STRENGTH THROUGH TRAGEDY
Coronation Street star on trials of his life
IT WAS five years and one month ago, as his world collapsed around him, that a lightbulb went on inside Bill Roache’s head.
He had been woken at home in Cheshire by the buzzer on his electric gate. Five policemen walked to his front door and rang the bell.
“We’re arresting you...” said one of them, but as the colour drained from Roache’s face, the rest of his words were lost in a mist.
He was to be charged with historic accusations of rape and indecent assault, and even though he knew them to be false, the realisation dawned that the courts might see them differently.
“I said to myself, this is the law. Things can happen, things that you don’t think will happen, in court can happen,” he reflects now. The headlines were predictable.
“Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow on sex charges,” reported the tabloids.
It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that life had thrown him a curveball. In 1999, a libel action against a newspaper, followed by an ill-advised claim against his lawyers, had left him bankrupt.
“But life never gives us more than we can deal with – I knew that,” he says. “Also, everything passes. I knew that, too. So I knew I would get through this.”
He says he came to terms with his arrest by choosing to see it as an extended work break that would afford more time with his family.
“From then on, it only took about three weeks to get into feeling positive,” he says.
But it was another nine months before he went in front of a jury. They acquitted him, unanimously, on all the charges. There had, he said afterwards, been no winners.
The fact that he can now write and speak about the experience with such candour is testament to a lifelong regimen of positive thought.
“Life will throw big challenges at you but there are ways of understanding them,” he says. “You don’t want to lapse into fear or self-pity, or into saying ‘woe is me’ – you do that, and down you go.
“The bigger the challenge, the more you need to stand up to it – actually embrace it. You will come out wiser and stronger and actually feeling better for it.” Roache, who has been in Coronation
Street since the first episode in 1960, and who hopes to still be there 14 years from now, as the first centenarian soap star, was at the time of his arrest already in a state of grief.
His second wife, Sara, whom he married in 1978, had died suddenly at their home four years earlier. She was just 58.
“We were just chatting, sitting up, side by side in bed, when she froze midconversation and leaned forwards with an ‘oh’,” he recalls in his new book, Life and Soul.
“Then she fell to the side and lost consciousness. I thought she had fainted. She’d never had a day’s real illness in her life.”
The agony of losing a partner unexpectedly was compounded by the medical investigation that went on. “The doctors at first couldn’t understand why her heart had just stopped beating. This is usually due to some illness or abnormality, but there was none in Sara’s case,” Roache says.
His conclusion, he writes, was that “she had died because her soul chose to”.
He says: “We all go when our soul decides we’ve done enough and it’s time to go home. If we’re meant to go, we will.”
He believes that the same is true of his eldest daughter, Vanya, who died three months ago at 50.
“The shock and grief is immeasurable,” he admits, but writes: “I know that she is now dancing in a wonderful place.”
The book, part autobiography, part self-help guide, is not a public catharsis, he says, and certainly not a manifesto for others.
“I’m not lecturing people. My book is my experience, that’s all.
“I’ve been looking for truth, and the truth is that you have to make the effort to find the truth in anything. It’s been a natural progression through my life.
“If it helps people and if it resonates, then that’s good – and if it doesn’t, that’s good, too,” Roache says.
“I’ve been an actor for over 60 years now, and I’ve been meditating for around 50 of those years. It’s a part of me. The more you understand what being a human being is, the more you can live in harmony with that. And when you do that, things get easier.
“People say to me, ‘You’ve had a very tragic life’, but that’s not the case at all. I’ve had a wonderful, glorious life, and the big challenges are also opportunities to grow in wisdom and strength and understanding.”
It had been his son Will’s idea to commit his mantra to paper, and also Will who had supplied Roache with one of his most surreal experiences as a parent.
It was eight years ago, as the 50th anniversary of Coronation Street approached, that the producers of a drama that would recreate its birth cast him in the role of his father.
It was not an entirely flattering portrayal, with the young Bill, just four years out of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and with only a few acting credits under his belt, telling the veterans in the cast that he was just “passing through” on his way to greater things.
“How nice that we get to work with you in the meantime,” was said to have been the acid comment of Doris Speed, who played the Rovers Return landlady Annie Walker in the show’s first era.
Roache says the drama was “wonderful” and the casting of Will, whose professional name is James Roache, “the icing on the cake”.
Coronation Street’s production in those black-and-white days was primitive by today’s standards. Video tape had been invented only three years earlier and with no editing facilities yet available, it was used as a device by which accountants could squeeze two episodes out of the cast and crew in a single day.
“We used to go out on Wednesdays and Fridays at 7, and we would do the first one live and then record the second one just as if it were live. We went on that way for the first three months,” says Roache.
But it was also an age of experimentation, in which actors were sometimes given a surprising degree of freedom.
It was in 1971, on the eve of Ken Barlow’s planned emigration to Jamaica to take up a teaching job, that Val, the first of his three wives, plugged her hairdryer into a faulty socket and was electrocuted on the spot.
“The director, Carol Wilks, said, ‘I just want you to walk around, sit on the stairs and do whatever you want to do’,” Roache recalls. “It was lovely to have the freedom to do that, and I just cried and cried and cried.
“Ken’s been given quite a lot to cry about over the years, but I remember that moment. That sort of improvisation would never be allowed now.” n Bill Roache will sign copies of Life
and Soul (Hay House, £18.99) on Friday at 12.30pm, at WHSmith in Leeds.
People think I’ve had a tragic life, but that’s not the case. I’ve had a wonderful, glorious life, and the big challenges are also opportunities to grow in wisdom and understanding. Bill Roache, Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow.