Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Corrie’s bad boy Johnny and me
Amanda Barrie on her TV love
It was 3am when Amanda Barrie was woken by her landline ringing. She knew a call at that time is hardly ever good news. Half awake she answered, relieved but bemused to hear the excitable voice on the other end.
“We have worked together before,” exclaimed a delighted Johnny Briggs. “I’ve just seen us!”
This was the late Eighties, and just a few years into what would be Mike and Alma Baldwin’s 20-year love story, the pair were already one of the nation’s favourite Coronation Street couples.
Off-screen, Johnny relied just as much on charisma and cheeky-chappy charm to get him out of scrapes as his alter ego.
Scrapes such as ringing his co-star in the middle of the night to report they had unknowingly been in the same film – Doctors in Distress – in 1963.
It makes Amanda laugh even now. “I said to him, ‘What are you talking about? It’s three o’clock in the morning!’. But he’d just seen the film on TV, and decided to phone me right then to tell me,” recalls Amanda. “But that was Johnny.”
Nowadays Amanda has sadly become used to the phone ringing with bad news. And this week, it was “work husband” Johnny who had passed away aged 85 after a long illness.
“With us old ones, it’s never a complete shock,” Amanda, also 85, says. “It was just sad.
“Our particular time in Corrie was a really good time. Mike Baldwin and Bill Roache’s Ken Barlow were iconic – and that word can be overused.”
Amanda tweeted she would see Johnny in the “Rovers in the Sky”, and she and alter ego Alma would be raising a G&T.
She felt it important – like Corrie itself – not to forget that Johnny loved a laugh. “Johnny would have thought, ‘What’s she doing?’ if I’d been too serious and tearful,” she says. “I keep seeing his face all over TV this week. He would have loved that.
“It’s weird, it takes you whizzing right back and I’ve been remembering all the good times we had.”
There were plenty... Born days apart in September 1935, they were both children of the Blitz, and by the 1950s they were bona fide performers – Johnny having appeared on stage with a young Audrey Hepburn and Amanda having become a film and
West End darling.
By the time they joined Corrie, Johnny in 1976 and Amanda in 1981, their film credits included Carry On classics.
But it was as knicker factory charmer Mike and his long-suffering girlfriend-turned-wife
Alma that the duo became national treasures. And while it was fun to watch them, it was even more fun on set.
“If you merged Mike Baldwin to Johnny Briggs you wouldn’t know where the join was,” Amanda laughs. “He was like a very naughty schoolboy. We’d sit there talking for ages, being silly. None of us had grown up – he’d grown up even less than me. “He was only ever saved from lots of trouble by that grin he had. The grin would come on and I’d think, ‘Oh he’s got his own way again!’. I’d see we were due in first the next day and I’d look again and it was changed to later, I knew he’d used the grin!” He was also famous for his spoonerisms, once leaving her bemused in a scene where he ordered “coffee and mis-soul-lee”, until the umpteenth take when they realised he meant muesli. It was when Corrie stars were invited out that Amanda CO-STARS Amanda recalls happy times
Even his wife would say to me, ‘Do tell Johnny to behave’ AMANDA BARRIE ON HIM GETTING INTO SCRAPES
had to keep her eye on him. Johnny was with his second wife and mother of four of his six children, Christine. She would ask Amanda to keep him in check, when the cast were taken away for filming, awards shows or press junkets.
“Even his wife would say to me, ‘Do tell Johnny to behave,’” laughed Amanda. “I replied, ‘I’m not actually married to him, it’s not my job!.
As soap actors, you’re normally bored or terrified. You become more and more bonded. You think of the person as your other half. I sort of believed I was Mrs Baldwin.
“Once they took us to the premiere of Hook – he slept through it. I had to nudge him. He used to say, I treated him like Alma treated Mike. I remained half Alma – gently sending him up the whole time.”
In fairness, Alma, once caught in a love triangle with Ken Barlow, deserved some payback. One Christmas Mike dumped her and Johnny was shocked to find taxi drivers at a London train station all refused to pick him up because of his character’s behaviour. That wasn’t the only time they got flak from cabbies. They were caught a little worse for wear after an all-night party following the Royal Variety Show in the 1990s.
“We sat up talking to Chris de Burgh,” recalls Amanda. “It was just the three of us left in the London Palladium. I took my shoes off because they hurt and Johnny and I started walking down Oxford Street at 6am.
“The taxi drivers were shouting to see if Mike and Alma wanted a lift.”
Amanda has been with her novelist and journalist wife Hilary Bonner for 20 years but Johnny had met Hilary even before she had.
“When we got together, she had this room with all the pictures of people she’s interviewed. There’s her having a candlelit dinner with Johnny Briggs. That’s more than Mike ever did for Alma!”
Mike might have been flaky, but Johnny was nothing but professional. “Johnny was once arrested for speeding and he was put in a cell,” says Amanda. “They asked if he wanted anything. Most people would ask for a solicitor, he asked them to go and get his script out of his car.”
In 2001, Amanda left the soap, with Alma dying of cervical cancer. Johnny even made her laugh “on the deathbed”.
“When I was dying it became a bit like how many people can get into a Morris Minor,” she says. “I’ve never seen so many people on my bed. Bill was a bit upset but I don’t think Johnny was at all! I knew he was thinking, ‘How long is she going to take to die? I’ve a golf game to get to!’.”
We could have seen a lot more of them as a duo if things had gone Johnny’s way.
In 1995 they released a cover of Something Stupid. “He went and recorded it without me,” laughs Amanda. “Because he’d made some other arrangement – probably playing golf ! So I had to go and
do the harmony part on my own at Abbey Road. The ghost of the Beatles were probably thinking, ‘What’s this?’.
“Ever the optimist, he was like, ‘This could go to number one you know.’ “I was thinking, ‘In what chart?!’.” Johnny left Corrie in 2006 with an emotional scene where Mike, suffering from Alzheimer’s, calls out Alma’s name.
“It scared the living daylights out of me. I was in the kitchen. And I heard Mike, a disembodied voice, shouting, ‘Alma’. I thought of hearing things from the other side,” laughs Amanda.
The last time they spoke she was trying to persuade him to do the The Real Marigold Hotel, but had no idea that would be their last conversation.
Pandemic rules mean she won’t be able to go to the funeral. But she’ll be raising that glass as promised.
She laughs: “He was a silly old twit but I was very fond of him. Johnny, thank you for an immensely happy time.
“Alma was Mike’s soulmate but you treated Amanda better.”
You become bonded... I sort of believed I was Mrs Baldwin AMANDA BARRIE ON THE WORKING RELATIONSHIP