Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition
In Competition No. 2666 you were invited to supply an example of pretentious tosh in the shape of a review of a TV or radio soap opera or any other piece of entertainment aimed at the mass market.
It is tempting with this type of comp to go over the top and points were awarded to those competitors whose tosh, however affected and overblown, had at least the semblance of developing an
argument. Patrick Smith and Adrian Fry were unlucky losers; the winners get £30 each except Brian Murdoch, who nets £35.
I am not I, they are not they, Coronation Street is not Inkerman Street. Coronation Street is, however, an ongoing paradigm, a speculum humanae vitae, whose cobbles incorporate the Heideggerian
necessity of existence. The street qua street is no thoroughfare, it has no beginning and no end, a Ding an sich leading nowhere, but with at its still centre the Rover’s, the bourne to which
all travellers return. Birth, copulation and death revolve around the old gods: Ken, whose very name means ‘knowledge’, an aged Silenus set against the Ewig-Weibliche, Deirdre of the
Sorrows. The all-too-human plotlines are suffused with original sin — bodies remain in the concrete, love-children in others’ cradles, and the commercial proximity of kebabs and
lingerie scarcely needs a Freud to interpret, nor need we speculate why the factory is called Underworld. The populating she-devils would grace a Mystery play! Foucault once remarked…
Brian Murdoch
When, in glossing Hegel’s famous remark that history repeats itself, Marx added ‘the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’, he might have been proleptically describing the
classic series of Carry On films that distinguished British cinema between 1958 and 1978 — the last two decades of consensus politics in the UK.
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