Secrets and lies:
Emotional chaos reigns in the Barlow household on Coronation Street after a furious Daniel (Rob Mallard, right) finds out that his father Ken has been hiding a huge secret from him – that Daniel’s wife Sinead has cancer. James Rampton reports.
Emotional chaos reigns in the Barlow household on Coronation Street.
As all viewers of Coronation Street will know, there is never a dull moment with the Barlows.
However, the troubled family are now excelling themselves as there is drama in every nook and cranny of the Barlow household.
For starters, the newly wed Daniel (Rob Mallard) is livid with his father, Ken (William Roache), for keeping from him the fact that his pregnant wife Sinead (Katie McGlynn) has cancer.
To make matters worse, Tracy and Steve are dealing with the fallout from their shambolic wedding – and honeymoon. All in all, emotional chaos reigns. The Barlows are not so much on the cobbles as on the ropes.
Roache, 86, the only cast member who has been in Coronation Street since it began almost 58 years ago, says such turbulence comes with the territory when you’re a Barlow.
“There’s no let up for Ken with the dysfunctional family that he’s got,” Roache laughs. “Every one of them is flawed.”
The bombshell about Sinead is all the more terrible for Daniel because since the wedding, he has been wrapped up in his own happiness, oblivious to how much his new wife has been suffering.
Mallard, 26, explains that, “Daniel is elated. He is in his own little bubble and completely unaware of what has been happening. In his own self-involved way, this apparently happy marriage is something that he has always wanted, so he is trying to write that story and keep it that way for as long as possible.
“He doesn’t notice, in the same way that someone else might do, that the scenery is changing around him,” says Mallard. “He is
stuck in the same moment. Everybody else has caught up and he is left behind.”
Mallard says that Daniel is so detached from reality because, as a boy growing up neglected by his father, he felt isolated.
“Daniel is very solitary in some ways and, reading all those romantic novels, he fancies himself as a bit of a Heathcliff, standing on a blustery moor. I think he is playing that fantasy out in his head with Sinead as his Cathy, and he doesn’t notice that everything has gone wrong.
“He says this is the love of his life, but he is clearly not paying her enough attention.”
The actor carries on that, “She is doing everything to try to make sure he doesn’t find out about her illness, but he’s making it quite easy for her.
“He is not an insensitive person, but because he feels so harddone-by in life, he wants to really enjoy the good bits and not look any deeper than that. He thinks he deserves to be happy.”
Roache outlines why Ken did not inform Daniel about Sinead’s cancer diagnosis.
“He desperately wanted to tell Daniel, but Sinead begged him not to, saying it was her baby, her body, her life.
“If Ken was a less honourable man, he would have just gone ahead and told Daniel, because that’s what all his instincts were screaming at him to do. But as is often the case in life, you get punished for doing the right thing. “Ken thinks he’s done the honourable thing, but this is going to completely shatter his relationship with Daniel.” When Ken finally tells his son about Sinead’s condition, all hell breaks loose. “When Daniel finds out from Ken about the cancer, he doesn’t believe it at first,” says Mallard. “Then it starts to make sense with the way she has been feeling. “Daniel immediately withdraws and goes into petulant teenager mode and blames Ken. He goes back to that default.” The actor adds that, “Daniel can’t be angry with Sinead because of how he feels about her and because he could never take it out on her. But that anger still has to go somewhere. So it finds its home in Ken. The rage re-directs that way.” It certainly does. Roache takes up the story. “When Daniel does find out, Ken gets the full blast of all the pent-up resentment that Daniel has lurking because Ken was an absent father. We then have a four-hander episode at the Barlows’ between Ken, Daniel, Sinead, Peter – full of recriminations. “It’s a great episode, drawing on their history and bringing all those things together. “One of the things I love in Coronation Street is how it draws on its own history, in this case the history of Ken being a bad father.”