EDITOR’S LETTER

With TV Guide Deputy Editor Chris Bush Write about what you know. It is advice given to many budding writers and that’s exactly what a talented young TV scribe named Tony Warren did when he created Coronation Street, which this week celebrates 60 years on screen. As a child, Warren often visited his grandmother, who lived in a Manchester neighbourhood similar to that on Coronation Street, and observed the local residents. “Even as a small boy, I used to invent family dramas in my mind and write stories around them,” Warren later recalled. The rest really is history. Coronation Street is now a TV phenomenon, outlasting its creator who died in 2016. He was 79. Warren was commissioned initially to write 12 Coro episodes. The 13th was to be the last with the Street to be bulldozed – a storyline eerily similar to one of the latest Coro plots. Those first episodes rated well enough to have its run extended. As in everyday life, Coronation Street has had plenty of highs and lows over the years but it’s a show with true heart and that heart is still beating strongly. Happy 60th, Coro.