The Curse of the Crying Boy painting.

hmmm i dont recall rita and len having kids. Jenny Bradley as rita's stepdaughter is all i remember and she had red hair

Jack and Vera had this on their wall.

http://www.artnet.com/WebServices/images/ll00232lldu74GFgPEyO3CfDrCWvaHBOcOJ5D/francisco-rodr%C3%ADguez-clement-the-red-skirt.jpg

Big Tindersticks fans, were they?

Remember this one? All over the internet in the early 2000s, people were coming out with all kinds of bizarre claims about it. It is pretty creepy, to be fair.

https://orion-uploads.openroadmedia.com/lg_6ee8e8-HauntedPaintings_TheHandsResistHim.jpg

On the subject of the Crying Boy paintings, I do recall hearing a Radio 4 documentary about the phenomenon some time back which I think basically concluded The Sun had made the whole thing up, based on a couple of house fires where by sheer coincidence, copies of that painting had been present. I remember the loathsome Kelvin MacKenzie having a good chuckle about it.

http://coronationstreet.wikia.com/wiki/Len_Fairclough

he had a son from his 1st marriage!

xp

yeah the article i posted says that

In the 1980s Rita and Len became foster parents; Rita continued to foster children after Len's death. When she was asked to look after Jenny Bradley in 1986, Rita met Jenny's dad Alan and began a relationship with him that nearly cost Rita her life. In 1989 thuggish Alan secretly remortgaged Rita's house to raise money for a business and assaulted Rita when she found out and confronted him. Alan met his end in Blackpool when he was hit by a tram while chasing Rita.

Maybe one of the foster kids, Mark?

I remember the blackpool tram stuff. Brilliant episodes. A real high point for Corrie

Maybe the Tindersticks were big Jack and Vera fans.

Mark could it have been her? Only other one I remember

http://coronationstreet.wikia.com/wiki/Sharon_Gaskell

We never had anything like the Crying Boy in our house, my dad was too pretentious for that. We had a painting by someone called Jacques Voyet, who I've only just googled, on our living room wall - it's still there, in fact - though I can't find an image of the painting in question. Also, Renoir's "La Loge", which my mum was particularly fond of, and, googling frantically, "Langlois Bridge at Arles" by van Gogh, which is also still there. My mum took up painting for a while and, with typical modesty, took to hanging her own work occasionally. In fact I've got one of my mum's paintings in this room with me!

but do you remember seeing it in other peoples houses?

My dad's auntie had a lot of stuff like that, but then most of the stuff in her house was stolen - allegedly.

might be yes: here she is with len and rita and black hair
http://i1.liverpoolecho.co.uk/incoming/article8991437.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/CD1301828.jpg

not finding any confirmation that she listened to joy div tho

and if you google coronation street goth I'm sure all the hits would be about rosie webster

My auntie had the pair, I think. She had loads of ornaments that I found vulgar, even then, and flock wallpaper and patterned carpets. She had this one path ular thing which was a sculpture like the Venus de Milo that was about 12" high and it had a glass canopy over it and between the base and the canopy there were threads, like fishing wire and water ran down the wires because the thing was actually an indoor water feature.

Path ular = particular.

Then there was Spider, who was a sort of crusty and toyed with Toyah Battersby's affections. (xxp)

She was the only one I could remember because she re-appeared in the late 80s and she owned the kabin and fell out with rita (it was talking about suzie Birchall being in it a few times made me think of her)

Her husband was Uncle Rab and he used to shout all the time, not in rage just everything he said was shouted. He had the oiley teddy-boy hairstyle which was dyed black, now that I think about it. The whole experience of going to their house was frightening.

there was a fancy lamp shop at the bottom of mardol* which sold those exact same indoor-water-feature lamps -- they were very plasticky and the droplets of water looked like more like oil** (or even glue), at least when you peered through the window

*in shrewsbury again obviously, it was a mecca for combination fancy yet vulgar tat
**maybe it was an indoor hair oil feature

I remember in George & Mildred they had a lava lamp thing that the rich brother in law hated. I seem to recall a fair few people had similar lamps at the time (nobody in our family though)

Stirmonster will be able to confirm if she was the joy division character btw. He's a corrie expert

I'll alert him:)

Already did :)

if anyone is gonna remember a joy division tshirt on corrie it's him!

actually maybe i thought it was oil because of lava lamps (which i think wildings mentioned above sold for a while) and i kind of imagined the venus de milo thing was a sort of victorian attempt at a lava lamp: the fancy lamp shop was much too up itself to sell lava lamps (but that's mardol for you, so up itself)

it wasn't a T-shirt! it was either listening on the radio, or just mentioning them as music better than someone else was listening to (it was a very brief mention! but it resonated and may even have been discussed in NME)

(which at some point did a big feature -- by ian penman -- on corrie, i should look that out also)

(xp) He will surely remember Emily Bishop having a blow on Spider's didgeridoo then...

https://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/coronationstreet/images/c/c1/Episode_4330.jpg

Mark it probably was oil because the drops fell slowly.

So lava lamps were quite a thing in the 70s then? Another thing I remember in houses (especially in my grans) were ornaments brought home from Holidays in Spain etc. She even had a windmill that you plugged in and it moved and played a tune. i loved that actually.

Other things were just wee ornaments with Ibiza or Lloret De Mar on it.

Other houses had fans. Not the electric kind. I think my gran may have had one that my cousins got her now I think of it

lol Tom. My mum mentioned the other day that Emily Bishop was supposedly visiting Spider and wasnt in corrie anymore. They should bring him back!

Oh they had a plastic Spanish dancer in a red dress with black lace ove the red and a comb thing in the nylon hair with a lace veil thing.

Thread is triggering me.

lava lamps were more like late 60s i think -- we had a little cheapie one which was blue wax in water rather than red or yellow benzene

oh i remember those too jed!! My gran didnt have one of those.

She did have these weird toilet roll dolls that mightve looked like that. Noone liked it and she chucked it in the coal fire!

We still use toilet roll dolls though haha

sharon gaskell wasn't the joy div fan. i know because i had a massive crush on her so would recall that extra bonus feature. i can totally remember the character being referred to who did listen to joy div but it is eluding me at the moment. i think my brain might be over saturated with corrie trivia and there is no brain power left to process it all. joy division have also had their music played on corrie many times. my fave was "decades" being "on the radio" in the kabin.

so much shit was brought back from continental holidays by so many brits lol

"Then there was Spider, who was a sort of crusty and toyed with Toyah Battersby's affections. (xxp)"

Just thought it would interest you that Spider actor Martin Hancock also played Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois in a pretty decent BBC French Revolution drama - Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution.

Ooooh, terrible man Collot d'Herbois, terrible man. Spider, on the other hand, was very nice.

This is a different picture to what we all had and was in The Sun. but bizarrely is seen as cursed for the same reason in europe as was mentioned by daniel upthread

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_Boy

I cant find a pic of the crying girl painting that we had with the one of the boy

it's not allowed on the internet as long as you can find the crying boy because of the curse

also: i'm going to bed now, perchance to dream of moons and saddam and oil features in corrie

Funnily enough my other 'alf covered the crying boy thing on his crime podcast Bloody Murder recently. Or at least I thought he had, maybe he was just talking about doing so.

Maybe stirmonster will remember by morning :)

xp

i already know i am going to be kept awake thinking about it.

in the meantime...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIj2Lpb4X0E

hahaha wtf!!

I mean it's not really

presuming that there's minimum a few dozen thousand prints of whatever counts as that generations livingroom decor in circulation

great form to make a big deal out of whatever human tragedies you can find in that most bella/NOW magazine humantragedyprone of large demographic subsets but hey misery/tabloids/ppl whatyagonnado

obviously i now have "jilted john" stuck in my head

I recall my Grandparents had the crying boy painting in their house in Renfrew Rd, Paisley when I was a nipper, also a crying clown portrait too, which wasn't scary.

My parents had a framed Vernon Ward print of geese flying - just went to look for that particular painting, and of course there are LOADS of Vernon Ward pictures of geese flying.

One of my dad's relations had the charging elephants picture over her fireplace, and a painting of JFK JR saluting his father's coffin. Perhaps the ultimate crying boy picture, even though he's not crying in it.

My other grandparents had Sacred Heart pictures (some with lamps in them) and plates of famous Renaissance shepherds and whatnot. The first time I went to the Louvre, there were so many pictures there I'd only ever seen in plate form.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Q2uxR1n7Eps/hqdefault.jpg

https://dgeiu3fz282x5.cloudfront.net/g/l/lgPP32602.jpg

it was albert tatlock.

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