What I've learned from Coronation Street

It's 1977. For a four-year-old I'm up way past bedtime. But I've sussed that if I lurk quietly, nestled under my mother's armpit feigning the need of a bedtime hug, I get to watch a grownups' show about a girl called Gail.

Gail Potter works in a corner shop. She has the most exciting life ever. She wears tight-bummed, flared-leg denims. She tongs her long pretty hair into Farrah Fawcett curls and snogs dishy hunks like Brian Tilsley. Brian is a bit of a wrong 'un, I fear, but I can't quite work out why. My mother wishes I'd just go to bed. Gail and her best mate, Tricia, go to a pub called The Rovers Return and get tipsy on fizzy booze. The pub has an uppity puffadder of a landlady called Annie who hates young people like Gail. Annie also hates common types, drunkards, loud laughing and people who don't bring back the darts. "Why does she work in a pub if she doesn't like being in a pub, mam?" I ask. She can't give me a simple answer. Gail and Tricia giggle about "ending up in the pudding club", getting felt up by randy married men, and who is so-and so's "real dad". This Coronation Street programme is brilliant. I'm already completely hooked.

Back then, Corrie was a slightly more glamorous version of a world I already knew. Life but much better. A terraced street of quarrelsome women like Elsie, Bet, Annie, Hilda, and subdued fellas such as Stan, Albert, Eddie and Ken, heavily reminicent of 70s Carlisle where all inter-mam disputes were negotiated publicly, at great volume, fingers wagging, wrestling two Presto carrier bags, while dads sat indoors in favourite chairs saying barely 17 words from one year to the next, except to ask for ketchup. Corrie was exciting, ever-moving, never-ending. We'd play, my friends and I, in the street after school, chucking a manky tennis ball at the side of pebble-dashed terraced houses or other such high-excitement leisure pursuits, dispersing promptly as the wail of the brass cornet Corrie theme tune blared out of living room windows. We needed to know if Hilda's flying ducks had been spared in the flood or if Bet's new boyfriend, like all those before, would turn out to be a bed-her-then-run shyster. We wanted to see if Rita Fairclough's new trial-run paperboy got the job or if Eddie Yeats's latest get-rich plan had came to fruition.

Back in the 80s, smouldering Corrie stalwart Elsie Tanner fascinated me. I loved this glamorous yet decidely anvil-faced woman and her wardrobe brimming with pencil skirts, pussy-bow blouses, high heels and seamed stockings. I loved how Elsie would stand at the parlour mirror, backcombing her hair before smoothing the top layer over into a voluminous bouffant. Elsie's hair was like her life: a tangle beneath the surface, but the parts that showed were glossy, immovable. Elsie Tanner didn't have a penny piece yet she worked hard at channelling a Hollywood goddess. Or a Holyhead goddess anyway. Whatever grimness life served up, Elsie did her weeping in private, wailing kohl rivers down her cheeks, before standing back up, picking the best of the dog hairs off her coat, giving her frock a "French wash" (spray with Tweed by Lentheric) and getting out the door. A finer life survival lesson was never taught at school. I'm unsure what came first: Elsie Tanner or the way a lot of British women function like her.

In 1981, Elsie took in a lodger, Wally Randle, and fell madly in love with him. Wally, however, saw Elsie as just a friend. Heartbroken, Elsie went out boozing and brought home slimy Bill Fielding, whom she wasn't aware was married. "Maaam, why is that man going to sleep at Elsie's house?" I asked. "Erm, he has sore legs and it's too far from his own house to walk home," I was told. Sadly, Bill's excuse to his own wife for bedding Elsie was even less deft. Bill's furious missus broke in and ripped and slashed Elsie's wardrobe into silky slivers. It broke my heart. For Elsie, this was like sending Superman a kryptonite-flavoured muffin basket. Elsie made these mistakes so a generation of women didn't have to. Always double check men aren't married and prepare for your enemies to fight dirtily, I learned at an early age. I didn't get my hands on much Shakespeare until I went to university, but thankfully Corrie had plenty of worldly truths. I remember vividly Deirdre Langton's husband, Ray, doing a moonlight flit on a coach at Manchester bus station, leaving Deirdre alone with monstrous child Tracy. Can dads just leave? That's not in the rules, is it? Surely they have to come back? According to Corrie, apparently not.

Later, Deirdre remarried Ken Barlow and began a steamy, passionate affair with local spiv-type Mike Baldwin. Younger readers may need to relax their brains somewhat to believe Deirdre, Ken and Mike Baldwin were ever in a ratings-smashing sordid love triangle, but believe me, it did happen. The fallout of an affair, I learned, was horribly bleak. The image of the trio fighting in the Barlows' hallway is burned on my brain. If only it'd had this effect on Deirdre. She popped to Dev's shop for grocery supplies on Christmas Day 2001, returning home sheepishly after a chancing upon a rather unorthodox type of "stuffing". Deirdre never learns anything. A good rule of thumb in life is to think, "What would Deirdre Barlow do?" then act utterly to the contrary.

I love Corrie's interpretation of marriage. Corrie loves a big wedding-day drama, like all soaps do, but where it excels is in documenting the long arduous ever-after. Couples such as Stan and Hilda Ogden and Jack and Vera Duckworth skilfully and comically portray marriage as a life-sentence with debatable benefits. "The Duckeggs", AKA Jack and Vera, loved to hate each other. Jack lived in fear of Vera sexually. He kept pigeons for the luxurious peace he found within a bird poo-splattered shed; his biggest happiness was a solitary pint and Vera disappearing down the bingo. She hated his laziness, his lack of support, his wandering eye and his gambling. When Vera died Jack was shattered as, in truth, she'd been his world for decades. When Jack died, Vera came back from the other side to fetch him. Not just a life sentence, a sentence in death too.

Corrie shows men and women as totally incompatible yet perilously entranced by each other. Steve McDonald's constant stream of warlike, belligerent or plainly demented wives and girlfriends. Norris Cole and ex-wife Angela. Liz McDonald's daily toil with passionate yet booze-sodden Jim. Corrie has the gift of time to display quietly and slowly, year upon year, how love pans out. Hilda married Stan Ogden in a hurry six days after she tripped over him in a wartime blackout, the joke for writers being he had the next 40 years of daylight to rue his mistake. When Stan died of gangrene in the 80s, Hilda brought home his belongings in a small package. Hilda unwrapped his spectacles box, sat alone at their little dining table, then put her head down and sobbed. The screen faded to black, ending in silence, no titles and a lot of viewers like me offering to make the post-Corrie cuppa and snivelling by themselves in the kitchen. Crying at the TV wasn't done back then. You only cried at Lassie Come Home, but then no one of any moral decency can stay dry-eyed at a lost dog.

Of course, over the decades many intelligent people have sniggered down their sleeves at me for watching Corrie. There are shameful snobs everywhere, quite happy to pontificate on what "honest working families" should be doing, saying and spending, while at the same time retching at the idea of consuming the same TV as the vile creatures. The plain truth is that Corrie residents – the Websters, the Barlows, the Windasses, the McDonalds etc – are at least a semi-accurate snapshot of the British working classes and the issues that affect them. These are families never more than two missing pay-packets away from poverty and homelessness. University isn't a natural route for them and will be even less viable from now on. They are factory workers (Fiz, Sean, Janice) and army recruits (Gary Windass). They work in Roy's Rolls and The Kabin newsagents. The social services often descend to sort out their child welfare problems. Corrie residents love the idea of social mobility and bettering themselves; they try to start businesses and buy bigger houses, but without inheritances, trust funds, family connections or good education, their plans typically lead nowhere.

If you're a politician or someone simply interested in Britain today, how can this not be of use to you? You certainly won't find any solutions to "broken Britain" standing in front of an Aga snoozing through The Archers. Corrie detractors make me furious but, like Elsie Tanner, I simply paint on good lipstick and never let it show on my face.

And if you're just tuning in now for the 50-year anniversary, well, I won't lie, you've missed a lifetime of brilliant telly. You missed it when Jack and Vera attemped to swap social gears to upper working class by stone-cladding their house in attractive blue and gold stones and renaming it The Old Rectory. You missed when Dev from the corner shop dated Maya the solicitor, who had jealousy issues that led to her burning all five of his shops down. You were possibly watching University Challenge on BBC2 when Todd Grimshaw came out as gay and made a pass at Nick Tilsley. You missed out on Richard Hillman and his slow-burning path of evil, the multiple murders, convincing Audrey she had Alzheimer's disease, driving a people carrier holding Gail and her kids into the canal while playing the Wannadies' You and Me Song at full volume. You skipped Alec and Bet running the Rovers, Curly managing Freshco, Graeme Proctor as garden doctor and endless hilarious scenes in the minicab office between Eileen, Steve and Lloyd. Too late now. Don't miss the next half century.

I don't watch Corrie in the same way these days. I rarely catch the early-evening ITV show, or get to watch with my mother. I watch it on a laptop on ITV Player, in the middle of the day on Sky+, or on ITV2+1 after midnight when I get home from a bar. Gail Potter is still there: she doesn't wear the flared denims any more and things never really improved manwise after Brian Tilsley. Gail's mother, Audrey, is still around sticking her oar in, which, I often remind the TV loudly, is bloody ironic after her neglect of Gail in favour of good times in the 70s. (Yes, I do know they're not real people.)

I called my own mother 400 miles away this morning and we talked about Carla Connor's drinking, how we both hate the John Stape storyline, about Sian and Sophie "the Corrie lesbians" and whether Sophie's mother, Sally, is handling things well. My mother tells me my three-year-old niece has started watching Coronation Street. "She's too young to understand it, but she likes to sit having a cuddle before bed." The child isn't daft. She's learned that if you stay very quiet and let the grownups forget you're on the sofa, you're suddenly in another world completely. You're watching the greatest TV show on the planet.

Catch up on 50 years of Corrie disasters – including the tragic death of Barney the bunny – in the Guide this Saturday

Coronation Street's 50th anniversary week starts on Monday on ITV1