Over morning coffee last week, Matt and I found ourselves discussing childhood memories of EastEnders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale – the vaguely forbidden adult backdrop to our everyday 80s lives. Matt, it turns out, wasn’t allowed to watch EastEnders, but Emmerdale was ok. My brothers and I weren’t allowed to watch any of them. Even Grange Hill was off-limits as teenagers, never mind that it was designed for our exact age range. All that insolent drama was considered a Very Bad Influence.
Which is ironic, given the Oscar-worthy episodes that played out at home. Particularly since the most reliable barometer that real drama was afoot was when EastEnders came on the telly but Mum didn’t immediately switch it off – ergo, the fungal spores of a home-grown drama were about to explode.
But it did make me wonder: why do we like the stuff so much? I remember holidaying in the Canaries once and hearing the dulcet tones of the Coronation Street theme tune wafting from an upstairs beach apartment. It made me laugh that, wherever we go, we often take our dramas with us – literally and figuratively.
Of course, our appetite for drama long predates television. From myths and fairy tales to folklore and legends, humans have always told stories of peril, conflict, adventure and meaningful resolution.
And then there’s our own lives. We are story-led beings, forever connecting dots and casting characters. When something happens, we craft stories to make sense of it. When we feel hurt, our minds head straight for the director’s chair, casting a victim, a perpetrator and perhaps a passing saviour.
Mine’s often cast me in the leading role of a tragedy or a hero’s tale, back when I wore my dramas like prestigious medals. Yes, I’ve done my fair share of wallowing in fuss, gossip, tiffs, squabbles and argy-bargy, stubbornly submerged in my drama-filled pool like a water buffalo in its waterhole.
I often hear it in the gym changing rooms: ‘Did I tell you what Cheryl said to me the other day? The cheek of it! Well, she said that I said that he said that they said… and I was absolutely FUMING.’ And the other person invariably plays along with their assigned pantomime role: ‘No! That’s awful, you poor thing! How could she?’ Cheryl is Villain No. 1, our narrator is the Wronged Heroine, and the gym changing room has become the West End.
(No sexism intended; I just can’t easily access the male changing rooms.)
So what is it about these endlessly ravelling and unravelling human narratives that compels us so profoundly?
I think it’s because stories have their own alchemy. Something happens to an experience when we turn it into a story. Stories can help us connect, share emotions and transmit ideas. We’ve used them across generations to distil experience into wisdom, warnings, morals and meaning.
But sometimes our storytelling is less ancient elixir and more George’s Marvellous Medicine: we keep stirring in ingredients until the thing grows so enormous its head bursts through the farmhouse roof.
The danger isn’t that our story is necessarily untrue, but that every telling can quietly alter its properties and proportions, like re-heating stew. What matters most is the meaning we attach to it, not the event itself. A hurt becomes an identity. A disagreement becomes a betrayal. The driver who cuts us up on the motorway becomes a murderous meathead, though for all we know they’re rushing a loved one to hospital. And the more often one tells a story, the more solid its casting becomes.
I know this because I’ve done it. In ‘Ducking Beneath the Sellotape’, I confessed to trying to recruit a comrade-in-arms who would second my casting and share in my outrage.
I’m slowly learning – with enough false starts and plot twists to make EastEnders proud – to take care with the stories I tell, both to myself and other people. Not to stop telling them, or to deny the difficult parts, but to notice what each telling grows.
Am I making something clearer, or merely making it bigger?
Not so I can live happily ever after, by the way – that’s another story altogether – but so I can tell mine with more conscious care.
The Beginning.
