Q: What are your earliest memories of Coronation Street?
“I have to confess my parents didn’t let us watch ITV for a long time. We were allowed Blue Peter, but not Magpie. I was probably aged about 10, around 1968, when I first watched Coronation Street. It is surprising how often, before I worked in television, you would happen upon the big Coronation Street episode or the big moment. You wouldn’t watch something for a while and then suddenly you would just be watching and that big moment would come on. Like Alan Bradley and the Blackpool tram.”
Q: What does your job involve?
“As Managing Director of Continuing Drama I have overall responsibility for Coronation Street and Emmerdale from both an editorial and financial perspective. I have been with Corrie for 15 years or so and with ITV for about 24 years.
“I go to the creative conferences when they used to happen in real life and now online. I’m part of the team that decides who lives, who dies, who leaves in a taxi. Ultimately I’ve got fantastic producers and executive producers. So those bits of my life are very pleasurable. The parts where you sit around a table with 25 writers and work out what is going to happen next Christmas or whenever.”
Q: How many people work on Coronation Street?
“Between 400 and 450 people work on Coronation Street including a regular cast of about 70. It has grown in recent years as we have increased the number of episodes screened every week. We produce three hours of television a week which is the equivalent of one or two feature films. And the same with Emmerdale.”
Q: You said at the 50th anniversary that Coronation Street creator Tony Warren had uncovered the DNA of a nation. His legacy lives on?
“Tony Warren was so insightful about the show long after other people would have stopped being so. He watched it right through to his dying day and he would always have fantastically insightful things to say about it. All of the producers would have a monthly or bi-monthly lunch with Tony when he would give them his opinion. And they always came back from that enriched and with a depth of knowledge about what the show was. We will always be indebted to him for that.”
Q: It is easy to forget how groundbreaking Coronation Street was when it first came to the screen in 1960?
“There were plays like Look Back In Anger. But for Granada Television at the time there were a lot of misgivings. Would anyone understand the accents? Would anyone want to watch a programme about the daily doings of a small street in Salford?
“We made that film The Road To Coronation Street and a lot of the story was in there. It was all genuine. Including the people talking about it in the canteen that made it the success it was. That’s when the founder of Granada, Sidney Bernstein, started to take notice and think, ‘Actually, hang on a minute, we’ve got something here.’ It was genuinely different for Granada to do and I think they were probably quite surprised at just what an instant success it was. I don’t think they thought it would be.”
Q: How has Coronation Street managed to survive on TV for 60 years?
“It’s a huge achievement. It is the mix. Realistic storylines which tackle strong subjects. The best storylines are the ones where you are sitting around at the conference and when somebody pitches it, your first reaction is, ‘No way can we do that.’
“And then the discussion carries on and the writers start to think about how characters would react in those situations. Then suddenly you realise it’s actually the best story you’ve got.
“So there are those big stories that people think, ‘Is that going to happen in my life? Is this something that could give me some guidance if it were to?’ When we did the Bethany grooming story we really were surprised at the chord it struck with people. I read an email from somebody saying, ‘I was watching the programme with my 12-year-old daughter and she turned to me and said, mummy, I think that’s happening to me.’
“It was just the most chilling thing. But that was one of those stories when you had thought to yourself, ‘Can we really do that?’ Along with, ‘Can we really do male rape? Can we really do Aidan’s suicide? Can we really do the Geoff and Yasmeen story?’
“It’s a mix of having big stories like that - and Corrie has always had them - with more soapy affairs and people getting in other people’s faces. And then the humour, which the writers are so adept at. Coronation Street has always been characterised as strong women and feckless men. I’ve tried to keep that tradition of having our men as feckless as possible and certainly our women are very strong.”
Q: How does the long history of Coronation Street help inform the decisions and stories of today?
“The history is one part of the mix. We have writers who go back a long way and have a lot invested in certain characters. They know all of the history of the show. We also have great researchers who keep us right.
“That’s the great thing about having 25 writers. You will always find two or three who are totally invested in a particular character and know everything about that character. That’s when it gets difficult if you’re deciding you need to kill somebody. You will then always have two or three writers who will passionately argue why it can’t be that person.
“It’s fun that when we did our 10,000th episode we went to Blackpool because Blackpool is the sort of place Corrie goes on its traditional charabanc. It’s fun to play with all of that history. An episode where people are joking about Deirdre’s glasses. It’s fun for people who have invested that amount of their lives in watching Coronation Street.
“But it’s much more than that. When Hayley Cropper died there was a national outpouring of grief. People wrote in to say, ‘Hayley has been married to Roy for longer than I have been married to my husband. And that’s why I am so devastated by it.’ People build up these long term relationships with characters.
“If we go wrong at all then people do jump on it. And where they jump on most is where we take a character into something the audience don’t think that character would do. Quite rightly. They are absolutely willing to think a character will do extreme things in extreme circumstances. But there are some fundamental things a character just would not do. Sometimes we have arguments about that around the table. Would Roy Cropper do this? Or not? And those are the most passionate arguments. The audience will go with us on pretty much anything apart from radically changing a character midstream.”
Q: It has been said that Coronation Street’s brand of humour and comedy set it aside from other soaps. Do you agree?
“I do think that is true. There is a particular type of Corrie humour. The kind of incisive humour that comes from the characters and from the hearts of the writers. I’m always in awe of the way the writers manage to find the humour, sometimes in quite bleak circumstances. That’s where the show works best. When it is bouncing between something very bleak. That’s where I think Corrie is at its finest.”
Q: How do you attract a new younger audience without alienating older fans?
“I read all of the duty logs about the calls and emails we get and, interestingly, older viewers are very willing to go along with things if they feel it is done in the right mood with the right heart. They are much more mobile of thought than some people might think. Partly because they have lived, they have seen everything and it takes quite a lot to shock an older person.
“It’s actually the younger people who are much more easily shocked than older people these days. So I don’t think we have a problem doing quite extreme subjects while still appealing to our older audience.”
Q: Social media now provides a real time reaction to storylines. Do you read it?
“I try not to let it make a difference. The soap gods mean they will eventually get their man. But that happens slowly. It wouldn’t be drama if what everybody on social media wanted to happen just happened. Then we wouldn’t have any drama. People in real life don’t always behave as you want them to. They behave how their character dictates they should.
“The Geoff and Yasmeen story is a case in point. For a long part of that story, perhaps maybe even until Geoff locked Yasmeen in the box, people were hating it. Really hating it. Hating Geoff, rightly, but also hating the story. How can we watch this man being cruel to this woman for so long? And then they suddenly got it and realised where we were going.
“We had plenty of time to change the story. We could have said, ‘Social media hates this story. We can go away from it.’ But we stuck to our guns. You have to do that with social media. You just have to say, ‘You will eventually get your satisfaction.’
“All of our sensitive and potentially controversial storylines are extensively researched in advance. We talk to all of the charities involved in stories and fully research. But in the end it does have to be drama.
“I do feel for everyone who may be going through a similar sort of thing. I remember, again with the Hayley Cropper story, quite early on when she first got pancreatic cancer there was a letter from someone saying, ‘My wife has got pancreatic cancer. Hayley has just been told that it is terminal. My wife’s only joy in life was watching Coronation Street and now you have taken that away from her in the last months of her life.’
“It was a sobering letter and it does make you think. But what I did think was, well, on the crew there are lots of people who have suffered from losing people due to cancer. Lots of people have personal things invested in the stories we cover. The writers, the actors and the crew. Life is full of that sort of trauma. All we can do, all we can promise to people, is to do it as honestly and as unblinkingly as we can. With a cast as brilliant as the cast we have got you can feel a degree of certainty they will get it right.”
Q: What is the story process from original idea to screen?
“We have monthly story conferences which look at the next block we are about to storyline. They involve all of the writers, the story team and the producers who sit around a table and discuss what next for this set of characters or that set of characters. Four times a year we have a long term conference and sit round for two days and work out what was happening from probably about six months hence to about a year ahead. The writers will pitch stories for their favourite characters. So we will have three or four competing stories for, say, the Nazirs or the Platts. Before virtual meetings the art of the pitch was everything. The writers are very funny people so they will pitch very funny stories in very funny ways and it can be a very enjoyable experience.
“The producer’s job, and to some extent my job, is to take, say, the three or four stories that have come up at conference, discuss them and say, ‘Which one do we like best? Could we hook into this, use that?’ And so on. So from those stories comes an outline of where the show will be going over the next year or so.
“Part of my job and part of the producer’s job is to look at it strategically and say, ‘What is going to be our big story next autumn? What is going to be our Christmas story?’ And also look at it from an ITV schedule point of view. What is going to be big in Britain’s Got Talent week? And so on. So we plan out the year.
“Then we layer that on to a monthly conference where we look at what is going to happen in the next month. The story office will put that on a big board with lots of Post-It notes and they will look for an A-story, a B-story, a C-story and sometimes D and E. And the A-story will be the tagging story that week. The big main story and the one you end the episode on. That will then dip down the next week and another main story will come out. We will work out a month in that way. It’s a very colourful board because every family has a different Post-It note colour. We also look at it and think in terms of large things or a big stunt and think, ‘Can we achieve that in terms of production?’
“Once we’ve done that it is written up as a storyline document. That will then divide into episodes and then the writers will write the stories with all of the beats in them. Individual writers will be given those episodes with those stories. And then it’s up to the writer to pour in the magic. They have to hit all of those beats. Not steal beats from the next episodes, which are what writers are always very tempted to do. They will think, ‘Oh, I can have that really juicy conversation in my episode.’ They have to restrain themselves from doing that. Think about what has gone before and how the characters would react in those situations. And then they have to think a little bit laterally and say, ‘Where should I set this argument between people?’
“The magic the writers bring is the ability to cleverly weave much deeper things into, ostensibly, much shallower conversations. In the way we all do. A classic example was written by Simon Crowther. A conversation between Kylie and David Platt. They had both been out to the shops and bought a cucumber. So they had this big row. But, of course, the entire thing wasn’t about the cucumbers, it was about the state of their relationship.
“Once the writers bring their magic to it, the script editors come in and they do two or three drafts of that script, maybe changing things because we can’t get hold of that set or a particular actor for that time. Or the director wants to do it in a different way. Then that becomes the shooting script and that’s what we go and film.
“In terms of the actual genesis of the ideas, the writers are very different. Some of the storylines come up from the story office. Some come from the producers. Some of them come from the writers. But a lot of the writers have been in the story office. That’s where they cut their teeth. So they have a story brain. They are magpies. They are out there collecting phrases and stories. Listening to the world.”
Q: Is there a route into Coronation Street for voices of all kinds?
“I have always taken the view that the more diverse the team, the better the stories. We try to have writers who have lived a bit. In the past people have been social workers or teachers in another life and have turned to writing. Writers should come from different backgrounds. Comedy writers and theatre writers. Also diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity and orientation and geographically diverse. There are lots of different groupings among the writers.
“What that makes for is people coming at things with a more inquisitive and broader approach that improves the writing. The best stories are the ones where people just tear them apart to begin with. Somebody will pitch something and you think ‘This is ruthless.’ But by tearing the story apart people then start to put it back together again. Sometimes it comes out remarkably similar to how it was pitched in the first place and sometimes it is entirely different. It is a collaborative process. Coronation Street is a writer-led show. That’s the way Tony Warren wanted it and that’s why it works so well.”
Q: Do you think some people underestimate the skill and talent required to produce a show like Coronation Street?
“There is so much snobbery about soaps. Our writers produce top class scripts week after week after week. They love the genre. It’s the most immediate way of getting your thoughts, and some of your spirit, on screen. At its best, soap is the highest form of drama.
“A soap actress once said to me, ‘It’s not that hard, is it? It’s just two people shouting at each other in the street.’ Well, on one level it is. But on another level it is much more than that. Including a blueprint for going through life. I think the pandemic has shown that more than anything.”
Q: Do commercial pressures impact on the show?
“It is interesting the extent to which ITV advertisers are on board for the radicalism of the show, in a way. I’m not sure you would get that in America. There are times in America where advertisers would shy away from some of the trickier subjects Coronation Street deals with.
“Advertisers are quite commercially savvy. And certainly sponsors are too. They like to know when we’re doing these tricky subjects. But I have never once had a sponsor or an advertiser say, ‘Hang on a minute, should you really be doing that?’ That is to their credit. They want to be associated with something that does get to people.”
Q: Bill Roache has played Ken Barlow since the very first episode on December 9 1960. That is quite an achievement.
“Bill Roache is the longest serving soap actor in the world. What an amazing career. And he is now looking younger than ever. There must be a portrait in an attic or something. It’s quite an achievement to have been on screen for 60 years. Bill is a real marathon runner. It is incredible.
“You can throw anything at him. For example, the storyline set in the posh retirement community. And he is very funny because he plays it so real. You can also suffer with him as Ken deeply agonises about Peter’s drinking. He is an everyman in the sense he can span it all. When he stands on the Street and looks up at it, that’s when the history does really hit home.
“One of the things that is lovely about the show is if you take a character like Daniel - it’s a cycle. He is reliving Ken’s early life in a way. It’s an aspiration of doing better through education and so on. But in the end it is the pull of family and the pull of the Street. I like the parallels between Daniel and Ken. They really do resonate.”
Q: What issues did you have to overcome when filming resumed after the pandemic lockdown?
“They divide into off screen and on screen. Off screen was about security and safety for everybody. Early on we took the decision that no-one should be closer to each other than two metres - cast or crew or anyone else. That dictated a whole lot of stuff like how many people we could have on set, the complexity of shots and so on.
“It also meant people had to think about how they could appear to be closer than two metres but actually not be. There was a whole new language that the directors, the camera people, lighting and the actors had to learn. The actors had to learn a little dance they do between each other, ‘I’ll come forward, you come back…’
“When I watch episodes now I don’t really notice any social distancing. But there actually is. I know that because everyone is wearing buzzers and they buzz if anyone is closer than two metres to them. It’s easier inside because you can use a bit of furniture, somebody can be making a cup of tea in the background and so on. It’s slightly more noticeable outside where people walk down the street and one person is walking in the gutter and the other person is walking on the pavement. Or somebody is rushing along and the other person is rushing to keep up, which is another way of doing it.
“Those are the superficial things. I think more germanely it’s about how to keep the interest going in the stories. How to tell those stories when a little bit of soap is about the thrill of blowing cars up, doing something unexpected or spectacular.
“But there was a thought about, ‘Is the world changing? Does the world want to be a little kinder than it was? Is the community of Coronation Street all the more important in a world where we have all found we are not always immune or as clever as we thought we were?’ So I think there has been a little shift in the tone of the show towards a slightly more supportive community. Also looking at what is important in family.
“The biggest issue for us has been trying to adhere to the ever changing rules nationally and between the nations for things like face masks, some businesses being open and others not. How big a household can you have? How many people can you interact with?
“With masks, for example, the watchword has been to respect masks but enjoy the drama. We did shoot an intense scene where two people had masks on and, frankly, after 25 seconds it became farcical. It became comedic and not in a good way. So we had to take some dramatic license. The view we took is that people are seen wearing masks in the same way as they appear in real life. But people will take their masks down in order to have a conversation. And I think the audience has gone along with that and feels that is fine.”
Q: How have the original plans for the 60th anniversary changed due to the pandemic?
“Two or three years ago we started talking about what the 60th anniversary was going to have in it. It’s difficult when you have done what we did for the 50th and that live episode. We had plans in place for something that was going to be big and then the pandemic happened.
“So what we have done is concentrate on the stories we have running at the moment and peak them during the week. We will have a good whodunit and a great chapter in a particular story. And we will have a community story where our community has to rally together to save the street. That has been done before. I’ve seen Ken sitting down on the cobbles in past episodes. But this is a more Manctopia-type threat to the street which feels more modern. Rising to the challenge of that.
“But there will be a stunt for the 60th anniversary and a little bit of the spectacular still there. We are going to do ‘close contact cohort’ for the first time. Which basically requires two or three of the actors to be tested every two or three days and for them to isolate only with themselves. And the stunt crews to do the same. So they can be within two metres of each other for this particular stunt.
“It’s a balance of two safeties. The stunt people have to be there to make sure our actors are safe. And that is really important. As is people not spreading the virus. So it’s a combination of using this testing regime and a bit of isolation to allow us to film this stunt in that way. It is new territory for us.”
Q: A street created by Tony Warren has been a thread through so many viewers’ lives. A place we can escape to. In some cases for 60 years. What are your thoughts about that?
“Coronation Street is very special. It’s about the humanity of seeing characters developed through the brains, intelligences and hearts of so many people. And seeing how they deal with situations you know you may have to deal with yourself in life. It’s a guide to humanity with a little bit of comfort blanket thrown in along with a little bit of sharp, northern wit. People drift away from Coronation Street and they drift back. The great thing is it is always there for them.”
Q: What are your hopes for the next 60 years of Coronation Street?
“I hope Coronation Street continues to be modern. That after I have stopped somebody doesn’t come in and say, ‘What we like is about Coronation Street is it’s nostalgic, harking back to an old era.’ I used to have big discussions with David Liddiment, former director of programmes at ITV, about what would Coronation Street really be like if it was in Salford today? Would The Kabin have a metal grill and should we knock down the medical centre and put a block of flats there?
“For me that is all cosmetic. It is more about the characters. Do the characters feel modern? Is Gemma the sort of person you come across in the street in Manchester? If those characters are modern and not a parody of themselves I don’t think it matters what buildings they live in.
“It is an honour to do the job I do and be a part of Corrie. If the writers are the keepers of the show’s ‘holy flame’ then maybe I’m the person with the match. But I’m only allowed to light it from time to time. It’s a very privileged position to be in.
“So long as we are true to how things are out there in the real world then I don’t think there is much doubt that Coronation Street will be around for another 60 years.”
Glenda Young
Twitter: @Flaming_Nora
Facebook: GlendaYoungAuthor
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