ALTHOUGH the words “based on an idea by Tony Warren” appeared at the end of every episode of Coronation Street, few of the 20m viewers of the longest-running British soap would have been able to put a face to the name. It was an anonymity that Warren, who has died aged 79, greeted with a mixture of frustration and relief.
He was 23 when he persuaded Granada TV to commission “Corrie” as an everyday story of northern working-class life. 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.”
Granada bosses were equally sceptical. Eventually Warren stormed the office of Granada’s head of drama, Harry Elton, and climbed on to a filing cabinet, declaring he would not come down until he had the go-ahead for his cherished project. He was promised he could write a pilot.
He wrote the first script in a single night. By dawn he had created his triumvirate of formidable female characters: Ena Sharples, the busybody in the hairnet; Annie Walker, the landlady of the Rovers Return; and Elsie Tanner, the tart with a heart.
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 said it sounded like a brand of disinfectant. After toying with Jubilee Street, executives chose Coronation Street.
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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 process of handing over control as “like giving your house to the National Trust”.
One of his best lines came not on screen but when the Queen visited the set of Corrie in 1983. “Where is the real Coronation Street?” she asked. “In the hearts and minds of your subjects, ma’am,” he replied.
— The Times