John Savident

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John Savident is the voice of choice
Dec 28 2007
John Highfield
www.dailypost.co.uk

JOHN Savident in full anecdotal flow is surely one of the great phenomena of British show business today, a spontaneous outpouring so entertaining that it should really be classed a national treasure and saved for posterity. Even the fact that he’s recently been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, now brought under control by medication and some changes in diet – ‘My least favourite four-letter word!’ – cannot dampen his enthusiasm for a good story well told. He can switch from a morsel on Hollywood icon Faye Dunaway to a snippet about Liz Dawn without pausing for breath.

Audiences will know John best, of course, as Fred Elliot, Coronation Street’s booming butcher and one of Weatherfield’s most enduring comic creations. The Guernsey-born actor grew up in Manchester and was a young Lancashire police officer for six years. He explains. "Do you remember John Stalker? I was with him. We were cadets and PCs together."

He was already an enthusiastic amateur, however, when the chance came to join a touring production of old musical favourite The Student Prince, starring John Hanson, in 1962. He took it. Over the next three decades, he appeared in TV’s The Saint, Callan, The Avengers, Doctor Who and Blake's Seven – not to mention Moll Flanders and Middlemarch and films from The Battle Of Britain to The Remains Of The Day. In 1994, though, he won a lasting place in the nation’s affections when he first blustered his way into Coronation Street as the redoubtable Fred Elliot.

"I based that on people I knew who really spoke like that," he says. "It was all to do with the Industrial Revolution and the Lancashire mills, where people repeated themselves because of the noise of the looms. It was still happening when I was at Mixed Infants. So I started to put it into Fred’s speech and people would say: ‘Are you allowed to do that?’ But I say bugger that! We had all these writers who wrote in the wrong accent!"

So Fred is gone but in his place comes another larger than life Lancashire character, the overbearing Mr Hobson in Hobson’s Choice. It’s a story that paints a hilarious portrait of class and gender in Victorian England. Set in Salford in 1880, it remains as entertaining, relevant and radical today as it did when written almost 100 years ago. "I didn’t want to do it really because it was another Lancashire character," he admits. "For years nobody asked me to play a Lancashire character, only once or twice before Coronation Street and it never really took off. But now I've done Fred and I’m lumbered with it."

What next? "I will tell you I won’t do any more soaps – you won’t find me in The Bill. They’ve even asked me to do that celebrity Come Dancing thing, I was horrified to hear. They’ve asked twice and offered me a lot but it stands for all I hate about television today."

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[Kezza]

Glad to hear he's still working -- I do miss him as Fred Elliot, though.

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Savident says he was reluctant to leave Coronation Street
29 December 2008

John Savident has revealed that he was reluctant to leave Coronation Street. Mr Savident, who played Fred Elliott on the soap for 12 years, decided to quit Weatherfield in 2006 as he wanted to spend more time with his wife, children and grandchildren.

Speaking in an interview to The People, the star revealed that he would have liked to continue in the show if the producers had been able to reduce his workload. He said :"I did think they might find some way to accommodate me. Quite honestly I was surprised and disappointed that they didn't try a bit harder. I told them a year in advance that I was going and then they took me out for dinner and said, 'We're not going to insult you, John, by trying to make you stay'. And I'm sitting there thinking, 'Please, go on, insult me'."

In the show Fred combined butchery with being co-owner of the Rovers. John said: "If they'd made things a little easier for me by letting Fred give up either the Rovers or the butcher's shop I'd probably have stayed but that option was never presented to me. So I just served out my notice."

John also said that TV bosses at Granada had upset many of the cast by making cutbacks on bonus payments for the soap actors.

He explained: "Granada were becoming increasingly mean. All the nice little extras that the cast enjoyed were being whittled away. The subsistence allowance - basically for working away from home - only got paid for the first couple of years you were in the show, not for five, as it had been. Holiday pay was slashed. I think Liz Dawn, who played Vera Duckworth, was in floods of tears and someone like Bill Roache (Ken Barlow) must have lost a small fortune. And then Granada reduced the weekly retainer we got for showing 'loyalty' to the programme, from £470 to £100 a week. Loyalty clearly doesn't mean a thing now, especially in television."

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Dead Fred will return to haunt Coronation Street
Coronation Street bosses have confirmed that Fred Elliot is to make a return to Weatherfield.
06 January 2009

Coronation Street bosses have confirmed that Fred Elliot is to make a return to Weatherfield. The dead butcher will return in spirit form to posess trainee meat seller Graeme Proctor, says a report in the Sun.

The spooky storyline will see Graeme (Craig Gazey) discover Fred's (John Savident) old straw boater at Ashley's (Steven Arnold) butcher shop. The supernatural trouble begins after Graeme starts to wear the boater and street residents are soon alarmed to hear the lad say Fred's trademark phrase: "I say."

Also, when barmaid Michelle Connor (Kym Marsh) compliments Graeme on his hat, he says: "Eeh, that's right kind of you Michelle, I say right kind - in't it our Ashley?" A street insider said: "This storyline will be absolutely hilarious. The character of Graeme is proving to be one of our funniest and this will be laughs all the way." They added: "We've even talked about having the hat exorcised, which would be fantastic telly."

Fred left Weatherfield in 2006 when he suffered a heart attack in and died in the hallway of Audrey Roberts (Sue Nicholls) house.

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Woooo, I say, Wooooooooooo!

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I’ve got no time for Corrie now, says John Savident
Natalie Anglesey
May 18, 2011
Manchester Evening News

Coronation Street icon John Savident – aka Fred ‘I say Fred’ Elliott – has little time for the show that made him a household name. Six years after his much-loved butcher character died of a heart attack, John sees no appeal in tuning in five times a week to follow the lives of Weatherfield’s current crop of residents. While many familiar faces still remain from his days on the Street, he admits it's the younger generation of stars who turn him off.

“Honestly I rarely watch Corrie now,” the 73-year-old admits. “Some of the young people just want to be on screen and have no ambition to act elsewhere – what future do they have when their contract ends? One of them asked me who this Laurence Olivier was I was talking about as he’d never heard of him! Olivier was my hero and I had the honour of working with him on a couple of occasions.”

Since John left Corrie, there has also been a noticeable influx of celebrities making appearances – another development in the soap world that he doesn’t welcome. “Don’t get me started on that score,” exclaims John. ”I took Sir Ian McKellen to task by asking how he could play a role in Corrie which meant some poor actor who needed the work lost out. He didn’t reply – just hung his head.”

But John’s place in Corrie legend is secure thanks to his 12-year stint as loveable Fred. Laughing, he explains, in cultured tones, that when he first got the role in Coronation Street, he copied the idea for Fred’s repetition from millworkers in Ashton where he was raised. “They used to shout and repeat themselves to be heard above the noise of the looms,” he explains.

“When I first arrived on the set all those years ago I’d no idea I’d stay so long. We filmed at a decent pace and I’d often put in a few dialect phrases which caught on with the public and people would tease me about them. People just took to Fred. When the pace changed to five shows a week, I knew the quality would suffer. My family were in Surrey but I was in Manchester, often going into work every day and never filming a scene. I was also waiting for heart surgery so I asked for a meeting and explained my situation. The producer didn’t try to dissuade me and it was decided I would go.

“Although I’d asked to leave, I wanted to go quietly and suggested that Ashley discovers Fred dead in bed on his wedding morning. But they preferred a big dramatic finish so as he was about to marry landlady Bev Unwin, he died on his last visit to Audrey. But I’ve no real regrets about leaving, apart from missing all my friends in The Street particularly the lovely Sue Nicholls who is such a lady, Bill Roache and the wonderful Betty Driver. Now most of my other friends have also left like Steven Arnold (Ashley) and Julia Haworth (Claire) who were the loveliest family. At least they were given plenty of notice.”

John’s in jocular mood because he’s returning to Manchester soon to narrate A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Manchester Camerata. “I really miss the wonderful Hallé Orchestra and my beloved Camerata,” he says. “I started compering concert performances with them and occasionally I’d sing. In fact, I recently appeared in HMS Pinafore as I’m a great Gilbert and Sullivan fan and loved every minute.”

Fans may be unaware that John has sung professionally, appeared in landmark films such as A Clockwork Orange, Ghandi and Remains Of The Day and performed at the National Theatre. “Not bad for a little lad who arrived in the north from Guernsey at the age of three and couldn’t speak a word of English,” John admits. “My dad escaped from the Germans during the war and we came to Huddersfield first and then Ashton where I grew up. My family spoke Channel Islands’ French patois – a kind of dialect – but we had to learn to speak English quickly or we’d always be marked as different.”

When he left school John became a policeman and in his spare time was a keen member of amateur dramatic and operatic societies before quitting the force not long after he got married to pursue acting full time. John rarely gives interviews since the court case nine years ago in which a man, Michael Smith, was imprisoned for attacking him with a knife. “There were so many lies woven by some of the press at that time,” he recalls. “I was hounded by the paparazzi for a while, but the people who know me well know the truth and that’s all that matters in the end.”

In private, John is a family man who enjoys spending time with his children and grand-children and is planning to take his wife Rona to Rome. “I think my appearance belies my sense of fun although people in the business know how much I love comedy,” he reveals. “That was the beauty of working on the Street – one week there’d be comedy and the next you’d be reaching for your hanky. Now, in what I call the tea-time of my career, I’ve turned down quite a bit of work because I had a heart operation and a new hip. But working on this script for Shakespeare’s The Dream has been an absolute pleasure. I’ll be using the text wherever possible set to Mendelsshon’s score and as it’s mainly the fairy scenes it’ll be delightful.”

Will John be catching up with his old friends while he’s here? “Definitely. But top of my list is my dear old mother who’s in a care home in Denton and is 100 this year. She refused to move south with us so we’ll have a lot of catching up to do. I don’t know if she’ll be able to make it to the concert which would be a pity because it’s a mixture of two of our greatest passions, theatre and music.”

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meh, the auld fart.