Warren’s final word on the Street
The boy who dreamt up Coronation Street as he hid under his granny’s kitchen table was actually making history. Tony Warren, who passed away on Monday, has left a legacy that changed the face of television
ASMALL boy crouches under his grandmother’s kitchen table, drinking i n the gossip and working-class family conversation swirling around him. And he savours every story, every pungent phrase, and stores them in his mind. That’s how Coronation Street was born, and some would say it’s been the essence of the show throughout the 55 years in which it has mirrored tumultuous social changes in a British workingclass area.
The small boy was Tony Warren, who died on Monday aged 79. From his listening post under the table, he understood that the most powerful voices belonged to the women. They ruled his home, and all through his career he paid tribute to them, creating the strongest f emale characters on TV —women like Ena Sharples, Annie Walker and Elsie Tanner.
Warren was born Anthony Simpson in 1936, adopting his stage name as a child actor, performing on BBC Children’s Hour and radio plays.
But as the TV age dawned, and despite his drama training at the Elliott-Clarke Performing Arts School in Liverpool, Warren’s career faltered: he was too short and tubby for leading roles.
Instead, he turned to writing, and on a train journey in 1959 from London to Manchester, he told a BBC producer friend of his great concept for a TV series: ‘I can see a little back street in Salford, with a pub at one end and a shop at the other, and all the l i ves of t he people t here, j ust ordinary things.’
The producer dismissed the idea, but Warren was undeterred. He talked his way into a job, at £30 a week at Granada Studios, as a hack writer of crime dramas and action thrillers.
His boredom and frustration boiled over one day in an enormous scene. According to Corrie legend, he climbed onto a filing cabinet and refused to come down until someone commissioned his show.
A producer named Harry Elton called his bluff, giving Warren 24 hours to produce a script for the pilot episode.
His colleagues thought he was wasting his time, but Elton claimed that he knew he had a hit when, during a test screening on a TV set in his office, he r ealised the cleaning l ady was watching over his shoulder, unable to tear herself away from the telly.
Elton told her this new show was to o be called Florizel Street. The cleaner r sniffed. ‘Sounds like a disinfectant,’ shee said. The series was swiftly renamedd Coronation Street and commissionedd for 16 episodes.
At 23, Warren had grandiose ambitions. In a memo to Granada bosses, he promised it would be ‘a fascinating freemasonry, a volume of unwritten n rules’. Coronation Street would ‘explore the values of a working-class street in the North of England and, inn doing so, entertain’.
BUT he had a more down-toearth ambition: ‘I wanted to show there was glamour inn the back streets.’ Much of that glamour came e from the characters he observed in n Manchester’s underground gay y culture.
Warren knew from a young age that t he was gay — though he didn’t dare e tell his family at first — and he relishedd the sharp wit of the flamboyant characters he mixed with. There was, however, no question of having such a character on the Street: when the show started in December 1960, the legalisation of homosexuality was nearly seven years away.
So, like the boy under the kitchen table, Warren stole everything he heard and transformed it.
‘Some of these queens were sensational,’ he said. ‘I remember giving Elsie Tanner things they would say. When you think of some of the things she came out with, how many straight women have you heard say that?’
Elsie was the Street’s original bit of brass, no better than she should be. But to Tony, the heart of the show was Annie Walker, landlady of the Rovers Return. He created the role especially for Doris Speed, an actress he had worked with on radio.
Four decades her j unior, Tony worshipped her, and one of his aims was to make her a star. It worked: 12 months after reaching retirement age, Doris could afford her first mink coat. She christened it ‘Tony’.
The success of the show also gave him courage to declare his sexuality. He was scared. ‘I never went past Strangeways jail without thinking: “Is that where I’m going to end up?”’ he said.
He began telling his secret to trusted friends at Granada. But it was the people he didn’t trust or like who finally goaded him into making an open statement.
At one production meeting, fed up with the banter, he snapped: ‘I have sat here and listened to three poof jokes, an actor described as a poof, a storyline described as too poofy, and I would just like to tell you that without a poof you wouldn’t be in work!’
Warren stopped writing full-time for t he Street in 1968, t hough he continued as an adviser on the series all his life.
What he had created took on a more vivid, sprawling life than even he ever imagined, a sort of national tapestry into which every cultural change and trend could be woven.
He was never scared to tackle the most controversial scenes. Within six episodes of the series starting, a character was dead in shocking
circumstances: May Hardman, who had been in a psychiatric hospital after a nervous breakdown, suffered a heart attack and died trying to alert neighbours.
Nothing l i ke this had been shown on TV before: it was tragedy, but as mundane as a boiled egg. Sometimes the cast found it hard to take. Martha Longhurst (played by Lynne Carol) was one of the Street’s ‘three witches’, making up a coven of gossips with Ena Sharples and Minnie Caldwell ( Violet Carson and Margot Bryant).
When Martha was killed off by a fatal heart attack in the snug of the Rovers, the other actresses were horrified.
Carson threatened to resign and had to be sweet-talked into staying by Warren and others. At the end of the episode, the credits rolled in silence as a mark of ‘respect’ for Martha. Next morn- ing, Granada Studios was kneedeep in wreaths and bouquets from grieving fans.
But it was his willingness to depict the British class system that was Warren’s real stroke of genius. The first big storyline saw university student Ken Barlow struggling with his father, who thought a working- class lad had no business getting educated above his station.
This reflected the growing gulf between a generation of men who had fought in World War II, and teenagers with ambition who didn’t want to settle for factory j obs l i ke t heir f athers and grandfathers.
Warren was able to create legendary characters such as Stan Ogden (Bernard Youens), who could always find an excuse to dodge work while he slipped into the Rovers for a couple of pints, and his wife Hilda (Jean Alexander), who carried a mop and duster as she swept up all the Street’s tittle-tattle.
Later came the Duckworths, Jack and Vera (William Tarmey and Elizabeth Dawn), who lowered the tone by keeping pigeons and covered the front of their terrace house i n stone cladding that looked like a fake tan. Then came established names in major roles including Boyzone’s Keith Duffy and Ian McKellen.
One aspect of real life, however, was not shown: in order to keep its early evening slot, Corrie did not allow swearing. It was not until 2009 that the first ‘b****rd’ was aired. Of course, actresses such as Pat Phoenix, who played Elsie Tanner, and Julie Goodyear (barmaid Bet Lynch) could read the Bible and still sound as though they were turning the air blue. When Tony Warren created Coronation Street, it had cobbles and outside toilets. Now it’s got broadband internet and a wine bar under t he t r amway arches. Prosperity has seeped in, along with the modern ills that were unimaginable i n 1960: violent crime, drug abuse, splintered families, illegal immigration.
Soaps can no longer invoke the community in ordinary streets, because that no longer exists.
Warren admitted, at the Street’s 50th anniversary celebrations in 2010, that he preferred reality shows. ‘I love them,’ he claimed. ‘They say something new.’
The truth is that Coronation Street was the original reality show. It reflected ordinary life, and at the same time brought outrageous characters into our living rooms. Who needs celebrities, when you’ve got the likes of Elsie, Bet and Hilda?