TV classic is right up my Street

JMARKING 60 years of Coronation Street this week wrenched at my heart. I was working at Granada TV in Manchester in 1990 when we celebrated the Street’s 30th anniversary, Cilla Black doing the honours, presenting a huge ITV extravaganza.

Quite extraordinary that Corrie is still thriving magnificently all these years on. Back when it first launched in 1960 ITV bosses gave it just weeks. Mind you, TV execs have a habit of getting it wrong. When we started This Morning, another Granada stalwart, in 1988, the powers that be said we’d be off the air by Christmas.

Coronation Street soon became the living, breathing essence of both Granada and of Manchester itself, proud, poor and struggling – but always a great, throbbing heart of a city filled with extraordinarily determined and opinionated characters, who immediately took their ( it always felt like theirs) new show deep into their souls.

I grew up in a street like Corrie, two up, two down, no bathroom and a toilet in the backyard.

I recognised my large extended family in the Street’s characters, especially my forceful aunties who worked at C& A, selling smart coats and dresses to women like themselves, ordinary but aspirational, and determined to be well- dressed. My mum was fearsomely stylish and toughly ambitious for her children. Like Ken Barlow, William Roache, below, my brothers and I were the first in our family history to go to university.

For mum and my aunties, being smartly- dressed was an absolute must, and led to some comical sights. This Christmas I’ll smile at the memory of my Auntie Ada turning up at ours as she did every Christmas Day, with hairnet, curlers, fluffy slippers, pinny, carrying force- meat stuffing balls and jars of homepickled onions, but, dwarfing the lot, her majestic fur coat proudly sweeping the floor.

I cherish that memory, and on Christmas Day I’ll also remember my dad bashing out Mary’s Boy Child on the piano, mum and aunties forcing me and my brothers to sing. My uncles, pint pots held aloft, swaying and crooning as dad plinkyplonked the beloved oldies.

All those unforgettable moments still piercing my heart every time I hear the theme tune.

I don’t watch it much now; time’s moved on. But I’ll always be grateful to the genius Tony Warren, who invented the show, and to the old, great Granada TV, for giving us Coronation Street.

RICHARD writes of the Cambridges’ tour and how he envies the luxury facilities. He compares it to Churchill’s wartime transatlantic plane, but

I think it’s an Enid Blyton- type fantasy, combining adventure with safety.

But who would envy the surly greeting Kate and William received from Nicola Sturgeon, right, and Welsh minister Vaughan Gething, implying they weren’t welcome? How rude and nasty politics is right now.

Fortunately the Cambridges are above that and have their priorities straight.