He says: "It’s really going to kick off for Karl shortly. He has been set up as a gambler and a dodgy character so it should be quite fun but very hard work and there’s a nice little twist in it. I’m really looking forward to this and I hope I do it justice but I know it will be very hard work.”
John says Corrie is still the only soap he watches and he is a huge fan. When producer Phil Collinson offered him the part, he did not need a second to think about it. A few weeks later, behind the bar of The Rovers Return, it suddenly came home to him exactly where he was.
John said: “It was a bit, ‘Oh my God, so this is actually it’. "What is slightly intimidating is standing there pulling a pint and the person on the other side of the bar is someone like Steve McDonald or Sean Tully. They’ve all worked behind the bar and you know that used to be their space and now you’re invading it and they’re kind of looking at you thinking, ‘I wonder how he’s going to do’.”
But that does not stop John describing Corrie as “one of the friendliest sets he has ever been on”. He added: “They are all amazing. No one talks too much about acting. It’s all very casual.
“One of the first people I met was Annie Kirkbride (Deirdre) and she didn’t come up to me and shake my hand or ask who I was. She just said, ‘Oh, hello – what’s your star sign?’ I said, ‘Scorpio’. She said, ‘Lovely, you’ll get on with him and her’. She started going on about astrology. There are very few people who pull rank in the show. None of that starry nonsense goes on simply, I think, because there are so many – there are 65 adult actors and about 10 kids. Half of them do most of the work but it still means there are about 70 people.”
John also revealed that Karl will get a job in Streetcars when Stella pushes him into getting a proper job. He says: “Those scenes are great fun because it’s the only laddie place in Coronation Street – the soap is basically about women. It’s about strong women and weak men. But me, Craig and Simon in the office are just having a laugh, chucking darts, messing about and talking about women and football. Unfortunately, a lot of these scenes get cut because, if they need to drop something, they’ll cut a scene that doesn’t really add to the story.”
With the Street’s imminent move to a new location in Salford, however, that might change. The new set will see the actual street – currently only wide enough for one car – becoming much broader, allowing two vehicles to pass. This could mean John and the boys being filmed just hanging out in their taxis and chatting rather than so many scenes in the mini-cab office.
John said: “But we love it in there because it’s our own lads’ hideaway – away from the madness of all those domineering women.”
Read the full interview here.
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