On Corrie, true crime, and how on-demand media creates warped desires that it can’t sate.

We’ve started watching Corrie. My partner and I both work from home, so most days at 1pm we log off, grab some lunch, and sit down in front of the TV. We used to half-heartedly flick through whatever the YouTube algorithm served up, but lunch breaks are finite and it seems to be increasingly difficult to find something base-line tolerable amongst all the rubbish. So we’ve been looking for a long-running, low-effort show that we can reliably turn to. Not mindless trash, but legitimate comfort food. A bowl of satisfying mashed potato, instead of the audio visual equivalent of instant forget-or-regret McDonalds fries.

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We had a great few months with Rough Science, an Open University edutainment programme from the early 2000s. They drop a group of scientists in a remote location and give them tasks to complete using nature’s lab equipment. It’s scrappy and wholesome and has a faint but undeniable undercurrent of sexual tension between almost all of the contestants, who I guess didn’t have much to keep them entertained outside of filming hours. We were bereft after the final episode, but eventually realised there’s one very reliable show that’s been airing multiple times a week since before any of our parents were born. Coronation Street.

The best Rough Scientists and host Kate Humble, on a boat. Mike B’s shorts are so tiny that he’s had to cover his crotch with his fist.

We’ve only been watching for a couple of weeks - half an episode at a time - but I completely see the appeal. For most of my life, media has been like a tap that you turn on and off. YouTube launched when I was 15, and Netflix took off a few years later. But the Rover’s Return and Roy’s Rolls persist irrespective of me and my whims. Corrie feels permanent. Familiar. It’s cosy.

It’s also surprisingly - at least to me (a person who hasn’t watched broadcast TV regularly since 2008) - experimental. A recent ep traced a coercive relationship as it turned violent over the course of one in-universe week, and showed this exclusively through security footage: a two-way doorbell camera, nanny-style cams hidden in picture frames, dashcam footage, shop and hospital CCTV, and police bodycams.

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The bodycam footage allows the audience to see events through the eyes of the police officers. We see the first impressions the couple make, infer what the police officers might be thinking, and - naturally - compare this to what we already know about the relationship from other episodes. We see the aggressor who has been tracking, berating, and controlling his partner in multiple ways calmly buddying up to the cops, laying the foundations for his defence. And we see his partner shocked, panicked, inarticulate, being read as suspicious.

I’m embarrassed to admit the reason that this struck me so vividly... It reminded me of a real life, seemingly coercive, relationship. One I have no connection to, but know far too much about. I’m only aware of it because one of the couple was a wannabe van-life influencer who went missing on her travels, and was later found dead. Her story was picked up by online ‘true crime’ fans, hyper-excitable after a second summer cooped up in 2021’s lockdown conditions.

The police released bodycam footage from before she went missing, and it went viral (whatever that means these days). The couple were stopped after someone reported seeing him slap and hit her, and try to leave her on the side of the road without her phone. Because she was hysterical and had hit him back, and because he was calm, they wrote up that he was the victim of domestic violence. A few days later she was dead.

I’m embarrassed to make this connection because true crime as a… I don’t want to say ‘genre’… a phenomenon? Is controversial. It turns genuine cruelty and tragedy into entertainment, doesn't typically seek consent from victims’ families, and its relationship with policing is rarely critical and never on a consistently structural level. And I fear that admitting to recognising real life bodycam footage of a now-dead couple as a possible influence on a Coronation Street plotline will put me into a box in your mind. A dusty, opaque one with a tight lid. I fear that I’ll have to put myself in that box.

At this point I feel the need to clarify that I’m not a true crime consumer. Not really. I don’t watch it. I’ve seen it. …I stumble across it from time to time. Occasionally I dip my toe in, curious - not about the content, but about how the people making their careers from this are navigating the ethics of it.

Some of them raise money for victims families (alongside flogging branded t-shirts and weed gummies). Others restrict themselves to only covering ‘cold cases’, in the hope that their video might make a positive difference by helping to surface new evidence. Still others seem unconcerned with the ethics at all, dispassionately reading out gruesome details as they demonstrate make-up techniques, or even hosting Tiktok livestreams where they seek out and rile up suspects in active investigations.

So, you see, I’m not like other true crime viewers. If I do watch it, I watch it critically. I’m holding a notebook and peering through a monocle and wrinkling my nose. I’m very sophisticated and above judgement, actually.

Me contemplating true crime, gracefully and unimpeachably. (A stock image of a well-dressed white white woman with grey hair staring into the middle distance and chewing on the arms of her glasses)

But despite this fear of judgement, and my need to distance myself from the average true crime viewer, I’m sympathetic to them. I don’t think they woke up one day and said ‘I feel like watching a 45-minute breakdown of a brutal murder’. Most are uncomfortably aware that it’s at least interesting that they find this material fascinating, even soothing. And I’m pretty sure they fell into it in more or less the same way that I did. Nudged gently by an algorithm away from a comparatively normal - if idiosyncratic - search, gradually towards, and deeper into, something they hadn’t even realised existed.

My route in was via ‘unsolved mysteries’. I’ve always enjoyed fictional locked-room detective stories. Situations that seem impossible (there’s no way a killer could get in or out of this sealed underground bunker!) and yet must have an explanation because they happened (there’s a body with a bullet in it here, and the victim was physically incapable of using a gun).