Corrie - 50th Anniversary

[SpursFan1902]

Wow. I would love to see some of those really old epis. It would be interesting just to see if I could understand them!

[faceless]

I've never seen any of the really old ones, but I remember watching the series from about 1975 onwards with the family...

[faceless]

Coronation Street to air live to mark 50th anniversary
Kate Mcmahon
2/09/2010
mirror.co.uk

Coronation Street will be shown live for the first time in a decade to mark its 50th anniversary celebrations. ITV1 bosses are planning to air the episode in December this year, and are already lining up guests and an explosive storyline. A spokeswoman said: "Everyone is very excited, if not to say a little nervous. But we felt it was fitting to go out live to celebrate such a prestigious anniversary." Bosses were trying to keep the show a secret but Keith Duffy (barman Ciaran McCarthy) let it slip last week. The soap was also shown live for its 40th anniversary in 2000 featuring Prince Charles.

The spokeswoman denied they were copying EastEnders when 16 million tuned in to for a live show in February. She said: "Some of the first episodes were live. We have a proud heritage of it." Details will be released this month - though there is speculation it could feature the tram crash storyline.

[SpursFan1902]

If it is as good as EE's then it will be a treat!

[SpursFan1902]

[faceless]

Corrie gold: Julie Goodyear as Bet Lynch in Coronation Street in 1982
Coronation Street: 124 deaths (including 16 murders), 86 marriages, 52 barmaids - 'ey oop chuck, it's 50 years of Corrie
Tim Oglethorpe
3rd September 2010

Celebrations are under way to mark Coronation Street's 50th birthday, with the ITV show given an unprecedented accolade by a rival: a BBC docu-drama. Corrie chalks up another landmark this month, becoming the world's longest-running TV drama. Here, Tim Oglethorpe unearths 50 facts about a soap that was twice rejected by the BBC and condemned by critics after its first showing on December 9, 1960...

1. The first character in episode one was supposed to be a cat jumping out of a dustbin and making its way down the street to the corner shop. But the cat went missing just before the live show began, so the first scene was hastily reorganised to show two girls playing ball.

2. One of the girls was 11-year-old Manchester schoolgirl Lynda Belcher, later to change her name to Lyn Paul and enjoy worldwide pop fame with The New Seekers.
Julie Goodyear as Bet Lynch in Coronation Street in 1982

3. The show's first words were: 'Now the next thing you've got to do is get a sign writer in,' spoken by corner-shop owner Elsie Lappin as she handed the shop over to Florrie Lindley.

4. The only surviving cast member of the first episode is William Roache, who plays Ken Barlow. Now 78, he was paid £10 for each show - compared with the £3,000 he is reputed to get now. 'I needed to be convinced that it wasn't a mistake to sign up,' he recalls. 'If I had known it would turn out to be my life's work, I would have run a mile.'

5. Eric Spear, composer of the iconic Corrie theme tune, was paid £6 for his work. It is the only piece of music to feature in a survey of Britain's top ten favourite sounds (after laughter, rain, wind, waves, applause and the words 'I love you').

6. The longest-serving props are the Barlows' dining room table and a painting of a boy scout, The Pathfinder, by Ernest Carlos, which has hung in their hall since the beginning and has been reproduced as postcards and as stained glass windows in churches.

7. The original title sequence - showing terraced houses back to back - was filmed in Archie Street, Salford, which was demolished in 1971 as part of a slum clearance scheme.

8. The Street's creator, Tony Warren, who had been scripting episodes of Biggles for Granada TV, staged a sit-in in producer Harry Elton's office until he agreed to let him write a drama of his own - 'the Manchester I know, with dirt under its fingernails.'

9. Warren had made two unsuccessful attempts to interest the BBC; one executive fell into a deep sleep while he was explaining his idea. When Granada agreed - albeit reluctantly - to make the show he was under a watertight, £30-a-week contract, regardless of how much he wrote and how popular his work was.

10. For gritty Northern authenticity, characters' names were taken from gravestones in Manchester cemeteries.

11. The pilot episode was not deemed a success by producer Harry Elton who was about to cancel the show - until Agnes the office tea lady voted it a hit. She also suggested that the original title, Florizel Street, was wrong, 'because it sounds like a disinfectant'. It had been named after one of writer Tony Warren's heroes, the dashing Prince Florizel in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.

12. Granada boss Sidney Bernstein could not understand why anyone would want to watch a show about the north 'with all the boring bits of life strung together'. A 1965 script had Rovers Return landlady Annie Walker putting it more eloquently: 'One does get rather tired of this dreary landscape, this desert of bricks and cobbled streets, blackened chimneys piercing the sultry sky like jagged teeth.'

13. Warren originally gave Ken Barlow a sister, Enid, in the first script, but had second thoughts at the last minute, and changed the character to a brother, David - a professional footballer.

14. It fell to Ken Barlow to utter the show's first expletive. his use of the word 'bloody' in 1961 brought 83 complaints.

15. Pat Phoenix, who was to play the tough, matriarchal Elsie Tanner for 21 years, almost didn't get the part. She antagonised the director by arriving late for her audition and refusing to take off her coat. 'I'll leave what I'm wearing underneath to your imagination,' she told him.

16. With that teasing remark she set the tone for her character - Elsie Tanner went on to have 23 boyfriends, three husbands and seven marriage proposals.

17. Pat Phoenix died of cancer in 1986 at the age of 62. Since then, many have claimed to have seen her ghost backstage at the studios and heard her distinctive gravelly voice echoing down the corridors.

18. The much-loved character of snug bar dragon Ena Sharples almost didn't survive the audition. More than three dozen actresses were tested for the part, and if the last, Violet Carson, hadn't measured up, Sharples would have been cut from the script.

19. Violet Carson almost fluffed her first line as Ena Sharples when the cameras rolled. She was sucking on a Mint imperial and had to hastily swallow it when she heard her cue to speak.

20. Ena Sharples's hairnet remains one of the show's most enduring images, but Carson didn't wear it in the first episode. Before the next episode, she had slipped one on to protect her bouffant hairstyle and had gone out for tea. But she forgot to take it off for that night's show - and it stayed on for 1,147 episodes.

21. Violet Carson's casting brought an unwelcome reunion with the show's writer, Tony Warren. She complained about his 'cheeky, unprofessional behaviour' when she starred alongside him on radio's Children's Hour, when he was a 12-year-old actor. She also claimed she spanked him, although Warren denies it happened.

22. Doris Speed, who played landlady Annie Walker for 23 years, had virtually given up acting and was working for a brewery when she auditioned for the part.

23. Laurence Olivier had a part as a tramp created for him but scheduling problems prevented him from playing it. Distinguished actors who have appeared include Sir ian McKellen, Sir Ben Kingsley, Joanna Lumley and Stephanie Beacham.

24. Since then, the Rovers Return has had 13 landlords and landladies, 12 temporary managers, 52 barmaids - the best known being Bet Lynch - four barmen, 17 potmen and ten cleaners.
Corrie sidebar

25. Spirits served in the Rovers are a mixture of burnt sugar and water. Beer is mostly coloured water topped up with the real thing to give it a frothy head. The pub's food - including Betty's famous hotpot - is brought in from the studio canteen.

26. When the storyline called for the Rovers to be sold in 1995, one viewer from the Midlands sent a cheque for the full asking price of £67,000, believing it really was up for sale. The cheque was never cashed but hangs, framed, in the Coronation Street offices.

27. Encouraged by good audience figures for the first episode (torrential rain kept viewers at home with only two TV channels to choose from) the scripts quickly went for crowd-pulling drama. Just three weeks in, on New Year's Eve 1960, the first character was killed off when May Hardman, played by Joan Heath, collapsed and died at her home, No 13.

28. In all, there have been 124 deaths, including 16 murders and six suicides. To balance that, there have been exactly the same number of audience-pulling happy occasions: 38 births and 86 marriages.

29. The first child born on Corrie was Paul Cheveski, a son for Polish-born Ivan and his wife, Linda, on June 12, 1961. The most recent was Liam Jr, son of Liam and Maria Connor, in July last year.

30. Twenty-eight characters, including Theresa the turkey, have been killed off in road accidents. Another major disaster is being planned for December, when several more Corrie characters will die.

31. Ken Barlow and Gail McIntyre (Helen Worth) have had four marriages each. Ken sold his scooter to finance his first wedding, to Valerie Tatlock. He also married Janet Reid and wed present wife, Deirdre, twice. Gail's first husband, Brian Tilsley, was stabbed to death, she and Martin Platt divorced and husbands three and four, murderer Richard Hillman and kitchen fitter Joe McIntyre, drowned.

32. In 1982, the old studio plasterboard sets were torn down and the Street was constructed with real building materials, using 49,000 reclaimed Salford bricks for authenticity. It is paved with 90,000 cobbles.

33. Bill Kenwright, now a millionaire theatrical impresario, played barmaid Betty Turpin's son, Gordon, for several years from 1968. He still sends the actress who plays her, Betty Driver, roses every Mother's Day.

34. A strike kept Coronation Street off air for 11 weeks in 1979. The show returned with a special 'catch-up' in which storylines that would have taken place during the strike were explained away in a chat between Len Fairclough and Bet Lynch.

35. Famous fans of the show have included the poet Sir John Betjeman, who said whenever he watched it 'I am in Heaven'.

36. Jean Alexander played Hilda Ogden for 23 years but only used five pinnies and four sets of curlers. 'I'd repair them, rather than have new ones,' she said. She played landlady Mrs Webb in 1962, two years before her debut as Hilda.

37. The audience of 27 million viewers for Hilda Ogden's last episode on Christmas Day 1987 remains the highest ever for Coronation Street.

38. The show has won 90 major awards, including three Baftas for best continuing drama.

39. June Brown - best known as Dot Cotton in EastEnders - was Mrs Parsons, the mother of a musically-gifted son, Tony, in three episodes in the Seventies.

40. Last Of The Summer Wine's Bill Owen played unionist Charlie Dickinson in 1971. He helped window cleaner Stan Ogden form his own union - the Stan Ogden District union (SODU).

41. Prunella Scales - later to become famous as the matriarch of Fawlty Towers - played a bus conductress in 1961.

42. Corrie specials have featured Jack And Vera Duckworth in Las Vegas, with a guest appearance by Joan Collins; and Steve McDonald driving a van full of alcohol from France back to Weatherfield.

43. and Deirdre Barlow's border terrier, Eccles, is actuallyplayed by three dogs: Tess, Phil and Maeve. In the scene where Eccles jumps into the canal, it is Tess on the towpath, Phil in the water and Maeve being dried off.

44. Corrie is shown in 71 countries, including Australia and New Zealand. At various times, it has been seen in Estonia, Gibraltar, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Sierra Leone.

45. Several accomplished television writers have turned their hands to episodes, among them Kay Mellor (writer of Band Of Gold), Paul Abbott (Shameless), and Jack Rosenthal (London's Burning).

46. Spin-off merchandise has included Coronation Street Monopoly, a 1,000-piece jigsaw, musical mugs, knitting kits, boxer shorts and a Coronation Street Survival Kit.

47. A sit-com called Pardon The Expression was a Street spin-off. The 36 episodes starred Arthur Lowe as his Corrie character Leonard Swindley managing Dobson And Hawks department store.

48. Drag show in the Rovers in 1973 had barmaids Bet Lynch and Betty Turpin in a Laurel and Hardy routine. At a fancy dress party shown on Boxing Day 1966, Ken Barlow came as Lawrence Of Arabia and Len Fairclough as Batman.

49. Michael Parkinson , presenter Russell Harty and writer Willis Hall formed The British League for Hilda Ogden fans.

50. Hilda and Stan Ogden paid £575 for No 13 Coronation Street in 1964. Jack Duckworth bought No 9 from Chalkie Whiteley for £11,000 in 1985 and this week the current tenant, Eileen Grimshaw, had her offer of £82,000 accepted.

The Road To Coronation Street, BBC4, Thursday, September 16, 9pm.

[faceless]

I've added the BBC Drama starring Jessie Wallace, 'The Story of Coronation Street', to the soaps download section.

[SpursFan1902]

Cool, thanks Face!

[SpursFan1902]

Interesting that BBC did this as Coronation Street was Granada and there were so many slurs against the BBC in the show. Well done to them and to Jessie Wallace. It took me FOREVER to figure out that was her. I had forgotten that your post, Face, said that she was in it and it wasn't until halfway thru the 2nd part that I figured it out. I kept thinking "God that woman looks sorta like Kat but it isn't her voice" She didn't look or sound the same...Wonderful job.

[faceless]

I've not watched it yet, but every review I've seen has been very positive about it. It was actually produced by Granada for the BBC.

[faceless]

[SpursFan1902]

Funny how small the cast was in 1960.

[faceless]

[faceless]

1) SUNITA ALAHAN - Shobna Gulati; 2) DEV ALAHAN - Jimmi Harkishin; 3) BABY LIAM CONNOR - Ollie & Elliott Barnett; 4) KIRK SUTHERLAND - Andrew Whyment; 5) CLAIRE PEACOCK - Julia Haworth; 6) MARIA CONNOR - Samia Smith; 7) CARLA CONNOR - Alison King; 8) ASHLEY PEACOCK - Steven Arnold; 9) NICK TILSLEY - Ben Price; 10) CLAUDIA COLBY - Rula Lenska; 11) CHESNEY BATTERSBY-BROWN - Sam Aston; 12) BILL WEBSTER - Peter Armitage; 13) FIZ STAPE - Jennie McAlpine; 14) EILEEN GRIMSHAW - Sue Cleaver; 15) CHERYL GRAY - Holly Quin-Ankrah; 16) JOHN STAPE - Graeme Hawley; 17) CHRIS GRAY - Will Thorp; 18) TREVOR DEAN - Steve Jackson; 19) CIARAN MCCARTHY - Keith Duffy; 20) MICHELLE CONNOR - Kym Marsh; 21) GARY WINDASS - Mikey North; 22) RYAN CONNOR - Ben Thompson; 23) LLOYD MULLANEY - Craig Charles; 24) ANNA WINDASS - Debbie Rush; 25) EDDIE WINDASS - Steve Huison; 26) AADI ALAHAN - Zennon Ditchett; 27) ASHA ALAHAN - Tanisha Gorey; 28) PETER BARLOW - Chris Gascoyne; 29) KATY ARMSTRONG - Georgia May Foote; 30) LEANNE BATTERSBY - Jane Danson; 31) OWEN ARMSTRONG - Ian Puleston-Davies; 32) AUDREY ROBERTS - Sue Nicholls; 33) JANICE BATTERSBY - Vicky Entwistle; 34) GAIL MCINTYRE - Helen Worth; 35) NATASHA BLAKEMAN - Rachel Leskovac; 36) JULIE CARP - Katy Cavanagh; 37) DAVID PLATT - Jack P Shepherd; 38) JASON GRIMSHAW - Ryan Thomas; 39) TINA MCINTYRE - Michelle Keegan; 40) GRAEME PROCTOR - Craig Gazey; 41) SEAN TULLY - Antony Cotton; 42) SIAN POWERS - Sacha Parkinson; 43) MARY TAYLOR - Patti Clare; 44) HAYLEY CROPPER - Julie Hesmondhalgh; 45) NORRIS COLE - Malcolm Hebden; 46) ROY CROPPER - David Neilson; 47) TYRONE DOBBS - Alan Halsall; 48) MOLLY DOBBS - Vicky Binns; 49) PAM HOBBS - Kate Anthony; 50) IZZY ARMSTRONG - Cherylee Houston; 51) RUSS GRAY - Finton Flynn; 52) SIMON BARLOW - Alex Bain; 53) BETTY WILLIAMS - Betty Driver; 54) RITA SULLIVAN - Barbara Knox; 55) SALLY WEBSTER - Sally Dynevor; 56) KEVIN WEBSTER - Michael Le Vell; 57) DEIRDRE BARLOW - Anne Kirkbride; 58) ROSIE WEBSTER - Helen Flanagan; 59) KEN BARLOW - William Roache; 60) SOPHIE WEBSTER - Brooke Vincent; 61) EMILY BISHOP - Eileen Derbyshire; 62) LIZ MCDONALD - Beverley Callard; 63) JACK DUCKWORTH - Bill Tarmey; 64) STEVE MCDONALD - Simon Gregson; 65) BECKY MCDONALD - Katherine Kelly; 66) KYLIE TURNER - Paula Lane; 67) AMY BARLOW - Elle Mulvaney; 68) JOSHUA PEACOCK - Benjamin Beresford; 69) FREDDIE PEACOCK - Niall & Luke Beresford; 70) ECCLES; 71) SCHMEICHEL; 72) OZZY.

Pity they cropped out those on the far-right and far-left in the first pic...

[faceless]