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Coronation Street, created by Tony Warren, is Britain's longest-running television soap opera, set in a fictional street in the fictional industrial town of Weatherfield which is based on Salford, now part of Greater Manchester. It is the central television programme on the ITV network, and is produced by Granada Television. Its principal rival soap opera is the BBC's EastEnders.
Originally broadcast live, it is now pre-recorded, usually four to six weeks in advance of broadcast. Whereas rival British soap operas are known either for their gloom (EastEnders) or their sharp one-liners (Emmerdale), Coronation Street is known on occasions for its humour, though it has tackled some controversial storylines.
The 'Street', 'Corrie' or 'Corro' as it is affectionately known, is based in a row of seven working class houses with a public house and corner shop at either end, built according to the storyline in 1902, and named after that year's big national event, the coronation of King Edward VII, hence Coronation Street. The Street is located between Rosamund Street and Viaduct Street. The architecture of the Street was based on Archie Street, Salford, which also appeared in the programme's original opening credits. The Street itself was originally a set built inside a studio, with the houses reduced in scale. This was awkward for the actors, who had to walk more slowly than normal to appear in scale with the set.
In 1968 Granada decided that the indoor set was just too limiting and unrealistic, and decided to build an outdoor set. This was built on some old railway sidings near the Granada Studios, and co-incided with a storyline of the demolishion of Ellison's Raincoat Factory and the Mission Hall and the subsequent building of maisonettes opposite the terrace. The outdoor set was initially little more than a facade. In the early 1970s roofs and back yards were added, but the set was still quite cramped. This location later became the New York Street at the now-closed Granada Studio Tours complex in the '90s.
In 1982 a modern full size exterior street was built in the Granada backlot; because it was meant to be permanent the houses were constructed from bricks and mortar rather than wood and scaffolding. However, the houses had no interior walls — the chimneys had to be made of fibre-glass, since there would be no support for them otherwise. The majority of interior scenes are still shot in the adjoining purpose-built studio nearby. An additional number of surrounding streets were added in recent years, while a new computer-generated opening credits 'locates' Coronation Street in a large urban landscape surrounded by similar small working class streets. (Previously a montage of similar streets shot in several cities had been used.) While one side of the street consists of the early 20th century houses, the other consists of a factory, a shop, a garage and some late-1980s semi-detached houses.
As befitting the soap opera genre, the Street is made up of individual housing units, plus five communal areas; a newsagents (the Kabin), a small eaterie (Roy's Rolls — owned by Roy Cropper), a general grocery shop (owned by Dev Alahan), a factory ("Underworld" — owned by Mike Baldwin) and its permanent feature, a public house called "The Rover's Return", whose landlord or landlady invariably becomes one of Britain's most famous actors. Many of the Street's most famous stories, including the death of Martha Longhurst (played by Lynne Carol from the show's inception until May 1964), occurred there.
The serial began in 1960 and was not a critical success. It was only expected to run for a few weeks. However it caught the imagination of viewers, not least because of its location in the North of England, which was becoming a highly visible centre of 1960s Britain, from the 'kitchen-sink' dramas of the BBC's The Wednesday Play to the rise of the Beatles, from nearby Liverpool. Like kitchen-sink dramas, it focused on the plight of 'ordinary folk', often making use of Northern English language and dialect. Terms like 'eh, chuck', 'nowt' and others became widely heard.
The storylines focused on the experiences of families, their interreaction and of relationships between people of different ages, classes and social structures. In some ways Coronation Street has charted the changes in public attitudes towards religion, politics, community, family breakdown, the gentrification of working class areas etc. For example, in the first decade one of the central social points on the street was the Glad Tidings Mission Hall, where religious services were held and social contacts, parties, etc took place. By the start of the twenty-first century, no religious 'set' exists, with the only religious resident on the street being the 70 year old widow, Emily Bishop (Eileen Derbyshire). Religion if it features at all, is mentioned in weddings and funerals, though here too, matching contemporary society, registry office weddings and non-religious funerals are increasingly common.
Early storylines revolved around self-appointed moral voice Ena Sharples (played by Violet Carson), and her friends: timid Minnie Caldwell (Margot Bryant) and bespectacled Martha Longhurst. When Martha was killed off the programme, Albert Tatlock was allowed to be the unofficial third friend in the group. Ena and Albert had many differences, which they aired regularly, and Albert and Minnie were supposed to be married in the early 1970s. The marriage was eventually called off.
Headstrong Ena frequently clashed with Elsie Tanner (Patricia Phoenix), whom she believed espoused a rather disgusting set of morals. Elsie believed in the right to let each person live life according to how they see fit, and resented Ena's gossip, which, most of the time, didn't have much of a basis in reality.
Most of the stories in the early days (and, to an extent, still today) addressed how middle-class people made a caste system in their own mini-society and excommunicated others they don't wish to associate with. In reality, many of the people deemed too common (like Elsie Tanner, and Hilda and Stan Ogden, played by Jean Alexander and Bernard Youens) were of the exact same stock as the people who were judging them.
Of the original cast on the show, only one character remains, Ken Barlow, played by William Roache. Barlow entered the storyline as the young radical son of a large family, epitomising the youth of 1960s Britain, where figures like the Beatles, the model Twiggy, the Rolling Stones and The Who were reshaping the concept of youthful rebellion. Though the rest of the family were killed off or moved, Ken Barlow has remained the constant link throughout forty years of Coronation Street. He has been a teacher, a newspaper editor, a community activist and most bizarrely of all a trolley-pusher at a supermarket, before returning to teaching and writing. He has been married three times, widowed once, divorced twice, and had twenty-seven girlfriends, including a character played by the now famous actress Joanna Lumley. He had four children during the street's existence; a daughter (Susan) killed in an accident, a son (Peter) who returned to live on the street (and was once played by the actor's own son) but has since departed again (after bigamously marrying two women), a son who lives with Ken's ex-girlfriend, and his adopted daughter, Tracy (again a street returnee, played by a fourth actress to have the role!), who was his third wife's daughter by her ex-husband, Ray Langton (Neville Buswell).
Barlow's character embodies the clash of perspectives and cultures played out in the soap opera. For decades his arch-foe was Mike Baldwin (Johnny Briggs), a dodgy cockney (i.e., London) businessman, who set up a clothes factory on the street. Baldwin and Barlow epitomised two different types of character. Whereas Barlow was an arts orientated, left of centre community centred man, Baldwin was a cut and thrust money-grubbing right wing businessman, who forever mocked Barlow as a 'waster' who could do 'nothing but talk'. Their lives were complicated in typical soap-opera style by personal links. Barlow's third wife, Deirdre (Anne Kirkbride), had an affair with Baldwin, before going back to Barlow. Baldwin then met and married Barlow's daughter, Susan (by an earlier marriage) before they divorced, after she supposedly had had an abortion. Except that a decade later it turned out that she had not had an abortion but had Baldwin's child. Finally she told her father, who told Deirdre, who told Dev Alahan (Jimmi Harkishin), who told Mike Baldwin, who tried to get access to his son, Adam. In fleeing from him, Susan was killed in a car-crash, leaving Adam's father, Mike Baldwin, and his grandfather, Ken Barlow, fighting over custody. In one of the great soap-opera reconciliations, Balwin and Barlow, having reconciled their differences, are now close friends (as are the actors who play them in real life!), sharing a son/grandson.
Since its launch, Coronation Street has become famous for its humorous storylines. These include the notoriously prissy, reserved and plain Mavis Riley (Thelma Barlow) having not one but two suitors throwing themselves at her, while she in true Mavis-mood cannot make her mind up between them, saying her catchphrase, 'oooh, I don't knooooow'. When she finally decides to pick one, she ends up being named as the 'other woman' in a divorce case! When she and Derek finally agree to marry, both fail to turn up at the church, where hundreds of their friends are waiting. When Derek is offered a company car by his new company, he finds it is a lime green car with the company logo on the side and a large plastic paper clip on top. (The company manufactured stationery.) They fill their garden with kitsch decorations, only to have someone 'kidnap' their garden gnome and send letters demanding payment of a ransom. And then receive photographs of their kidnapped gnome photographed at famous world monuments. Another comic creation, Reg Holdsworth, who is rapidly balding, tries to look more virile by getting an appalling toupeé, which in reality looks like a dead albino hedgehog but which he thinks will 'draw the ladies.'
In 2002, one of the comedy storylines involved an notoriously homophobic loudmouth character, Les Battersby (Bruce Jones), whose wife has left him, taking in a male lodger, only to be informed by the local council (who owns his house) that in taking in a lodger he has broken his tenancy agreement and must move. To hold on, he and his dimwitted teenage lodger decide to pose as a gay couple, or what they imagine a gay couple's home would be, with hilarious results, all the more so when his estranged wife, worried that he might lose his house, returns to pose as his happily married wife. She walks in on a house turned into a shrine to Judy Garland and Liberace, to be asked by the Council official 'was it when your husband 'came out' that the marriage broke up?' She blows her husband's totally unconvincing scam by erupting into laughter. 'Les. Gay? LES? Les is not gay. Les?'.
Another storyline involved efforts by locals to stop Council plans to turn an open space (the 'Red Rec', the red indicating the amount of blood spilt there during a battle in the English Civil War, according to the storyline) into a housing development. The normally reserved Emily Bishop, spurred on by her environmentalist nephew, Spider Nugent (Martin Hancock), ends up staging a sit-in up a tree alongside other youthful environmentalists, aided by local 'conscience' Ken Barlow and local history expert Roy Cropper (David Neilson).
The street has covered a number of storylines that proved to be controversial with many viewers.
The programme moved to modernise its sets in 1986. One way the producers and writers chose to do this was to have the Rovers Return set ablaze. Bet Lynch (Julie Goodyear) was on the upper storey of the pub at the time, and failed to fully execute her escape. Kevin and Sally Webster happened to walk past at the time, noticed the fire, and alerted the neighbours. The fire brigade eventually rescued Bet when Kevin could not, and she recovered from a case of smoke inhalation. Afterwards, she decided to knock the main area, the Select, and the Snug into one bar.
In 1998, the Street introduced the first transsexual person in British soap history. Its handling of the story, and Hayley Patterson (Julie Hesmondhalgh) ultimately 'marrying' bookish nerd Roy Cropper, proved immensely popular, and was praised by transgendered groups, not least in how it highlighted transgender issues, such as how she remained registered for tax purposes as a man called 'Harold', leading to ridicule from her boss, Mike Baldwin.
Curiously, though launched by an openly gay man who still gets listed on the credits, filmed in a city often described as Britain's gay capital, and with a massive gay following, Coronation Street avoided featuring a gay resident, unlike EastEnders which has had a number, and Emmerdale which has a lesbian vet and a number of other gay characters, both male and female. Only recently, in 2003, has the soap featured any kind of homosexual activity.
Also in 1998, Deirdre Rachid was sent to prison after a former lover implicated her in a bank fraud scheme. Public outcry was so big that one big grassroots campaign, with the slogan of "Free the Weatherfield One!", petitioned the Home Secretary to become involved on Deirdre's behalf. As a result, Tony Blair addressed the House of Commons, hoping to free Deirdre. After three weeks, Deirdre was released from prison and four different newspapers claimed victory for themselves and their readers. However, the producers of the programme had planned Deirdre to stay in prison for three weeks the entire time.
In 2002–3, Coronation Street featured a particularly controversial story of a serial killer, Richard Hillman (Brian Capron), who entered the storyline as a relative of the late Alma Baldwin. Initially the character was seen offering financial advice to street residents and buying the house of Emily Bishop, in an arrangement where she would have a right to live in it for her lifetime. He then married twice-divorced Gail Platt (Helen Worth). Over the months, questions were raised about his trustworthiness, with suggestions of some irregularities in his dealings with old people elsewhere. He left a business partner, Duggie Ferguson to die after falling over a balcony. Viewers then witnessed his murder of his second wife (and her burial under concrete at a housing development he owned) while hearing of the strange death of his first wife, from both of whom he had become estranged.
In late 2002, viewers saw him subtly (and with typical Corrie humour) give his wealthy mother-in-law, Audrey Roberts (Sue Nicholls), grounds of questioning whether she was experiencing the onset of dementia, though such things as unlocking doors she had locked, hanging out washing that she (of course) could not remember hanging out, putting on lights she had switched off, leaving a dress in to be dry-cleaned, to her surprise as she could not remember leaving it in. Finally, he tried to kill her in a house fire, made to look like the result of her dementia, with the battery removed from the fire alarm.
In 2003, in severe financial trouble (and failing in his attempt to get his hands on Audrey's considerable wealth) viewers witnessed him try to murder Emily Bishop while all the other Street residents were at a function in the Rovers Return, only to be discovered by the woman she was babysitting for, Maxine Peacock (Tracy Shaw), whom he then brutally murdered, while framing a young man sleeping rough nearby.
The storyline in February 2003 saw a number of normally conspiracy-orientated street residents, urged on by his mother-in-law who survived the fire, suspect him of Maxine's murder, Audrey challenging him at Maxine's funeral. (Audrey realised he had made two slip ups with her; 'knowing' there was no battery in a smoke alarm before the fire brigade had checked it (he had removed it) and leaving in the dress to be cleaned on a day when she had independent witnesses to confirm that she had been with them all day and so could not have brought the dress for dry cleaning! Other largely elderly Street residents had their own suspicions and 'expected' he would do something to Emily (her attack matching their suspicions), while Ken Barlow, having seen the drunken state the 'framed kid' — a former student of his — was, doubted the kid's ability to carry out the crime.) However both Audrey and Ken ended up boycotted by other street regulars, including Richard's wife, Gail (who became estranged from her mother after Audrey blamed him for the fire), Maxine's family and Emily (who survived with no memory of the attack on her) all of whom saw him as a perfect husband, neighbour and friend.
Hillman himself was racked by guilt at his actions, all the more so when it turned out that someone else whose house he owned had died the previous week, meaning that his financial problems were already solved before he tried to murder Emily and murdered Maxine. In a cruel twist of fate, he was only contacted by the daughter of the dead person after he has done his own killing, and is distraught with guilt, all the more so when he is asked out of the blue to do a reading from the bible about judgment day at the funeral service.
One of Coronation Street 's most controversial yet widely watched storylines, played out grippingly yet slowly over two years, produced a storyline which received critical and viewer acclaim produced one of British TV's most shocking, horrifying and moving storylines, tinged with typical Corrie black humour; many of Richard's comments (constantly asking Emily about her health, his 'concern' at Audrey's forgetfulness, etc) having macabre double meanings which the viewer got but which the characters, oblivious to his true nature and plans, don't grasp. Such was the strength of the storyline than the actor playing Hillman had his contract extended, with the original scheduled date for his exposure (Christmas 2002) being put back February 2003, when his trusting wife, Gail, finally twigged and challenged him, leading to his full and frank admission, he believing that she would stand by him and not reveal his sordid and brutal actions. She however refused to protect him. Pursued by the police, who eventually found the remains of his second wife, he returned to kidnap his family and try to gas them in the family car, before on being discovered driving off and crashing the car into a canal. The underwater scenes that followed were staged with the help of stunts people who have worked on James Bond films. It saw the death of Hillman in the car, but the survival of the rest of the family. In the aftermath, Hillman's financial dealings saw his wife and family facing the possible loss of their home, as did Emily Bishop, while the Duckworths lost their entire life savings, reducing them once again to the breadline, allowing the reintroduction of the famed 'Corrie' humour with the street's resident comic/tragic couple, Jack and Vera Duckworth.
Celebrities who began or spent part of their career in Coronation Street include:
Laurence Olivier once offered to take part in a scene on the Street. However health problems denied him the chance to act on his favourite TV programme. Michael Crawford and Robbie Williams have both appeared as extras, drinking in the bar of the Rover's.
In 2000, the show celebrated its fortieth year by broadcasting a live thirty-minute show, its first live broadcast in decades. Guest of honour in the show was His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, heir-apparent to the British Throne, who featured in a pre-recorded segment, a 'news bulletin report' of his being welcomed to Weatherfield by then mayor Audrey Roberts, which was being shown on the TV in the Rovers Return at one point on the evening. (His mother, Her Majesty The Queen, has visited the Coronation Street 'set' and met with the cast on a number of occasions, even taking a drink with the cast in the Rovers Return.)
Norman Wisdom made a guest appearance in 2004 as fitness fanatic Ernie Crabbe, who helped Jack Duckworth with his exercise regime.
The programme is now aired four evenings a week on British television, on Mondays (sometimes twice), Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. EastEnders is broadcast three times a week on the BBC; the two programs were scheduled opposite each other in 1994, Corrie had millions more tuning in as the writers revealed that Emily Bishop's wedding was to be called off. Since then, the BBC has made sure EastEnders does not clash with Corrie anywhere on the schedule.
In the 1980s over 24 million people watched 'Ken Barlow' marry 'Deirdre Langton' – more than watched His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales marry The Lady Diana Spencer. Viewing figures have declined, partly due to the addition of new terrestrial and satellite channels and thus new rival programming, it still remains ITV's most watched programme with audiences in excess of 10 million. The show's omnibus is shown on ITV2. Classic Corrie episodes are also airing on Granada Plus; currently, the episodes date from 1993.
The special Christmas day episode remains as central to many viewers' Christmas day celebration as the 'Queen's Speech'. The Christmas day episode which aired in 1987 was one of the most-watched episodes of all time; in the episode, Hilda Ogden left the Street to be a char to her doctor in the country.
The show is also shown in many countries worldwide, being the centre of the TV schedule of Ireland's independent television station, TV3 which simulcasts it with ITV.
In Canada, the show moved from a daytime slot on the CBC to primetime in 2004. Currently, the show airs about nine months behind the episodes seen in Britain, but this gap can fluctuate at any time. This gap is comparable to the episodes currently showing in New Zealand on Television New Zealand ONE.
The show airs in Australia on UKTV Australia; the episodes are currently two years behind Britain.
The show airs, or has aired, in most of the English-speaking countries and entities around the world. The lone holdout is the United States. The Trio channel aired a few episodes of the serial as a part of special-interest programming, but a concerted effort to air Coronation Street has not materialized for the American market. However, a two-disc DVD compilation was released in America, piquing optimism that a cable channel may be interested in showing the soap.
Many VHS tapes were made in the 1990s for the British market, with each tape consisting of edits for a particular character (for example, edits for Gail, or Rita, or the Duckworths). As they were made in PAL format, they were not distributed in the United States or Canada.
In 2003, a special DVD set called This is Coronation Street was released on Region 1 DVD. On the two-disc set is the 40 Years on Coronation Street one-off special as well as the first five episodes of the programme.
Granada has also produced a number of straight-to-video spin-off productions, which were only screened on television after having been available in shops for some time, as an incentive to buyers. These have included a crossover with Emmerdale, and a United States-set special, Viva Las Vegas!, released on VHS in 1999 and screened on ITV the following year. Written by Russell T. Davies (Queer as Folk, The Second Coming, Doctor Who), the special featured a guest cameo from actor Neville Buswell, who was then living in America, briefly reprising his role as Ray Langton.
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