CORRIE BOSS: WE’LL NEVER DO A MADDIE
McCann story ‘too raw for soap plot’
CORONATION Street bosses have revealed the one storyline the soap dare not touch is a Madeleine McCann-style abduction.
Show chiefs are bracing themselves for a backlash over the current Bethany Platt plot in which she is raped by members of a sex ring.
Executive producer Kieran Roberts has insisted the plight of the 16-year-old, played by Lucy Fallon, highlights real-life grooming and is a “very important story to be telling”.
An upcoming plot also shows the brutal reality of a mugging when Shona Ramsey, played by Julia Goulding, 32, is attacked.
But the one true event the show refused to go near was the 2007 abduction of Madeleine.
The three-year-old vanished from her parents’ holiday apartment in Portugal just seven days before the soap was due to screen a child abduction.
Scriptwriters had planned a nerveshredding plot in which Claire and Ashley Peacock’s son Freddie was snatched by their babysitter Casey Carswell.
Many scenes had already been shot of a desperate missing child hunt which was scheduled to run for four months.
But after Maddie vanished Corrie bosses pulled the storyline.
The plot was hastily re-written and refilmed in just seven days.
Kieran told a conference on storytelling in MediaCityUK, Salford: “We always plan our stories in advance to make sure they’re not too distressing for our audiences.
“But sometimes stories that become controversial are ones you don’t expect.”
He said the Madeleine case was “horrific” and it would have been “insensitive” for the soap to air a similar plot.
Instead of a dramatic search for Freddie lasting weeks, scriptwriters got kidnapper Casey, played by Zoe Henry, 43, to take the youngster to her house.
There he was quickly found by Ashley, played by Steven Peacock, 42.
A show source said: “Madeleine’s disappearance is the one subject that is just too raw for dramatisation, even 10 years on.
“No-one could have anticipated it would be still be a mystery a decade later.
“It is still far too sensitive for anyone to work into any kind of fiction.”