Thursday 11 February 2010

Persiflage (v) To constantly beat, e,g a wilful child or a carpet.

While sitting in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, waiting to be called in for a blood-test, my thoughts were drawn, as they often are, to ‘Coronation Street’ and the onscreen lives of Ken and Dierdre Barlow. The hospital has picked up some old ticket machines from a Safeways Deli Counter. The number on the LCD screen was 9. My ticket was 34, so I had quite a time to ponder.
I’m thinking of commissioning an opera based on the life of Ken and Dierdre, although I haven’t thought of a title as yet.
Ideally it would have a score by Philip Glass, and would be a Beckett-esque tragedy covering thirty years, one decade per act, and with a different person playing their psychotic daughter Tracy every time she appears on stage, just to keep it real.
Act I begins on a high note with the wedding of Ken and Dierdre, lots of choruses and a duet, but laced with a menacing counter-melody from Mike Baldwin, whose affair with Dierdre in 1983 initiates a feud that continues through the years until Mike’s tragic death in Ken Barlow’s arms in 2006.
After the blood test I had to have my knee x-rayed by two children. I swear they were on work experience or something. One of them had barely started shaving, and she was the one who looked the oldest.