Too Much of a Good Thing?

I wrote an email to the CBC today, filed under the category of "complaint".  I was reluctant to do so but wanted to voice my opinion on their recent switch to showing five hours a week of Coronation Street episodes, instead of 2.5 hours as they have been doing for the past several years.

At the moment, I am currently at least 12 hours behind on the show (partly because this change happened back on Sept 5th and it wasn't until the following week that I even found about it!) and wondering when I will have the time to catch up, let alone keep up with the weekly quota.  It's especially upsetting because I know something absolutely earth-shattering happened in the middle of this past Sunday's five hour show and I'm dying to get to that place in the storyline as soon as I can, but I also don't want to fast-forward through what I'm seeing now, which involves the death of one of the older characters on the Street and the poignant scenes associated with that as the other characters say their goodbyes. 

I know one of these reasons the network has changed the format is to catch us up to the episodes that are currently being shown in Britain, where Coronation Street is filmed. Canada is currently about 9 months behind, which seems a bit extreme until you realize that New Zealand is even farther behind than us!  But unless I go surfing the Internet to see what's happening in the current storylines, it doesn't matter to me that other people in parts of the globe are already that far ahead of us here in Canada.  And I'd certainly much rather keep watching week by week than do what the CBC did several years ago, when they tried to catch us up by jumping several months worth of episodes completely and simply summarizing what happened in the missing episodes.  They never did show those skipped episodes and as a result, we missed several valuable chapters in the lives of our beloved friends on the Street, including the wedding of one of the major characters, which I have always regretted.

I just can't imagine myself tuning in for a solid hour every day, five days a week or all five hours on Sunday mornings starting at 7 a.m.  I know lots of people do this on a regular basis, that's normal volume for a daily soap opera but it seems too much to me and I wanted to let the people making programming decisions at the CBC know that I, for one, don't want that much Corrie, no matter how much I love the show.

And I do love it. I've been watching faithfully for at least 30 years now, believe it or not. (I'm not the only one watching, the show has been on the air longer than I've been alive, since 1960 to be exact!) These characters are a part of my life, I just don't want to be compelled to spend that much time with them every...single...day. 

Yes, I could stop watching altogether.  Or I could just catch parts of episodes here and there, an hour or two at a time when it suits my schedule, but that would make all the story lines seem quite disjointed.  So my only option is to hope the CBC will see sense and return to two and a half hours a week.  Pleeeeeze!!