Street Of Shame

‘“LIVE IN CORONATION STREET FOR £7K,” announces the Star’s front page, in what looks for all the world like the paper’s attempt to do a Daily Mail.

It’s grim up north

The Mail, you will recall, likes to offer “dream homes” that are “worth £250,000” as prizes. The home is always the same: a thatched cottage in an orchard, with an all-white family in situ and no sign of a gypsy encampment or asylum seekers’ detention centre within 100 miles.

But the Star is not the Mail, and the offer to live in Coronation Street is not really an offer at all. It’s a report on house prices in Salford, where the real-life Coronation Street, as featured in the soap’s opening title sequence, is situated.

Before you rush out to buy one of these houses, we should remind you that although that life in Coronation Street has its downside.

For a start, every single property is boarded up. And the paper reports that in one 12-month-period in the area there were three murders, two manslaughters and five attempted murders reported to the police.

On second thoughts, compared to a typical 12-month-period in an average soap street – in nearby Brookside Close, for example – it sounds positively relaxing.

“Nobody on telly would last five minutes in this place,” confirms local resident Roy Austin. Too true – far too boring…’

Posted: 8th, March 2005 | In: Tabloids Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink