This will not be your granny's post. You know her complaint: she enjoys watching soap operas, and she cannot endure it when they are pre-empted. I am not your granny, but I do share her concern. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's wall-to-wall-to-wall-to-wall coverage of our eighth consecutive eighth place finish in some Olympic sport none of the rest of us has ever played or before watched has smothered, once again, airings of Coronation Street, something many of us do watch faithfully. Is this any way to treat your loyal viewers?
It is not bad enough that episodes do not screen here for more than six months after they are first shown in England? It is not bad enough that nightly episodes of the program never see the light of day during the hockey playoffs so that fans have, for months on end, to watch them all at once in a Sunday omnibus? While the Olympics dominate CBC programming, Coronation Street is not shown at all.
There was a time when the program was aired on weekday afternoons, and I can only assume that its shuffle to prime time was an acknowledgment by CBC brass that Coronation Street pulls in viewers. Why, then, does the network - a network, after all, that exhibits all kinds of strange behavior to attract viewers, including wedging in sports programming we have all watched already on American HD channels - go out of its way to ostracize some of its most loyal viewers? I must conclude that it is because they can. Pure and simple.
If Coronation Street was aired in the middle of the night, they know we would watch it then. They have absolutely no fear that, if ill-treated, we will go elsewhere. There is nowhere else to go because we have to have our Corrie. Well, CBC, let me tell you: there is something very sick about abusing your power in a relationship in this way. If there was any way that I could go without, I would. I have tried everything. I have tried to follow screen captures and read summaries on the internet. This will not do. Oh, CBC I wish I could quit you. I cannot.
Why can you not preempt What's For Dinner? How about Steven and Chris? Does anyone watch that, anyway? Oh, I have an idea. How about showing us an occasional Corrie rather than air yet another repeat of one of the thirty or forty episodes of Arrested Development ever filmed?
Sure, I am bitter. But I will be watching, like the passive partner I am, the eastern feed of the CBC on August 25 to see, at the very first moment possible, if Violet takes Jaime back, even though he once left her for his own step-mother. I am no less the doormat than is she.
