Tony Warren

After years in the doldrums — in which he travelled across the US in a Greyhound bus and became “persona non Granada”, to use his words — Warren resumed his writing career. Full of boyish energy, he made a cameo appearance in the 50th anniversary of Coronation Street in 2010. It had originally been commissioned for just 12 episodes.

A former child actor, Warren was unhappily churning out scripts for a TV series about Biggles when he pitched his idea for a drama inspired by his boyhood in Lancashire. He excitedly told the BBC producer Olivia Shapley in 1959 on a train journey from London to Manchester, sketching a story set in “a little back street in Salford, with a pub at one end and a shop at the other and all the lives of the people there, just ordinary things”. She replied: “Oh, Tony, what a bore”. When he submitted The Street to the BBC, he heard nothing.

Granada bosses — despite being based in Manchester and with a duty to encourage the culture of the north — were equally sceptical. Sidney Bernstein, who founded the ITV franchise with his brother Cecil, liked to quote Alfred Hitchcock’s maxim that drama was “life with the boring bits left out”. Warren’s plan was to put them all back in.

However, Warren, cocky despite his lack of years, was nothing if not persistent. He stormed the office of Granada’s head of drama, Harry Elton, and climbed up on a filing cabinet, declaring that he would not come down until he had the go-ahead for his cherished project about the Salford back street.

He was eventually promised that he could write a pilot. His original memo set out: “A fascinating freemasonry, a volume of unwritten rules. These are the driving forces behind life in a working-class street in northern England.” It still sits in the producer’s office.

He wrote the first script in a single night using two Woolworths pencils. By dawn he had created his triumvirate of formidable female characters: Ena Sharples, the busybody in the hair net; Annie Walker, the snooty landlady of the Rovers Return; and Elsie Tanner, the tart-with-a-heart — Warren’s favourite.

Cecil Bernstein told Elton that the north-country dialect was “the language of Old Mother Riley and George Formby” and that nobody would take it seriously. Nevertheless, Elton arranged a screening for all the Granada staff in Manchester. They liked it.

Then there was a tussle to cast authentic voices. “We must use real northern actors otherwise it would appear patronising,” Warren insisted. He got his way — Violet Carson was cast as Ena Sharples and Doris Speed, who was 60 and had virtually retired from acting, was coaxed back to play Annie Walker. Paradoxically, Warren had carefully taught himself to speak in rounded, home county vowels.

Up to then the show was called Florizel Street. However, Bill Roache, who played Ken Barlow, couldn’t pronounce it and a Granada tea lady named Agnes — rather unfairly her last name is lost to television history — said it sounded like a brand of disinfectant. After toying with Jubilee Street, executives chose, at the last minute, Coronation Street.

It did not appear destined to survive. Television critics roundly panned it — although The Guardian, perhaps out of loyalty to the paper’s Manchester roots, suggested that it could run for ever. Regional channels were dismissive. The soap was not aired on the entire ITV network until May 1961 when it took off, establishing itself in the top ten most watched programmes.

Warren wrote the first dozen episodes but it became obvious that producing scripts for two half-hour shows a week required a team of writers. He described the painful process of handing over sole control as “like giving your house to the National Trust”.

He continued to write until the late 1960s, when inspired by the hippy “summer of love” he decamped to San Francisco, making sure to follow the advice of Scott McKenzie’s hit song to “wear some flowers in your hair”. Having been working since the age of 12, he said he had belatedly “decided to have a childhood”.

He was born Anthony McVay Simpson in Pendlebury, Lancashire, in 1936. Although the family soon moved away from the backstreet terraces to a semi-detached house in Swinton, he drew extensively on his upbringing for Coronation Street. His grandfather was a clog dancer and his formidable grandmother was the model for Ena Sharples. His father, though, had done well for himself, speaking several languages and serving in the Intelligence Corps in the Middle East in the Second World War before settling back into life in Manchester as a fruit importer.

Warren described himself as a “fey child” who wanted to be Noël Coward. At the age of 12 he wrote to the BBC and joined the Children’s Hour roster. His trips to London to broadcast scarcely interfered with his education at Eccles Grammar School, from which he was a persistent truant — he preferred to spend his time in Manchester Central Library reading plays.

Bullied by his classmates for being “different”, he decided that he was gay in his teens. He told his mother but she refused to believe him, insisting that he was just trying to make himself “more interesting”. He ran away to London at 17, hitching a ride on a lorry, and lived in a hostel while doing small acting and modelling jobs. His energies were redirected towards writing after a casting director made disparaging comments about his rather puckish appearance. He returned north to join Granada.

It was while working there that he came out as gay. He had put up with a barrage of homophobic remarks at a Coronation Street script meeting and told his colleagues: “I have sat here and listened to three poof jokes, an actor described as a poof, a storyline described as too poofy, and I would just like to remind you that without a poof you wouldn’t be in work.”

It was a defining moment. “From then on I never pretended to another soul that I was anything other than what I am. There wasn’t a closet big enough to hide me,” he said. However, he admitted that for several years until homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967, he lived in fear: “I never went past Strangeways jail without thinking, ‘Is that where I’m going to end up?’”

There was no possibility of writing a gay character into Coronation Street — although the fact that from the outset the strongest characters were female he attributed to his homosexuality. “I didn’t recognise that straight men were any good at all,” he said.

By the end of the 1960s, his inspiration was drying up and he started drinking and taking amphetamines to help the creative flow of his writing. In the end, it had the opposite effect; he was soon on morphine and the drugs “killed the characters” in his head.

“I was a ghost of a man who got up in the morning to have a drink and crawled home at night to hallucinate on LSD,” he said. After several years living in the US he returned to London, where he collapsed in the street and woke up in a psychiatric hospital.

Granada temporarily removed his name from the Corrie credits in embarrassment. However, he remained close to original cast members and was best man when the terminally ill Pat Phoenix (who played Elsie Tanner) married the actor Tony Booth in 1986.

He credited Melvyn Bragg and his wife Cate Haste with persuading him to start writing again, after Bragg arranged for him to speak at the Edinburgh festival. On the train back, he promised he would have a go at a novel and the result was The Lights of Manchester, which was published in 1991. It was followed by three more, including Behind Closed Doors, which he dedicated to Tim Justice, his partner of 12 years.

One of his best lines came not on screen or in his novels but when the Queen visited the Corrie set in 1983. “Where is the real Coronation Street?, she asked. “In the hearts and minds of your subjects, ma’am,” he replied.

Tony Warren, creator of Coronation Street, was born on July 8, 1936. He died after a short illness on March 1, 2016, aged 79