Les Battersby dead!? How can Coronation Street ever go on?
The reaction to news that the gobby cabbie will meet his maker next month has caused a surprisingly fierce uproar, and one that I didn’t expect.
Les, who many forgot existed until actor Bruce Jones started to take to the professional wrestling ring at the age of 71, will be killed off in a surprise decision from Corrie bosses.
I say surprise in the sense that we haven’t really heard about Les since 2007 and declaring him dead seems unnecessary.
Is it just to facilitate more heartbreak for Leanne and Toyah (Jane Danson and Georgia Taylor) in a year where one was revealed to have buried their stillborn baby and the other was drawn into a sinister cult?
Killing characters off-screen needs to have a real purpose, and it’s a soap trope that has become too common. Les was never a favourite character of mine but, yes, I agree that there doesn’t seem much point in killing him for what I imagine is a short-term storyline to unite the warring siblings.
Am I outraged? Am I calling for the heads of those at the top? Is Corrie on the skids without Les?
Well, no – of course not. It’s been nearly three decades since we saw Les, a character who already felt like an outdated stereotype at that stage.
When he first arrived in 1997, to huge fan and critic backlash, he was a violent, abusive lout, chucking punches about like wedding confetti.
He was largely toned down into a buffoon like comedy character in later years but it wasn’t really enough to paper over the significant cracks formed through the character’s vile transphobia and homophobia.
At the time, there was an argument that the show needed a character like Les to show the bigotry faced by the LGBTQ+ community and I wholeheartedly agree.
Until much later though, Les – and even beloved characters like Vera – got away mostly unchallenged with some of the most horrific comments, slurs and insults. Genuinely words you wouldn’t see uttered on TV these days.
Time has moved on and by the time Les went, he had been fleshed out a bit more. He proved to be a decent father figure to Chesney and what started off as a horrific neighbour from hell scenario turned into a camp pairing with the monstrous Cilla.
The latter was less offensive, but rarely entertaining. No amount of glancing through rose-tinted spectacles can convince me otherwise.
So why is everyone so upset that Les is getting a final ending? The ‘last straw for Corrie’ vibe feels dramatically over the top. I don’t think that losing a character from 27 years ago will be what finishes off the British institution.
Love him, loathe him or be largely indifferent to him like me, Les belongs in Corrie’s past and was never going to return, even without considering the cloud Bruce Jones left under.
Unless the character came back with a personality transplant, there was never really scope for him fitting into the show. And there was never really a call for it until now, when it’s too late.
We’re kidding ourselves if we claim we have been waiting almost 30 years for the announcement of Les to make his comeback. So the fury of knowing what we already knew – he’s not coming back – is misplaced.
Wading through the accusations of ‘woke’ (ah yes, that old classic), it’s clear that dismay at this decision is just there for dismay sake.
It’s fair to say that Les was a big part of Corrie’s history, but history is where he belongs.
Dead or alive, there was never any doubt about that.
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