I think the only times I haven't watched Corrie is when I was at University and didn't have a TV and when I've lived overseas. Even then I would get updates on what was going on from my mum.



Now you may be groaning, thinking soaps are a load of crap, which yes, a lot of them are, but there's something a little bit different about Corrie. There's a real northern warmth about the writing and a heck of a lot of humour. Whenever I catch glimpses of miserable Eastenders, seemingly filmed in grey, the only expression being a downturned grimace or tedious shouting of "leave it aaah, 'e aint werf it", I change the channel and think fondly of Rita's Cabin, where daft gossip is interspersed with comedy gold or the ongoing Ken-Deidre-Tracy sagas and Deirdre's timeless cries of "Oh, Tracy love".

I've just had a quick pop over to twitter and saw Joanne Harris, the writer, had shared her favourite Jack Duckworth quip:


That gentle humour is one of the things I admire about t'Street, which, by the way, attracts such theatrical luminaries as Nigel Havers and Ian McKellen. Yes, that's right, Gandalf has been in Corrie. I was recently on holiday in Malysia and Indonesia where I picked up what may have been the oddest thing I have ever brought abroad. We were in Kuala Lumpur central station, waiting for a train idly browsing a book sale in the station, when I found this:

Corrie book

Yes,  I bought a 1980's Coronation Street album while in Malaysia  It's awesome - if you like Corrie, obviously - and is packed full of facts and good interviews, not like novelty books today where most of the writing seems to have been left out. It's from the era when I first started watching Corrie, when I was deemed old enough to stay awake beyond the cat, so I've had fun dipping into it and dredging up old Corrie facts. If I ever go on Mastermind Coronation Street might well be my specialist subject. I just hope one of the answers would be "Oh Tracy love!"


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Champagne Bubbles

We went for a stroll this afternoon along the Seine where my MIL lives to work off the champagne and cheese from New Year celebrations and build up an appetite for our postponed Christmas meal. It was a good opportunity to take some photos of my latest FO, Bubbles hat by Woolly Wormhead . Compulsory Catalogue Pose I've met Woolly at several shows over the summer and we sat together at several meal times at the infamous Knit Camp as well as getting tipsy at Knit Nation. She's ace and also a great designer. She leads a pretty interesting life, living in a converted double decker bus in Italy. Take a look at her blog which is a good mixture of her day to day life on the bus with her partner and young son and loads of great knitting tips. The Bubbles pattern was great fun to knit and worked up pretty quickly, the cables providing just enough interest to make this a great knit while watching Agatha Christie mysteries on TV in between eating festive leftovers. I used Araucan...

Just beet it - part II

Here it is. The beetroot dye experiment results. I had read that beetroot turns a disappointing orange colour when the dye is set. The most saturated end turned a beautiful burnished orange however the far end of the skein, which had been a delicate shade of pale pink before cooking was a mucky yellow. The cream/mucky yellow colour dominated the skein and wasn't as graduated as I'd hoped for. I decided to redye the cream section, leaving a small section of the Naples Yellow (mucky yellow) for contrast (I actually like the colour in small amounts and looked up a nicer name in my Artists Colour Manual). I added a few drops of pink food colouring to the beetroot vinegar just to see what happened and over dyed the mid portion of orange with more beetroot vinegar with a few drops of red food colouring. This is how it looked while drying... ...ta dah ! Here it is reskeined . Well half the skein anyway. I was in a rush as I wanted to enter it in a dip dyeing competition on Ravelry w...

Unravelling the NHS

If you follow me on twitter you'll already know I have a healthy interest in politics. Our current government is slowly and steadily dismantling our beloved NHS (National Health Service) from one with full public accountability to one which is more dependent on profit margins rather than evidence based medicine. THIS MAKES ME VERY ANGRY. There's a lot of despair at the moment, many of us feel our government is not listening to us, the people, or experts in the field such as the British Medical Association or the Royal College of Nurses. Yesterday our unelected second house, the house of Lords, voted through the government's ill-advised health reform bill. We all felt hopeless, then I read this blog post . You should read it too. Many of us are working out what to do. How can we reverse this disastrous decision when essentially the democratic process is failing us. "The NHS reforms did not appear in either the Conservative or Liberal ...