A Tale of Two Images: Reality TV, Soap Cliche...
In the last couple months two deaths have pushed two very different tales depicting our city onto national TV screens. In the light of the diverse representations, the casual social scientist or media studies undergraduate could be forgiven for their confusion in their assessments of where our city, of just under a quarter of a million people, sits in the world.
The violent death of Paul Massey, last September, and the flurry of shootings and stabbings inspired the recent Panorama programme, Gangs, Guns and the Police, which asked the question, `Have the Police Lost Control of Salford's Streets?'
The thirty minutes of flagship BBC documentary had an attractive posh lady cruising the streets of the city, pausing at various hotspots, and gasping to camera. A grenade attack here...a seven year-old boy shot and wounded here...a machete attack over there... and a man machine gunned to death in broad daylight just here.
Well what's new? Salford has been synonymous with violence for as long ago as the gang masters threw tally numbers on the floor for causal stevedore labour to fight over for a day's work on the docks.
And the documentary spent most of its thirty minutes uselessly recycling the many incidents that supposedly justified the hypothesis contained in the programme title.
So the next time I was visiting my home town, I promised myself that I would check to see if I could park where I wanted and ignore traffic regulations, deal openly in contraband and generally flout the law within Salford city limits.
Needless to say that the minute I tried to get free parking, a warden emerged from the shadows, and my attempt to snort cocaine off the nearest flat surface was discouraged by disapproving glares from bemused fellow Salfordians. I declined to ton up on the M602 (assuming my Toyota Auris could manage it) due to the plethora of speed cameras and the odd jam sandwich patrol car cruising by. In short, the law whether it is due to the presence of the authorities or self regulation, is by and large intact. And to even suggest otherwise is just speculative headline grabbing.
The documentary was sparse in its first hand sources, revealing little if anything new.
Jason Coughlan, the reformed blagger - carving out a new career for himself on the Cost del Sol advising fellow not so ex-blaggers on how to avoid deportation - is from Stockport and basically sang Paul Massey's praises.
A young actor manfully tried to imitate a Young Firm A Team member, though try as he might he woefully lacked the visceral attitude of the genuine Street. There were the overviews from patrician contributors such as Graham Stringer and the former NW DPP. Overall, if you were from Mars or South of Macclesfield, the programme created Salford as a North European Naples or some such, where the police really have lost control of the streets.
In fact, if you know that city, then the police have not had control since the end of the Second World War. In my experience Salford was a great deal more lawless during the early nineties.
I remember coming back to Ordsall, in particular, and stumbling upon council owned flats in the now demolished Sunnyside Court which really did have the appearance of a Hollywood dystopia. Specially triple, reinforced steel doors protected entrances to drug dealing flats, where drugs would be dispensed from a hatch on the inner door...
...Frequent organised dog fights on the communal landings of Nine Acre Court, attacks on ambulance crews turning up to tend victims of shootings...Young mothers trapped on the top floor of maisonettes literally filled with domestic and building rubbish...
That was 1990. If you doubt me I still have the shaky video to prove it. Where, you might ask, was Panorama then? Because that was a seminal stage in the development of the criminal industry that continues to exist in Salford today. The other stages exist further back...
...We could go to the abject poverty of the 1850s but that would take too long and, surprise, surprise, even though the poverty was real as opposed to relative, with families cramped into insanitary cellars, stables, virtually anything with a roof over three walls, there was generally plenty of work.
Working conditions were shit and dangerous, living standards squalid and wages barely subsistence which, in 1856, did not put much more than gruel on the table. But with work there is hope and ambition that things can get better...which was a similar situation to the 1960s in that people - notwithstanding TV, motor cars and hi fi - had relatively few domestic comforts, living in cramped terraces built to house their great grandparents 110 years earlier, and were still lacking bathrooms, inside toilets and heating, save a small coal fire.
But then again, the work was plentiful and increasing wages meant that, for once, thrifty workers could raise themselves and their kids into something a bit better. Then came much needed but equally mismanaged slum clearance.
During this period, if there was a moment in time when Salford went from industrial work horse to post modern dystopia it is depicted in the testimony of a young Paul Massey in Pete Walsh's book Gangs of Manchester. Massey recalls messing about in an old building due for demolition off Chapel Street (between 1965 and 1985 virtually every vacant building over fifty years old in inner Salford was considered old and due for demolition). The young Massey was having fun, smashing the building up as most kids back then did at some point. Bizarrely the police arrived and all the other kids ran off.
But Massey hung around, not seeing the need to run from the law for smashing up a building that would soon meet its demise at the hands of a wrecking ball. How wrong he was. And in one of those scenes reminiscent of the 1930s Hollywood crime movie Angels With Dirty Faces, where Pat O'Brien legs it at the sight of the railway cops but Jimmy Cagney trips and gets lifted...Massey is arrested - then charged and convicted of criminal damage, and sent to an `approved' school...just like the movie.
O'Brien stays ahead of the law, eventually taking holy vows into the priesthood. However, Jimmy becomes a hardened thug who becomes the local Mr Big, eventually meeting his maker in the gas chamber.
There but for the grace of God go so many Salford generations that lived though the breakup of long established communities and the disappearance of traditional economies which saw youth unemployment in inner cities at rates of up to sixty per cent.
An 11 year-old kid pinched for breaking a window of a building, that in all but a few weeks time would be rubble, leading to a life time spanning forty years of crime ending in a bullet riddled body in crumpled heap. Cause and effect if ever there was an example.
As shocking as the unsolved murder of Lee Erdmann, the senseless slaying of stranger Anuj Bidve and many more, though it does not present a good image of the city, it falls short of the Panorama depiction of Salford - and conjures up many arguments regarding the distortion of its image and the real Salford.
A faithful picture has always proved elusive. Coronation Street and its relationship to Salford came under sharp focus yet again in the programme's 55 year existence due to the sad death of Eccles born, Pendlebury resident, Tony Warren, aka David Simpson, the creator of surely the most successful TV format of all time.
From the outset of the programme in 1960, with its opening credits of smoking terraces interspersed with even smokier factories, it was indelibly linked to Warren's Salford that nestled beneath the eight storeys of Granada TV studios. In the beginning there was little argument that this was the real thing, that the characters in the TV programme were drawn from streets verbatim. However, as the programme became successful and therefore long-lasting, more and more characters had to be created and the storyline devised to keep the show's million of fans enthralled.
Quite simply, you could not do that twice a week, year in year out. And shall we say that Coronation Street and Salford parted company as the show became less Weaste and more Weatherfield, more Showbiz and less Seedley. As a young actor working in the show I was always lobbying for more realistic plots and characters, and I would even say so to Tony on my many visits to his house overlooking Victoria Park.
"No, No, No" he would counsel "It's not real, it's an approximation that hopefully entertains people, and it's wrong to think of it as a drama documentary..."
`Why not? Surely we should be highlighting social issues that affect Salford people and people across the nation in cities and neighbourhoods like Salford?' I reposted. But when they tried to do that around the mid 1970s, the show fell out of the ratings for the first time.
In the final analysis, of course the show's creator was right and I, the idealistic but inexperienced young Turk, was wrong. Coronation Street is not Salford! It is a fictional place called Weatherfield that took some features from working class Salford as its foundation...
But if Coronation Street is not Salford, then neither is Panorama's documentary a true representation of the city.
We are not so lacking in an identity that we are defined by gangsterism or show business. If anything we are lately defined by civic incompetence that has robbed us of our past, fudged our present and has no plan for our future.
Government, national and local, has taken us from teeming industrial inland seaport, to a few thousand acres of office space for insurance and finance companies, retail parks, warehousing, sink estates and speculative swank apartments. In short, Any Town UK...
On reflection, give us back gangsterism and the soap opera cliches …no, no, only skitting...though is it any wonder we no longer have an idea of Salford's image and place in the world? We have had our buildings knocked down around us, century old communities broken up and dispersed, industries and modes of employment shut down, our heritage overlooked and destroyed.
We can be forgiven for looking back instead of forward and being sentimental about the good old bad old days. At least then there was a solidarity and certainty and inclusion.
Looking into my crystal ball, as the thousands of apartments being built and marketed for anything up to fifty times the median affordability of working people in central Salford, I see a city ever more divided. Economically, professionally, culturally...
...Hmmm, if conflict is the root of all drama then at least there will be a strong future for Coronation Street story lines with gangsters at the heart of them...
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