CORONATION STREET: An Evening with Tony Warren
Granada Television’s ‘little experiment’ pleaded “Let me write what I know about” and, twice-weekly in 1960, he did.
Back in 2013, I braved a bitterly cold night on Saturday 23 March to join the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester*, then the only church in Manchester to be fully LGBT-led, to enjoy a very special evening with Coronation Street (ITV/Granada 1960-) creator and legend, Tony Warren. Hosted at Wilbraham Saint Ninian’s United Reformed Church in Chorlton, Tony was introduced by Reverend Andy Braunston and then regaled us with some highly amusing stories about his childhood in Manchester, how he became an actor, eventually arrived at Granada Television, created and wrote Coronation Street and then endured his battle with and emergence from alcohol and drug abuse. After a short break, the floor was then opened to the audience’s questions and Tony, rapidly losing his voice after his marathon bout as an eager and skilled raconteur, responded between gulps of water.
For those of us fascinated by the origins of Coronation Street and interested in Tony’s subsequent career, this was an often hilarious and inspiring 90 minutes. Christened Anthony McVay Simpson and born in Irlams o’ th’ Height in Pendlebury, Tony reminisced about life with his mother, his relationship with an absent father he first met at the age of eight, his short-trousered encounters with school bullies and his inspiring Aunt Lily who provided that classic Elsie Tanner line, “My God love, you’re about ready for the knacker yard.” Realising the bus outside Eccles Grammar School not only took him home but also travelled into the cultural melting pot of Manchester, he found his escape from bullying by bunking off to Manchester Central Library and engaging in an education provided by the likes of Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams and Thornton Wilder.
Taking his love of theatricals, Sunday school concerts and plays to heart, he enrolled at the Elliott-Clarke Theatre School on Rodney Street in Liverpool. Tony took great pleasure in describing how he blossomed under the wing of its flame-haired principal Shelagh Elliott-Clarke who declared that he was “blessed” to have talents as an actor and writer but if he should decide to pursue an alternative career Rodney Street could provide training of a different kind at one end with a school for shorthand and, at the other, a cathedral in which to pray.
After being expelled from Elliott-Clarke, he also recalled running away to London and an encounter with a working girl on the streets of Piccadilly whose repartee merely confirmed an ability to use his ear for dialogue already picked up from the women talking around his grandmother’s kitchen table. His acting school training and his knack for observing the idiosyncrasies of working class life would stand him in good stead when he undertook his famous sit in on top of a green filing cabinet in producer Harry Elton’s office at Granada Television. He refused to come down until Elton agreed to let him “write about something I know.”
“Are you in this?”
With much glee, Tony also took us back to his days as a child actor on Children’s Hour in the 1950s where he not only performed with the likes of Judith Chalmers and a young Billie Whitelaw but also had his first encounters with the unforgettable Violet Carson (who would play Coronation Street’s sharp-tempered Ena Sharples) and Doris Speed (Coronation Street’s pub landlady Annie Walker). He remembers Doris swanning into Children’s Hour rehearsals with a new raincoat and attempting to pass it off as “Balmain of Paris” when in fact under the label it was, as she admitted quite freely to her child co-stars, “Dannimac of Manchester”. Violet (or Violent as one viewer’s letter later addressed her), he reminded us, had threatened to smack his bottom because of his bad behaviour during the recording of Children’s Hour. She later thought of walking away from Coronation Street when she was reunited with Tony, horrified to think he was again acting with her. “Are you in this?” she asked him of Coronation Street and when he declared he’d written it she was moved to acknowledge that it was good. Tony said it was the only compliment he ever had from her.
Coronation Street did not simply appear out of nowhere in 1960 and Tony told us that its first incarnations — a drama called Where No Birds Sing and a comedy Our Street — were actually pitched to the BBC in 1956. He had also been bombarding Granada Television with letters, looking to break out of radio acting and modelling and into television. Tony remarked that many of the knitting patterns, which featured him on their covers, still turned up from time to time. Casting director Margaret Morris, who described Tony as a “beanpole with a baby face”, realised he was now too old to pass as a child and too immature to qualify for adult roles. It was she who suggested he turn his hand to writing and directed him to bluff Canadian producer Elton, a man he openly regarded as a mentor and to whom he owed a great deal.
Tony wrote half an episode of Shadow Squad (Granada 1957–59), the detective series Elton was producing, and sent it to him. At the end of the incomplete script, it simply stated “if you want to know how this ends telephone Pendleton 2437.” Despite the subject matter of drug addiction, which was unsuitable for the pre-watershed slot that Shadow Squad occupied, Elton thought the material was very strong and commissioned more scripts from Tony. Risqué material, he told Tony, could only be inferred and although prostitution could not be spelled out explicitly on screen this became the theme of his Shadow Squad script ‘Streets of Gold’. However, Elton felt Tony needed to learn more about working in television and secured him a job in the Promotions Department.
Tony remembered it was the script written for Bill Grundy’s commentary on an edition of Granada’s regional magazine show People and Places (1957–63) featuring Christmas pantomimes which caught the eye of Denis Forman, later to become joint managing director of Granada. “Who wrote this?” he demanded and Tony, believing he was in trouble, was despatched to Forman’s office where he was, much to his surprise, offered an exclusive contract at £30 a week. It was after contributing half a dozen scripts to an adaptation of Biggles (1960) when Tony picketed Elton’s office and persuaded him he could write something “about a street out there.” 24 hours later and episode one of Florizel Street (the Street’s original title sounded too like a brand of disinfectant according to a tea lady at Granada studios) was on Elton’s desk.
“You call my brothers, you call me.”
According to Tony, in their search to cast the character of Ken Barlow, actor William Roache was spotted sitting on an upturned bucket in an adjacent studio. Pat Phoenix turned up to her Elsie Tanner audition under various assumed aliases — Patricias Pilkington, Marsh and Dean — and Violet Carson’s late arrival as Ena Sharples nearly had the entire character scrapped from the series just as its first episode went into rehearsal. When asked how he knew Coronation Street had made its impact he recalled the actors who frequented the New Theatre Inn on Quay Street and gradually altering their greeting to each other, using “love” to replace the more affected “darling”, and remembered Pat Phoenix being approached at the bacon counter at Lewis’s and there asked, of her on-screen daughter Linda Cheveski’s (Anne Cunningham) estrangement from her husband Ivan (played by Ernst Walder, Tony’s partner for several years in the 1960s), “she’s left him, hasn’t she?”
However, Tony acknowledged that after the Coronation Street writing duties became the responsibility of a team he found Granada a less than tolerant place to work. At a story conference he was incensed enough to walk out after he had sat and “listened to poof jokes, an actor described as a poof and a storyline described as too poofy” and found himself surprised at the strength of his feelings when, after a fellow writer had indicated the comments weren’t directed at him, he stridently exclaimed, “You call my brothers, you call me.” Even though he never went on marches or protests, identifying as an out gay man was clearly a breakthrough for Tony and a brave thing to be out in the 1960s prior to the partial decriminalisation of homosexual offences in 1968. When asked by the audience what gay life was like in the 1950s and 1960s he gave a fascinating account of the various places, including Canal Street, where the LGBT community came together in Manchester. These included The Union Hotel, The Cafe Royal, Prince’s Bar and Grill (where, unaware of the venue’s status as a gay bar, Tony’s father took his family for a celebratory meal) and the infamous bus station cafe known as ‘The Snake Pit’ and frequented by drag queens and prostitutes.
Of the 1964 film Ferry Cross the Mersey, Tony remarked only the title remained of his original script after, relying on alcohol as a support, he failed to complete it. Despite the success of a three-part television drama about a black-marketeer, The War of Darkie Pilbeam in 1968, and writing intermittently for Coronation Street, he left the UK, ran away to Austria briefly, and then spent some time in San Francisco. There he found himself tear gassed during protests on the Berkeley campus at the climax of its decade long reputation as the bellwether of political and social uprising. With great honesty, he also described his descent into alcohol and drug addiction as he struggled to find inspiration. The culmination of this was his repeat prescription for tincture of morphine, to calm a poorly tummy, bought from a chemist who recognised the traits of his addiction and demanded more money to provide him with his fix. There was a sense of pride that cold March evening in 2013 that he had overcome these problems, happily clean (until his passing in 2016) after, whether you believe it or not, the intervention of a vision, an angelic figure in white, during a spell of cold turkey back home in Manchester.
He credits Melvyn Bragg’s wife Cate Haste as the inspiration to write his first novel The Lights of Manchester, published in 1991 after she had seen him in full-on raconteur mode at the 1985 Edinburgh Television Festival. Amusingly, he remembered talking to Victoria Wood and EastEnders producer Julia Smith about his speech at the Festival and taking great umbrage when, instead of the postcards they claimed they would use as prompts, both turned up with highly planned presentations. He was left to extemporise on the spot but it provided the spur to return to writing when he met Cate on the train back home to Manchester. Since, his life was reflected in the novels (each an autobiographical record of gay life in the 1960s and 1970s) that followed, with The Foot of the Rainbow, Behind Closed Doors and Full Steam Ahead published in the 1990s, and his role as consultant on Coronation Street reinforced his connection with his own creation, especially when the 2010 ITV production The Road to Coronation Street set out to beautifully capture Tony’s early experiences working for Granada.
Of the Street, he felt its continuing success was due to its ability to renew itself. He thought that the history of the exterior sets was a symbol of this change as its original wooden facades erected in the Granada Studios gave way to exterior construction in 1968 on disused railway sidings and to a full-size brick-built set that Tony memorably recalled was opened by the Queen in 1982. The Street was rebuilt again in 2013 on Trafford Wharf Road as part of ITV’s relocation of its northern production base to MediaCityUK. In 2014, the site named its Coronation Street studio building the Tony Warren building. Tony was awarded an MBE in 1994 and in 2008 received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Manchester Metropolitan University “for his contribution to ground-breaking television and creative writing which has helped put Manchester and Salford on the cultural map.” He passed away after a short illness on 1 March 2016.
*The Metropolitan Community Church, now the Metropolitan Congregation, was originally an American-based LGBT denomination and the community in Manchester was founded in 1992. Reverend Andy Braunston served as pastor from 1996. In 2012 the Church established a formal relationship with the United Reformed Church. The LGBT inclusivity of the URC — the first UK Christian church to allow their local congregations to register Civil Partnerships in their buildings — and the chance to be part of something British with significant resources on a local, regional and national basis, were powerful reasons to cement the formal relationship. In November 2013 it voted to leave the Metropolitan Community Church and explore a journey of discernment with the URC. In March 2014, at a meeting of the North West Synod of the URC, the Manchester community was formally designated a Mission Project of the URC, which was a further step on the way to becoming a fully-admitted URC congregation in due course.
Originally published at Corrie Blog in 2013. Revised 2024. All written material by Frank Collins (the author) is © 2024 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Please seek permission from the author if you would like to quote or re-use any of the author’s own written material.
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