Fab Photo Friday: Coronation Street girls on Blackpool beach

With thanks to the Blackpool Gazette for this wonderful picture and article from when Coronation Street filmed in the seaside town in May 1961. 

14 members of the Corrie cast of what The Gazette described as “the Granada television serial” came to Blackpool to film shots for the street’s Whit Monday day trip storyline. In the first of many visits over the decades Corrie was really breaking new ground almost exactly 50 years ago, as a coachload of actors, producers and cameramen left Manchester at 7.15am ready to begin filming in the Tower building at 9am.

First stop was the Tower Circus Zoo, where Lucille Hewitt, played by Jennifer Moss, aimed nuts at a co-operative monkey.
Then the three regulars of the Rovers Return, Ena Sharples (Violet Carson), Martha Longhurst (Lynne Carol) and Minnie Caldwell (Margot Bryant) made the trip to the top of the Tower.

Ironically, although Violet Carson lived in Fleetwood Road, Bispham, and Lynne Carol in Clinton Avenue, Blackpool, Margot Bryant was the only one of the trio who had made the ascent before. That was in real life, of course.

As trippers from Coronation Street, these ladies, along with the others in the cast did, according to the report, “exactly what every other visitors does, even to eating candy floss and wearing comic hats”. They also had their famous paddle in the sea, with the Tower in the background, an image which has become synonymous with having a fun time in Blackpool.