Maureen Messent: The Queens of Coronation Street who seduced us for 50 years
As the nation's favourite TV soap reaches its 50th milestone with a dramatic live episode, Maureen Messent profiles the colourful characters who captured our hearts.
THE small boy sitting in a corner of his mother’s northern kitchen, range door open to warm his knees, seemed to be poring over a school text book.
This was Tony Warren, but never believe he was concentrating on homework.
The lad was ear-wigging, enthralled by the snippets let drop by his mother and her cronies.
What was “up the stick”? What did “er’s no better than her should be” mean? And that Mrs Benson from down t’street, what change was she going through that made her come over all hot?
The women round Tony gossiped, condemned those moving out of their class, discussed pregnancies (“I see young Ida’s showin’ again, and ‘er Jack but six months old”) and, of course, the illicit sexual liaisons they’d swear blind were shaking the neighbourhood’s morals and bedsprings.
Twenty-three years later and that little boy in the corner had become the well known Tony Warren.
A promising child actor, he gave Britain a passion it’s never outgrown.
Drawing on his mother’s friend and their sayings, he wrote the first scripts of what was to become Coronation Street – he thought it should have been called Florizel Street until someone pointed out that Florizel sounded like a lavatory cleaner.
Now we see his name on the Street’s credits when we watch the world’s best loved “social drama” as it’s now called.
Tony – why hasn’t he been knighted? – passed his ideas for the drama to Granada after writing the first scripts, but not before he had changed British television forever by dreaming up women whose names are woven into our national fabric: Ena Sharples, Annie Walker and Elsie Tanner.
The British had seen only posh women from the Home Counties on television until then, heard only the cut-class voices of announcer Sylvia Peters (who’d wear an evening dress to introduce programmes) and Lady Isobel Barnett, the doyenne of What’s My Line – and later revealed as a real-life kleptomaniac who’d pilfer from shops near her Leicestershire home.
