‘My agent said: it will only be for 11 weeks’
As ‘Coronation Street’ turns 60, Julia Llewellyn Smith talks to William Roache who has played Ken Barlow since day one
Even after 60 years playing Ken Barlow in Coronation Street, William Roache still hates how the show, of which he’s the only remaining original cast member, is known as the world’s longestrunning soap opera. “Soap’s a derogatory term, it denigrates what we do,” he shudders. “Coronation Street is a major, cutting-edge drama serial.”
Certainly, it’s true that creator Tony Warren had highbrow aspirations for the series, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary with three special hour-long episodes between December 7 and 11.
“We were part of this new method acting – Marlon Brando, James Dean; the new realism with John Osborne and Look Back in Anger,” continues Roache, 88, who recently entered the Guinness World Records for being the longest serving soap star in the world. “It was highly prestigious with write-ups in all the big papers. We went straight in at the top of the ratings and we’ve never been out of the top 10 since.” e.
Fans have included ncluded the poet laureate John Betjeman – who called the show his version ersion of The Pickwick Papers, saying “I live for it” – George Michael el and David Bowie. “Camilla la Parker Bowles visited d the set and told us she e loved the show,” w,” Roache affirms. s.
It’s been an unimaginable trajectory for Roache, a doctor’s son from Derbyshire, who turned to acting in 1956 after national service in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He was invited to audition for the e role of Barlow when Warren saw him in a Granada Television play, but considered the part a mere stepping-stone in his burgeoning career. “My agent said, ‘It’ll only be for 11 weeks’,” he says.
Those weeks were extended and extended and – apart from a brief midlife wobble – Roache never considered trying his luck elsewhere. “A director once said to us, ‘The things you do are as good as what you see in any film or any play’. You were getting great stories two or three times a year, it was always a happy place to be, there was no reason to want to leave.”
His brief period of disillusionment came when working-class, universityeducated Barlow grew out of his angry young man phase. “When Ken moved from being the youth lead to the slightly older category, they didn’t quite know what to do with him. They wanted to make him nerdy, so I went to see the producers.”
They responded by conceiving a tempestuous love triangle between Ken’s third wife, Deirdre (Anne Kirkbride) and Mike Baldwin (Johnny Briggs). The 1983 scene in which Barlow discovered he’d been cuckolded attracted 20 million viewers; the news that Deirdre was returning to him was fla flashed up on the scoreboard at Old Traffo Trafford at half-time as “Ken 1 Mike 0”. “That was definitely one of my highlig highlights. I’d put a lot of work in into it and Anne and I found filming those scenes very heavy, so it was very gratifying.” Natu Naturally, the actor actors are very clos close. “It’s like fam family,” Roache sa says. The m memorial se service for K Kirkbride, who di died of breast ca cancer, aged 60, fiv five years ago, too took place around th the same time as De Deirdre’s on on-screen fu funeral. “It was th the only time I fe felt any co confusion about be being me or K Ken, I was m mourning my on on-screen wife an and the loss of a really great colleague and friend.”
Such incidents apart, Roache – speaking from his Cheshire home – insists he’s never had any difficulties separating his own personality from Barlow’s; although even his father once said to him: “Put the kettle on, Ken.”
“I thought, ‘If my own father can’t get it right, there’s no hope’. Now I treat Ken as my nickname, it’s what so many people call me and that’s fine, I’ll answer to it but I’m quite clear in my head as to what’s Ken and what’s me.”
Barlow’s certainly packed in the dramas: he’s had 28 affairs, his step-daughter was a killer and his son an alcoholic bigamist. “I call the Barlows a one-man Greek tragedy,” he says. Filming such storylines tests actors both emotionally and technically: in its earliest days the week’s first Coronation Street was – after several rehearsals – broadcast live and the second recorded “as live” immediately afterwards.
“About three months in there was a technicians’ strike, so then we started pre-recording, but for many years it was in a way that couldn’t be edited, so it was like doing it live.”
Today there are six episodes a week, shown in two 30-minute chunks on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Does Roache find it too much? “I thought when we did two [weekly] episodes it was too much. But I much prefer it now. There are no rehearsals but you can have maybe two or three goes at a take, so if something’s not right, there’s more latitude for hitting it how you want to hit it.”
Lockdown halted filming for the first time in the show’s history for 11 weeks. Roache and co-star 87-year-old Barbara Knox (Rita Tanner), the two oldest members of the cast, were the last to return in October. Roache, whose second wife Sara died in 2009, enjoyed an idyllic lockdown with his children, artist Verity, 39, and actor James, 34, who moved in with him, watching old movies every night together.
Meanwhile, Roache played online Scrabble and chess with Linus,
54, his son from his first marriage, who lives in Los Angeles, where he stars in the crime drama Law & Order. Both James and Linus have enjoyed brief appearances on the Street. Did Barlow fear for them following in his footsteps? “Oh, no. And Linus has had the career I’d have loved to have had. He had no national service so he started straight off with drama school, he’s worked at the National Theatre, done all the classical stuff.”
Covid has scuppered a planned Coronation Street 60th anniversary party next month, but Roache will be in the thick of on-screen shenanigans, with a scene in which Barlow, along with other longstanding cast members, defy developers’ bulldozers threatening to destroy Weatherfield. Michael Le Vell (Kevin Webster) recently recalled filming this scene at 4am and spotting Roache striding along the Street’s cobbles. He didn’t recognise him at first, because his gait was that of someone in their 50s. At this, Roache, a vocal proponent of spirituality, laughs delightedly. “If you look after yourself, the cells rejuvenate and keep going,” he affirms.
There’s a geniality to Roache that’s rare amongst those who’ve been in the public eye for a long time, and he says he enjoyed becoming famous. “It was good to be known in an age when there were fewer so-called celebrities. A lot of things were open to us,” he says. In contrast, the current young stars are incessantly scrutinised, and attacked, on social media. “Yes, it’s different for today’s youngsters,” he concedes.
Another rite of passage for this new generation is the reality circuit, with stints on the likes of
I’m A Celebrity ... and/or Strictly Come Dancing virtually compulsory to raise one’s profile. “Well, yes, if you need your profile raising,” Roache says.
He’s equally arch with those who ask him how he’d like Barlow to be written out. “I say, ‘I don’t think about it.’” His Guinness certificate seems unassailable. “I’m only in the Guinness World Records because I learnt my lines, turned up on time and stuck around long enough on a ship that just keeps sailing on. I’m very lucky.”
Coronation Street’s week of hour-long anniversary episodes will be on ITV from Dec 7
‘We were part of this new method acting – like Brando’