Why isn’t there a Jewish family living on Coronation Street? - The Jewish Chronicle

I am writing this from the cobbles of Coronation Street after a four-month absence. It is so nice to be back and receive all the congratulations on the wedding they all seem to think I have had. There is lots of green room gossip – about who is leaving, who’s arriving, who’s split up – on screen or in real life – who had or hasn’t had Botox or started Ozempic, or is going to be poisoned or blown up – you know, every day stories of simple folk.

Barbara Knox, Rita, at 91, line perfect but more fragile than when I last saw her; Bill Roache at 93 never to be found sitting down, even at meal times. The hugs, the kisses from Leon in the canteen, Kath on reception and Sheila in make-up. I glow with the pleasure of being missed even though I know, with absolute certainty, that the show is bigger than anyone who may or not be in it. One of the beautiful black actors from the Bailey family, Ryan Russell, is especially happy to see me and as we discuss his sister’s storyline I start to ponder whether any of the four main existing soaps has ever housed a Jewish family. A brief appearance in EastEnders perhaps, but generally, in the eyes of the storyliners, too middle-class I expect. Who would believe that Jews could be working-class or even poor?

My late husband Jack’s father, Sam, still suffering from being gassed in the First World War, was a “shmeerer” in a Mackintosh factory. That entailed plunging your hand into a bucket of glue and literally smearing the seams of the coat for someone further down the line to stick to the next seam. His mother was a dressmaker and alteration “hand”. Many was the week when Sam was paying off a “dead horse’ – last week’s wage advance, in order to keep the family in bread and occasionally, butter.

Jack was the first member of his family to go to university, although three brilliant cousins – Geoffrey, Neville and Alex – became a nephrologist, a psychiatrist and a Jerusalem Post journalist respectively. Apparently these three Berlyne boys would draw sophisticated architectural cities all over their mother’s fancy tablecloths. She indulged their brilliance and the twin tub took care of the pencil work.

One generation on and Sam’s grandson was doing classics at King’s College, Cambridge and now his offspring are getting 100 per cent in school exams. We assimilate quietly or punch above our weight in the arts, in scientific discovery, in medicine or politics; we survive like most immigrant populations, we give back and prosper, but always on the whim of our benign or crazed hosts.

I cringe at the behaviour and childish vocabulary of the leader of the free world as he brags, reviles his predecessors, batters the English language (referring to the Japanese enemy in the First World War) and attempts to demean Keir Starmer and Mark Carney with preposterous U-turns, lack of diplomacy, and ludicrously false claims. And then he bucks his trend by giving Israel his backing, engaging against Iran, calling out extreme wokeism or Harvard antisemitism. Once again, I am forced to close my lips and fly his feckless flag.

Because Israel hatred is a kind of wokeism. It is both fashionable and simplistic and utterly dependent on committed and ingrained activism. It’s a huge umbrella of certainty with more holes than fabric. It sweeps across countries, as if it were a new hatred, not the oldest one, and takes in every indigenous Jew with it, as though, because we share a faith, we are personally responsible for the actions of a country thousands of miles away.

The same hard-left argument, of course, merges into right- wing hatred of immigrants, which will deliver Reform into seats at Westminster. Its leader, Nigel Farage, had a great-great-grandfather born in Frankfurt, who moved, with no qualifications, to England in 1850. And would, under his great-great-grandson’s aegis, probably have been kept out or even deported. Cue the distorting sound of drawbridges being drawn up. As if we weren’t all immigrants? As if Donald Trump’s family were not immigrants and so were the families of Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, David Lammy, the House of Windsor and Freddie Mercury and Joyce Grenfell, whom I played on stage for some years.

“You keep your hands off our Joyce,” wrote some ignorant bigot to me, at the time, “she was English.” So I added to the opening of my show, Re-Joyce, to take care of the naysayers: “I realise Joyce was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and certainly not one with any chicken soup in it.”

Somewhere, though, in the suburbs of Kingston-Upon-Hull, this teenage girl understood instinctively Joyce’s objectivity and became her tribute act. As it happened, Joyce was three-quarters American. Her mother was from Virginia, her father was of American stock and they were well connected but not wealthy. Joyce gave the audience an objective, retro taste to the English, of the English at its most aristocratic and eccentric.

Over the weekend I gave the audience a taste of original Grenfell at a Music Hall appreciation day by the sea in Eastbourne. Same laughs 40 years on, she never dates. I told them about my rendition of the famous nursery school sketch: “George, don’t do that”, to a school in Barnet, and the subsequent letter I received from the headmaster, which said; “One of the girls laughed so much, she wet herself – and that was the geography teacher!”

It was a Jewish immigrant from Austria, who was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, the beautiful film star Hedy Lamarr, who had an IQ of 140 – genius level – who invented the concept of “frequency hopping’’ and shared it with the US Navy during the Second World War. Her innovation enabled wireless communication technology, which has paved the way for wi-fi, GPS and Bluetooth. She famously said: “Any girl can be glamorous… All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” She was, incidentally, never paid for her invention.

By the by, if you can catch James Graham’s play Dear England, which I saw this week in Manchester, just get there. Whether or not you understand or care about the offside rule it doesn’t matter. It is about blending a tribe out of disparate strands of men. How, by using kindness and loyalty and empathy, you can beat your demons and win. If the incredibly gifted director Rupert Goold reads the JC (why would he not?) I would just like to say; “Giz a job!”

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