Mr Coronation Street leaves just £400,000

CORONATION Street is the longest-running programme on British television and the revenues it generates have underpinned the success of Granada and ITV.

Surprisingly, though, the 56-year-old soap opera has apparently failed to make a millionaire of its creator.

For I can disclose that Corrie scriptwriter Tony Warren, who died in March aged 79, left just over £431,000 in his will.

The former child actor, who made a cameo appearance in the 50th anniversary live episode of Coronation Street in 2010, was openly gay at a time in the early Sixties when homosexuality was illegal.

He left his estate to David Tucker, his friend of 20 years, and director Noreen Kershaw, who used to work with him on Corrie.

‘No one has ever made me laugh as much as Tony did, even in the weeks he was dying,’ Tucker said at his funeral. ‘He was a genius — a man ahead of his time in every way.’

Other beneficiaries are his goddaughter Ella Duffy and Andrew McWilliams, of Ainsworth, Bolton.

Warren, whose real name was Anthony McVay Simpson, was just 23 when he created what turned out to be the world’s long-running TV soap. Undeterred by a lack of interest in his idea for a drama about a Northern road of terraced houses from BBC producer Olive Shapely, who told him it was a bore, he wrote Our Street and sent it to another producer at the Corporation, but did not receive a reply.

Granada producer Harry Elton, however, was impressed by the idea and the show’s name was changed from Warren’s original suggestion of Florizel Street after a tea lady said it reminded her of a brand of disinfectant.

Coronation Street was an immediate hit, but Warren left Granada after penning the first dozen episodes, and tried writing for film and theatre without much success.

He returned to work at Granada as part of the scriptwriting team and continued working on the programme until the Seventies.

He was proud that the show had fans of the calibre of the Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman, who likened the soap to Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers.