Corrie’s Antony Cotton
Corrie actor Antony Cotton’s tells how in a heart-wrenching twist of fate his character Sean’s storyline mirrored a real-life situation
Antony Cotton couldn’t believe what he was hearing when Coronation Street producers told him they were planning a storyline in which his likeable character Sean would become homeless.
“It was spookily uncanny and just didn’t seem possible,” he tells us over a cuppa at Corrie HQ. “Unbeknown to anyone on the Street, in real life I’d been involved with the nightmare of homelessness through helping out a friend who’d been sleeping rough.” More than helping out! It transpires that Antony basically saved this man’s life. But more of that later. When did he first become aware of his friend’s fate? “In January,” Antony replies. “At that stage, I wouldn’t have called this person a friend exactly as I’d only met him twice. I happened to go on Facebook, which I don’t do very often, and there was a message from him. It read, ‘Please can you help me? I've got nowhere else to turn. I'm homeless’. I didn’t know what to think and didn’t even know if the message was real. The last time I’d seen this man – many months earlier – he’d been successfully self-employed
with an Audi on the drive, a missus and two kids. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, as many of us do, that homeless people were alcoholics or drug addicts – and this guy had been neither. He’d left a number and asked me to call him. I was apprehensive but called and when I heard his voice, I could tell how desperate he was.”
Once again, he asked Antony to help him. Busy with Corrie and also Dancing on Ice, which he was in the middle of at the time, Antony was already stretched. But he said he’d do what he could. “How could I not help?” he says. “He was another human being and in a very bad way. I got in touch with a Manchester charity for the homeless called Barnabus and they said I should get him to Manchester from Fleetwood where he was living in a tent in the stairwell of a social housing block. I intended to pick him up but was advised against it as I wouldn’t know what I would be presented with. I got back in touch with him and he said he’d get a train – even though he wouldn’t be able to buy a ticket – to Manchester.” Antony booked him into a Manchester Travelodge for three nights. “I met him there and on seeing him, inwardly burst into tears,” he continues. “He’d been a big lad – a real unit – but now he can’t have been more than 8st. He looked very, very ill and he’d been beaten up and lost his front teeth. I sat with him and we chatted. His life had gone wrong and he’d gone from sleeping in his own bed to sleeping on the streets. He’d thought it would only be for a very short time but fast forward six months and he was now officially classed as homeless. I said we’d got three days to sort him out.” The most vital thing was getting Antony’s friend somewhere to live on a permanent basis.
“When you’re homeless, it’s like you’re a ghost,” Antony explains. “If you've not got an address you have no right to benefits or anything.
I drove up to Withington to see an amazing housing company that deals with homeless people. They had no beds but then the bad weather brought some good luck. It was that week in February with the terrible snow and so the Severe Weather Programme, where every council in the country must provide shelter for those who need it, was enforced. They took my friend in and he stayed for a week. Then we came into contact with an amazing organisation called Homes for Hope and within an incredible nine days, he was living in a private house. He had an address and once he had that, he was able to unlock social benefits and ultimately find a job. He’s now working for a construction company and he calls me every day to check in with me. That’s the edited version of what happened – it was actually far more complicated than that and involved many frustrating phone calls and being sent from pillar to post.”
Antony must feel a certain sense of satisfaction at how things have panned out.
“I feel more humbled than anything. It's a monstrous beast being homeless. It's horrific. I've sat in places I never in a million years thought I'd be sat in, all trying to access help for somebody. Because I've got a big gob I was able to knock on doors and I'd say, ‘I am not leaving here until we're seen. I don't give a monkey’s about whether someone has an appointment or this, that or the other, we are not leaving until it's sorted.’ My friend was OK because he had me to help but it breaks my heart thinking of all the people who don't have anybody to either physically lift them up, emotionally support them or take them to places they need to go in order to try to sort themselves out.”
Antony (42) feels it’s a happy coincidence that his Corrie character is now in the middle of a homelessness storyline. “Fact is sometimes stranger than fiction and, for me, there’s a real truth to it. It’s said that many of us are only two paychecks away from being made homeless. The one thing I hope people will take from this storyline is that it can happen to anyone.’
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‘The one thing I hope people will take from this storyline is that it can happen to anyone’