Coronation Street's Stephen is the Mr. Bean of soap killers - and we love him for it
Bumbling Stephen gives us much-needed light relief.
Stephen Reid (Todd Boyce) has stumbled accidentally into murder on Coronation Street and slightly strained villainy — the Mr. Bean of soap killers.
After all, the character had to kill his second victim, Teddy Thompkins (Grant Burgin), when he discovered that Stephen had killed his son Leo (Joe Frost). He had to pick up the nearest heavy object, the office’s hole punch, and fatally strike Teddy. Moments later, he tells an unsuspecting Michael Bailey (Ryan Russell), “I think I’ve done enough punching for today”.
In later scenes, his face turns from pulsating to seemingly slack with shock, his voice ravaged by terror, “come on.” He implored when the roof box containing Teddy’s body floated — until he threw rocks at it, it miraculously lowered as a passerby wished him a good evening.
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Earlier, a neighbourly Abi Webster (Sally Carman) had asked. “Blimey, what have you got in here?”
This is the simple gift of it all; ordinary life continues around him. His storyline and increasing desperation have been woven through the most mundane realities of family life: as David Platt (Jack P Shepherd) fiercely yearned for a wood chippings bargain. Audrey Roberts (Sue Nicholls) drove to visit an old friend as Teddy’s hidden corpse remained — though she grumbled about the weight and her son’s nagging. The family simply sniped and bickered on.
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It’s also woven around Summer Spellman’s (Harriet Bibby) experiences as an anxious teenage girl still coming to terms with her father’s death, her health concerns and other traumatic events — diabetes, bulimia, pregnancy, surrogacy, miscarriage. These essential storylines should be on our screens, in ordinary living rooms, to convey the pressures on today’s young people and to give viewers a prod. However, audiences have often felt pummeled.
Coronation Street has also portrayed some critical issues around Max Turner (Paddy Bever), including raising awareness about the dangers and impact of date rape drugs, up-skirting, and his own vulnerability to alt-right terrorism and propaganda.
But suspending belief — shirking reality a little — is also what Coronation Street viewers need to see.
Few moments can better summarise this storyline’s wild nature than when Stephen finally gets the car back from his mother. It wouldn’t start. His nephew David and policeman Craig Tinker (Colson Smith) assisted him. He winced, ashen, but slowly laughed as he realised he had gotten away with the body in his mother’s roof box as it remained locked, and everyone was unsuspecting — not so much cosy crime as Carry on Corrie.
Few could claim that Craig was the Sherlock to Stephen’s Moriarty.
In fairness, soaps have rarely offered a realistic portrayal of the criminal justice system, police officers or detectives — their prowess with crime detection is hardly equal to Morse or Poirot’s.
No one has even noticed that he’s developed a sickly pallor and an unhinged manner since he whacked Leo’s head off a railing and watched his body fall off the factory gantry and into a bin — Stephen has gotten himself into a right state.
He follows that grand tradition in soap—the unsubtle pantomime villains: the ones who bound onto our screens in a puff of smoke and a black cloak.
The scenario itself is farcical and requires some suspension of reality. Would Jenny Connor (Sally Ann Matthews) not recognise that he always loiters and looms within hearing distance?
Why would a seething Teddy agree to go into the factory alone with Stephen, who he believed had murdered his son? Why would he turn his back on him after the altercation? What about Sarah Barlow (Tina O’Brien) casually mentioning the CCTV in the office with instructions on how to wipe it? Which Stephen hadn’t considered and which otherwise would have wholly incriminated him?
The most absurd part is that Stephen managed to get a grown man’s very dead weight in the roof box and then get it off the roof without assistance when it had taken four adults earlier — and Tim Metcalfe (Joe Duttine) pulled a muscle.
Every character is in on the farce — gritty reality, long-held personalities and common sense set aside for a new no-thoughts-just-vibes approach to life.
The timing also lends itself to farce as Stephen hurries and hustles from one almost-gotcha moment to another. Carla Connor (Alison King) ominously remarks just before one ad break begins, “you were getting rid of the evidence,” and Sarah states before another, “so...tell me everything”.
He doesn’t pull off the heightened evil of the restrained, cooly calculating one-man crime enterprise that was Pat Phelan (Connor McIntyre). Rather, it’s a more spittle-flecked performance. Nor does he have the swagger of Meena Jutla (Paige Sandhu), who strutted her way mercilessly through victims with Britney Spears’ Toxic as her macabre mood music.
Stephen Reid may be the Mr Bean of soap killers — but he should stumble on. Let’s all shirk reality a little.
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