About Coronation Street
It was 65 years ago, on 9th December 1960, that the first episode of the TV soap Coronation Street was broadcast on ITV. The programme, then as now, centred on a terraced street in the fictional town of Weatherfield, in Greater Manchester. It was based on Salford, the hometown of the series’ creator, Tony Warren – real name Anthony McVay Simpson – an actor and later an acclaimed novelist, who died in 2016. It was said he came up with the idea on a train journey. The original name for the Granada series was Florizel Street, but this was widely criticised, and eventually the producer Stuart Latham made a unilateral decision in favour of Coronation Street – quickly shortened in common parlance to Corrie. It was at first broadcast twice weekly, increasing its run time more recently. The first episode got mixed reviews: the Daily Mirror predicted that it would last only three weeks and said it was doomed from the outset.
The 10,000th episode was broadcast in February 2020 and this year it is averaging about four million viewers per episode, despite competition from ‘new’ soap operas such as Channel 4’s Brookside (launched in 1982) and the BBC’s EastEnders (1985).
In 1981 the wedding of Ken Barlow and Deirdre Langton was watched by more than 15 million viewers – more than ITV attracted for the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer two days later. And on 8th December 2000, the Prince (now King Charles III) appeared as himself in a live, hour-long episode celebrating Corrie’s 40th anniversary.
Image – cropped version of Manchester : Coronation Street by Lewis Clarke, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
