Corrie actor sacked for violent rap about rape
DISGRACED Coronation Street actor Chris Fountain was sacked yesterday by ITV for posting disgusting raps about rape on the internet.
Fountain, 25, was suspended from his role on the soap last week when footage of him spouting violent lyrics while wearing a Halloween mask emerged on YouTube.
In one vile clip, he rapped about dragging a girl in pink underwear upstairs, and boasted: ‘I will f*** anybody up in the worst way, rape a b**** on her birthday.’
In another, he performed a stabbing action while rapping: ‘I’m a nasty ****, I will punch you in the face and you look like you’ve been having some acupuncture ’cos my fist is lethal.’
After he was identified as the anonymous rapper, Fountain insisted: ‘The videos were made over a year ago when I was experimenting with music and I’ve not done anything like since nor will I.’
A Twitter account belonging to his pseudonym The Phantom – which is said to have included a tweet about killing a rival – was hastily withdrawn. Fountain added: ‘I would like to sincerely apologise for any offence I have caused. I am deeply ashamed by the lyrics and very much regret my behaviour.’
It is thought he also apologised to ITV bosses during a private meeting yesterday in a last-ditch effort to save his job.
But his contrition was not enough to prevent them from axing him.
Fountain joined Coronation Street as mechanic Tommy Duckworth in 2011.
This year the character featured in a prominent storyline when his onscreen girlfriend became a surrogate mother in order to pay her debts. It is thought Fountain’s contract with ITV was only set to last until February next year.
An ITV spokesman said: ‘Chris Fountain’s contract with ITV has been terminated as a result of the unacceptable comments he made in a number of online clips.’
Fountain first came to notice as Justin Burton in Channel 4’s soap Hollyoaks. He has also appeared on ITV’s celebrity talent show Dancing on Ice, where his fancy footwork took him to the final in 2008.
THE cast of Coronation Street have a nickname for their boss. They call him the Grim Reaper, because of his ruthless penchant for killing off even the best-loved stars. Yesterday he claimed another victim as actor Chris Fountain, who played Tommy Duckworth, had his contract terminated as a result of ‘unacceptable comments he made in a number of online clips’.
But executive producer Stuart Blackburn’s nickname could take on an even darker significance. As the 53-year- old series stumbles from crisis to crisis behind the scenes, dogged by criminal allegations — from serious sex charges to embarrassing tales of freebies and freeloading — Corrie’s TV ratings are tumbling.
Fans are ditching the soap in their millions. Almost half its audience has switched off in the past three years. The characters are unappealing, and their stories are too often sordid and nasty.
The trademark wit and down-to-earth humour minted by creator Tony Warren have been dumped by the wayside.
Instead, today’s scriptwriters rush to comply with po- faced strictures on ‘appropriate language’ and ‘ acceptable attitudes’. But if the audience slide continues, Corrie faces extinction — and the former flagship of British television will disappear for ever, sunk by a combination of scandal, political correctness and dire plot lines.
The show’s reputation hit a new low this week as Fountain was fired after being unmasked as the rapper behind hatefilled internet videos in which he threatened to rape, batter and stab women.
As advertisers warned they would boycott the show if Fountain was not sacked, senior ITV executives were summoned to a ‘Cobra-style’ crisis meeting — apeing the Government’s emergency summits — in a bid to limit the fall-out.
Fountain claimed he had merely been ‘experimenting with music’ and that he had not expected his lyrics to be taken seriously. But the Bradford-born actor, who has had brushes in the past with lap dancers and three-in-a-bed tabloid headlines, was dismissed, despite pleading that he was ‘deeply ashamed’ of himself.
ACORONATION Street source said: ‘ There was a lot of bad feeling among some of the cast and senior members of the crew that Chris was not sacked on the spot the moment these videos came out. They feel that Stuart Blackburn has been dragging his heels on this.
‘There was no doubt that Fountain did these disgusting raps, because he admitted it. What else did anyone need to know?
‘Stuart obviously wanted to get all the facts and it’s complicated a bit by the fact Stuart used to work with ex-druggies and prisoners in Scotland and his instinct is very much to give people a second chance.
‘ But we are dealing with an institution in Coronation Street and we have to be very careful it is not damaged by this.
‘Even the few people who felt Chris had been stupid, but thought he should be let off with a b******ing, agreed it couldn’t be allowed to drag on.’
One senior actress on the show had flatly refused to work with Fountain again — suggesting that the cast’s female core do still have moral sense, even if the producers have lost their way.
The scandal comes in the wake of child sex charges, in unrelated police investigations, against two of Corrie’s best-known stars.
William Roache, 81, has been suspended from the soap since he appeared in court in May charged with the rape of a 15-year-old girl in 1967. A month later, the twicedivorced father- of-five, who has played Ken Barlow on The Street since it first aired in 1960, was also charged with five counts of indecent assault against girls aged 12 to 16.
He has been bailed until trial next year and, though he has not yet entered formal pleas, his lawyers say he will contest the charges. Michael Le Vell, 48, who has played mechanic ic Kevin Webster since the Eighties, s, faces 19 charges of rape, indecent nt assault and sexual activity with a child. He has pleaded not guilty. ty.
Both characters haracters have been written out of current urrent storylines.
As if this crisis was not deep enough, claims surfaced this month that some me of the cast were cashing in on their heir celebrity by promoting jewellery y and beauty products to their followers ollowers on Twitter, in exchange ge for free gifts.
Four actresses ctresses fell victim to a sting set up by Channel 4’s Dispatches programme. mme. They were persuaded to send out messages on Twitter promoting ing a firm called ‘Puttana Aziendale’ after they received skin products and bracelets as gifts.
However, the company was bogus — its name translates to ‘corporate prostitute’ in Italian. The stars, who included Brooke Vincent, who plays lesbian Sophie Webster, and Cherylee Houston, who plays Izzy Armstrong, may have breached Advertising Standards Authority guidelines, which state that sponsored messages on social networks should be clearly marked to avoid misleading followers.
How could a soap opera about an ordinary British working- class street have blundered so far from its origins? Corrie was once the beating heart of telly drama — now it is a pottage of immorality and political correctness.
One recent story, intended to tackle racism, has made the show a laughing stock. Fireman Paul Kershaw (Tony Hirst) was berated and shunned by other characters after he used a dubious phrase during a darts match at the Rover’s Return.
‘Play the white man!’ he blurted, to the disgust of cabbie Lloyd Mullaney, played by Craig Charles.
In any real pub in Britain, the remark would have been mocked — nobody talks like Rudyard Kipling any more — or perhaps dealt with by the landlord with a sharp: ‘Oi! Watch your language!’
BUT with this inane row, the Grim Reaper seemed to think he had his finger on Britain’s pulse. ‘There’s a point when Paul, in a moment of stupidity and stress, makes one wrong remark, ’ Blackburn proclaimed. ‘I think it’s one of those modern stories that will get everyone talking.’
In a hand-wringing display of antiracist sensibilities, the Corrie writers built it up until a lynching was threatened. The drama was resolved last night when Paul came to the rescue when Lloyd was set upon by racist thugs. Nothing, it seems, establishes true political correctness like a good punch-up.
Other recent plot threads have focused on gay marriage — despite ugly undercurrents of homophobia on the set. In February, producers were obliged to display a notice warning crew and cast not to voice anti-gay slurs in the studios.
That suggests that an undisciplined culture of homophobic banter must have been tolerated from actors and technicians alike for some time, if it forces a public memo.
This is bizarrely at odds with the show’s recent history of flying the gay rights banner. The on-off affair between Antony Cotton’s character Sean Tully and his partner Marcus Dent, played by Charlie Condou, has filled headlines for years — seasoned by reports that off- camera the two actors cannot stand each other, and that the cast is divided into factions backing either one.
A lesbian affair between Sophie Webster and Sian Powers, played by Sacha Parkinson, has also b been a regular fixtur fixture — prompting one much- loved Corrie veteran to protest that there was too much emphasi emphasis on gay rights. Jean Alexand Alexander, who played Hilda Ogden fro from 1964 to 1987, said the number of homosexual characters on the show had become ‘excessive’, ‘excessi a complaint dismissed by pro producers.
‘ There is no gay soapbox, we’re just telling stories about love. And the audience au want to see that, I beli believe,’ retorted Phil Collinson, Stuart Blackburn’s predecesso predecessor. The rebuttal w would be more convincing if he had ha not declared, two years earlier, th that Coronation Street was ‘an ama amazing platform’ that really makes ‘ ‘a difference to the way people thi think. This show has always had a gay ga sensibility’.
His comment goes to the heart of everything that i is wrong with modern Corrie. Of c course, the show at its height always was as camp as a Christmas tree in the Blackpool Tower ballroom: that’s th what made it light entertainment, entertainmen instead of an unending grind of misery. m In the past 50 years ye there have been serial killing killings, murderous feuds, bereaved par parents, orphaned children, abductio abductions, abortions, cancer, Aids, ba bankruptcy and unemployment. Why would anyone want to watch that, unless it was glammed up to the eyelashes and always ready with a cheeky aside?
The show had great characters, drama queens who were almost parodies of themselves. There was Bet Lynch, the barmaid who made Lily Savage look butch. There was Ena Sharples in her hairnet, swigging milk stout and bullying the younger women.
There was Reg Holdsworth, the manager of Bettabuys supermarket, in his ridiculous toupee.
However melodramatic the stories that engulfed them over the decades, these characters — played by Julie Goodyear, Violet Carson and Ken Morley — were forever teetering on the brink of comedy. Hilda Ogden was voted the most
popular character ever on television in a Radio Times poll, not just because she was played by a fine actress, but because she was so human.
Twitching her net curtains as she spied on the neighbours, gossiping about Ken Barlow’s latest ladylove or Mike Baldwin’s new sports car, Hilda was irrepressible.
She could also be deeply touching. No one who saw it will forget the moment when, despite her show of indifference after her good-fornothing husband Stan died, she broke down in tears when she found his spectacles.
That was a tiny drama, as far from the posturing and headlines of today’s Corrie as you could get, but it made a much greater impact on viewers.
And in those days, the Street counted its viewers in the tens of millions.
At its peak, half the country was watching, with famous fans ranging from Cliff Richard to Victoria Wood, and Cilla Black to U.S. rapper Snoop Dogg.
Ringo Starr flatly refused to miss an episode in the Sixties. Beatles recording sessions had to be suspended while Ringo settled down in front of the box.
‘This is real life,’ he explained — and that’s how millions of viewers, especially its fan base in the North, saw it.
A quarter of a century ago, viewing figures could exceed 25 million. Much more recently, in 2010, the soap could still pull a respectable audience of more than 14 million. Today, it struggles to achieve half that.
Hardly surprising. It’s a chore to slog through yet another portrayal of racial angst or transgender anxieties, especially when you are aware that a festering atmosphere of factional friction and sexual slurs is said to poison the atmosphere backstage.
Unless Coronation Street makes a rapid return to the gentle humour and gossipy stories of its heyday, audiences will soon dwindle to nothing. If that happens, the Grim Reaper will be in at the death of a television institution. CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
ON TV — Page 55