Corrie - 50th Anniversary

[faceless]

Coronation Street's bread display
A model of Coronation Street's Rover's Return pub - which has been built out of bread in celebration of the show's upcoming 50th anniversary - has been unveiled today.
24 February 2010

A model of Coronation Street's Rover's Return pub has been built out of bread. In celebration of the ITV1 soap's upcoming 50th anniversary, bosses of the show have joined forces with Warburtons bakery products and a specialist bread artist to create a carbohydrate-filled replica of the legendary screen nightspot. Coronation Street stars Jane Danson and Chris Gasgoyne - who portray on screen lovers Peter Barlow and Leanne Battersby - unveiled the model today at The Trafford Centre in Manchester.

Artist Lennie Payne - who has been working with bread for over ten years - has taken special care with the "intricate" project. He explained: "This is the biggest project I've ever undertaken and it's been great fun! The work has been extremely intricate - I've even toasted each slice of bread to just the right colour to imitate those infamous red bricks of the Rover's Return!"

Warburtons - who are a promotional partner of Coronation Street's 50th anniversary Best of British scheme - were also thrilled to help the legendary show celebrate their TV birthday in unusual style. Jane Sutton said: "It's fantastic to celebrate such a milestone in the history of Coronation Street - Britain's longest running soap. The Best of British Brands promotional activity is all about celebrating much loved family brands from the north of England, so we jumped at the chance to get involved!"

---------------------

If that's 'The Best of British' then we're all doomed!

[SpursFan1902]

They will never want for toast...

[faceless]

Coronation Street to be made into stage show

Long-standing ITV soap Coronation Street is to be made into a stage show to celebrate the show's 50th anniversary, it has been announced. The two hour production will take fans through the 7000 episodes and 2000 storylines over the years.

Coronation Street Abridged Live will open at Salford's Lowry Theatre in August. It will not feature any past or present TV cast members. Executive producer Kieran Roberts said the show would be a "treat" for fans. "The very heart of British television has been beating with the pulse of Coronation Street for fifty years. That's a lot of memories, a lot of drama, a lot of poignancy and a lot of laughter," he said. "I'm thrilled at the prospect of bringing to life on stage all the great stories and characters of fifty years of Coronation Street, and I'm sure the play will be a real treat for Corrie fans as well as a great night out in the theatre".

The show, which will also tour the UK, will be written by acclaimed playwright and long term Coronation Street scriptwriter, Jonathan Harvey. He will attempt to include all the favourite storylines over the years, as well as popular characters such as Ena Sharples, Hilda Ogden, Bet Lynch and Curly Watts.

[SpursFan1902]

Interesting idea....

[faceless]

Your chance to star in a Coronation Street scene
Dianne Bourne
June 19, 2010
Manchester Evening News

Could you deliver a withering put-down in the style of Coronation Street legend Ena Sharples? Or could you master the menacing stare of the soap's infamous serial killer Richard Hillman? If so, you could be in with a chance of a money-can't-buy prize to spend a day on the set of the Manchester soap, mingling with the stars of the show and walking the famous cobbled street.

As part of the continuing celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary year of the show, the soap's sponsors, furniture store Harveys, are launching a unique competition asking soap fans to give their own performance of classic Corrie scripts. It starts tomorrow at Manchester's Arndale Centre, when the Harveys Casting Couch will be in town and available for fans to film themselves acting out one of three famous soap scenes.

You could transform into Richard Hillman, as he confesses to long-suffering wife Gail all of his murderous crimes on the street. Or perhaps, if you fancy yourself as a bit of a comedian, you could try out the classic scene where Corrie icon Ken Barlow tries to teach dizzy blonde barmaid Raquel Watts how to speak French. With a straight face, you'll need to deliver Raquel's attempt to say what a lovely day it is, but instead trills to a stunned Ken: “Voulez vous couche avec moi, ce soir?” Perhaps you'd prefer to try out a classic scene from Corrie yesteryear, with legendary battleaxe Ena Sharples gossiping in the Rovers Returns with her pals Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst.

If you can't make it down to the city centre shopping mall between 9am and 7pm, there's plenty of time to enter the competition by calling into any of the firm's stores to perform the scripts on one of their sofas, or uploading a video of your performance of one of the three scripts, with all details on the website harveysfurniture.co.uk/coronationstreet.

You can also email your clip to castingcouch@harvey-furnishings.co.uk

All entries will be monitored to ensure they follow the scene exactly, and that they are in no way offensive before going live on the website. The public will then get the chance to view and vote for their favourite clips, with deadlines for entries November 7, to decide who wins the dream prize of a day in the fictional world of Weatherfield.

[SpursFan1902]

No thanks...I can just imagine what they would do to the token Yank on the street....especially since I have City leanings!!

[faceless]

haha, but it could b quite funny if you did something from Corrie in a really broad american accent

[SpursFan1902]

Except you haven't seen me act!!! C'est horrible!! I could play the part of the female that uses the most slang and then do it in a Southern accent (which I don't have BTW...)

[faceless]

Jessie Wallace plays Pat Phoenix Jessie Wallace plays Pat Phoenix
Beehives and battleaxes in Coronation Street's trip down memory lane
July 02, 2010
men.co.uk

Actors stepped back in time as filming began on a new drama telling the story of the making of Coronation Street. A host of famous faces descended on the set in Bolton made to look like 1960s Salford. Former EastEnders actress Jessie Wallace donned a beehive to play Corrie star Pat Phoenix who appeared as Elsie Tanner.

As revealed in The M.E.N Diary, the BBC4 drama sees a raft of stars play some of the key performers and producers of the soap opera, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Set in 1960, the show charts the beginnings of the Weatherfield soap and how creator Tony Warren fulfilled his dream of bringing characters he knew from Salford to the small screen. Warren has been a consultant on the 75-minute drama and his role is played by David Dawson.

Other leading names include Celia Imrie who plays Doris Speed, better known as Rovers’ Return landlady Annie Walker. Open All Hours actress Lynda Baron is playing Violet Carson, who starred as Street veteran Ena Sharples, and Jane Horrocks plays casting director Margaret Morris. Longest-serving cast member William Roache, who stars as Ken Barlow, will be portrayed by real-life son James Roache. The show will be aired during the Great Northern season this autumn, celebrating northern England.

[faceless]

Street legend Pat Phoenix's life was a real soap
By Alun Palmer
3/07/2010
Mirror.co.uk

The unemployed actress was up against 5,000 other hopefuls for a part in a brand new soap. But when the producer asked her to remove her coat so he could get a better look at her figure, Pat Phoenix slapped him down hard. "Cheeky young devil. You'll just have to guess at it, won't you?" The audition room fell silent and Pat believed she had blown her big chance. But in that moment she had just proved to Coronation Street creator Tony Warren she had the real-life spark that would breathe fire into the role of sex bomb Elsie Tanner.

Fifty years since Corrie's first episode, when Ena Sharples introduced Elsie as a woman with loose morals, former EastEnder Jessie Wallace is playing Pat Phoenix in a dramatisation of the birth of the Manchester soap. Winning the role of the feisty, flamehaired tart-with-a-heart and a heaving cleavage transformed Pat's life.

Tony Warren said the first time he heard her speak her lines was like sex. Dubbed the working man's Raquel Welch, then Prime Minister Jim Calla-ghan hailed her "the sexiest thing on television". Laurence Olivier was one of her many admirers.

Pat's real life, with an adulterous affair, three marriages and deathbed wedding, had all the twists, turmoil and turbulence of Elsie's. Born in the Fallowfield district of Manchester in 1923, her mother was an Irish girl who left her dad when Pat was very young. Pat's mum then entered, unwittingly, into a bigamous marriage with a Yorkshire journalist. The deceit was exposed when Pat was eight and her stepfather was jailed.

At a young age, Pat had dreamed of a glamorous life on stage but the stepfather she loathed was scathing about her ambition. He would say: "You've got to have beauty and talent and even then only one in a million makes it." But she lashed back, saying: "Well I'm going to be that one in a million."

After starting work as a lowly filing clerk, Pat did amateur dramatics in the evening. She slogged away in rep for 20 years and bleached and back-combed her hair in the style of Diana Dors. But back then, the looks that would later transfix millions of men held her back. She said: "It was hard for me then. If you weren't an English rose, you got damn all."

Pat married actor Peter Marsh in 1951, but it only lasted a year. Five years later she met Liverpudlian actor Tony Booth when they appeared in a play called A Girl Called Sadie in Manchester. He played a vicar and her a tart. The attraction was instant, their affair passionate but their relationship adulterous. Tony was married to Gale, whose daughter Cherie would go on to marry Tony Blair. The romance ended when TV lured Tony to London. Pat stayed in the North and landed the role of bold and brassy Elsie, at the age of 36.

"I was one of the first anti-heroines - not particularly good looking and no better than I should be," said Pat. "There was one notable difference between Elsie and me. She spent so many years drifting in and out of relationships - she had 22 lovers in all - that in the end she became disillusioned. I can honestly say love's been good for me." Fame brought fortune, but Pat remained down to earth saying: "I don't know what the word 'star' means. I am a working actress."

Her life intertwined with her Corrie character more than ever when she married the actor who played her on-screen husband, Alan Browning. But Alan's alcoholism sparked frequent public rows. Just as their fictional marriage collapsed, so too did their real one. They had already split by the time Alan died in 1979. Then back into her life walked Tony Booth, who had become a star in the TV comedy Till Death Do Us Part. In 1979 he nearly died in a fire and when he recovered he resolved to change his life and rang his old love.

"Pat was absolutely the most fantastic, vibrant woman I'd ever met in my life," says Tony. "Fate brought us together. Pat helped turn my life around." Childless Pat grew close to Tony's daughter Lauren, Cherie's half sister. Lauren, who has told of her poor relationship with her own mother, recalled: "My father was not interested in the mess he'd left behind (namely, us kids) but Pat was. One summer, she bought my sister and me fold-up bikes. But my mum sold them. We expect mums to help us develop self-esteem and to instil the joy of being female. Pat gave me that."

In the 80s, Corrie producers wanted to tone down an ageing Elsie and make her more philosophical and less glamorous. Naturally, Pat disagreed. The move to pour cold water on her character's fiery nature eventually sparked Pat's decision to leave the show. Elsie Tanner, she declared, was definitely not going to grow old gracefully. In 1983, Elsie was driven off in a taxi at night to start a new life with an old flame in Portugal. Pat then took a variety of TV, stage and chat show roles and even became an agony aunt for TV-am. But she acknowledged to the end: "I'll never shake Elsie off and I don't want to. Everything I've got I owe to Coronation Street."

Pat, a 60-a-day smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1986. But she didn't break the news to Tony for weeks. Only when she was seriously ill in hospital did she agree to marry him. She died a week later. Her funeral was no morbid affair. Instead a Dixieland jazz band followed her coffin. In death as in life, Pat brought vibrancy and colour to the rainy streets of Manchester.

------------------------

I didn't know about the story with her and the Booths. Every time I see Cherie Blair now I'll have that thought in my head...

[faceless]

Jonathan Harvey on his new stage play Corrie!
Jul 30 2010
Catherine Jones,
Liverpool Echo

TWO thousand storylines, 37 births, 115 deaths, 86 marriages and if not a partridge in a pear tree then there’s bound to be a Phoenix in there somewhere. It’s amazing Coronation Street scriptwriter Jonathan Harvey’s head isn’t spinning.

The Liverpool-born playwright has been juggling regular duties on the TV soap with his own play Canary (premiered earlier this year at the Playhouse before a London run) and now with Corrie! – a stage celebration of the Street’s 50 years which crams half a century of action into two hours in speedy Reduced Shakespeare Company fashion. A good thing then that he had a bit of help.

“My poor friend from Liverpool deserves a mention,” admits the 42-year-old who is currently working on Corrie’s big anniversary plot – strictly under wraps but rumoured to involve a fatal tram crash – due to screen in December. “Lyn Papadopoulos did all my research and I’m very grateful to her. She had to sit and watch lots of episodes. I said ‘I want this scene, I want this scene,’ – and she had to sit there and type all the dialogue out. It was great to write but really hard work trying to work out what was going to be in it. With all the major characters, just trying to work out what their journeys had been through the show, what scenes we needed to show, and stuff like that. Ken, Deirdre and Gail are the linchpins of the evening and other stories and comedy themes are dotted in and out to give a flavour of how the show’s been over the last 50 years.”

The result of Lyn’s (and Jonathan’s) labours opens at The Lowry in Salford next month with a small cast of non-Corrie actors. “It’s five actors playing about 50 parts, God love them,” laughs Jonathan. “The poor actors, they’re in rehearsals all day and then they go home and they’re studying archive footage from Coronation Street over the last 50 years to try and get the voices right. They’re working really hard.”

One of the quintet is Liverpool’s Leanne Best. “She’s marvellous,” adds the writer. “She’s playing Gail, Blanche, Tracey Barlow. She’s playing Florrie Lindley. Gail has a little leitmotif that every time she walks on stage she’s (adopts accent) ‘hello, my name’s Gail Potter, I’ve just moved to Coronation Street – I think I’m going to be REALLY happy here and meet the fella of my dreams. And then a different husband will walk on!”

There’s plenty of scope then for the humour for which Corrie has been renowned over the years, but it’s not all comedy in the packed two hours. Jonathan explains: “I watched some of the Reduced Shakespeare shows and they’re really good, but they’re really tongue-in-cheek and quite mickey taking. And I thought, I don’t want to do that with Corrie. Yes, you’ve got to have a sense of humour about it otherwise you can’t get through all those stories. But I felt, unlike the Reduced Shakespeare Company, there needed to be space in the play to savour big emotional scenes and the big fights on the Street and Gail discovering Richard Hillman’s a serial killer. You want to see those scenes and you don’t want to be laughing in them, you want to be hooked and moved and excited.”

Corrie! is at The Lowry in Salford from August 12-21.

[faceless]

Review: Corrie!
Soap stage show is right up your Street
John Jeffay,
August 19, 2010
jewishchronicle.com

Two of Manchester's greatest cultural icons kicked off a new season this week. United thrashed Newcastle at Old Trafford. And just across the Manchester Ship Canal, the cast of Corrie! scored their own hit with a stage tribute to Britain's best-loved soap. Jonathan Harvey, a long-serving scriptwriter for Coronation Street, has crafted a comic masterpiece for the ITV soap's 50th anniversary and the world premiere at the Lowry attracted a host of past and present Street celebs.

Harvey had set himself a daunting challenge - squeeze 7,400 episodes of Coronation Street into the pint pot of a two-hour stage show. He does it with a comic lightness of touch that is the Street's trademark, and with just five actors dashing through countless costume changes to play 55 characters. It is like a Reduced Shakespeare Company on cobbles. Harvey shines the spotlight on three of the most enduring personalities: Ken Barlow (four wives, 27 girlfriends), Gail McIntyre (three husbands) and Deirdre Barlow (three husbands, one prison sentence, several pairs of large glasses). Other characters get a passing mention; many are jettisoned completely. Plots that gripped a nation are boiled down to a few lines.

Directed by Fiona Buffini, it is quickfire and deliberately disjointed - the chronology is all over the place. For these reasons, plus the great writing and good acting, it works. The performers - Leanne Best, Katherine Dow Blyton, Josie Walker, Simon Chadwick and Matthew Wait - show remarkable versatility at capturing the looks and mannerisms of almost a dozen characters apiece (including a very masculine Bet Lynch, beloved brassy barmaid of the Rover's Return). Simmering storylines that were played out over months and gripped a nation are boiled down to a few terse lines of dialogue, with impressive comic effect.

Famous love triangles, Peter Barlow's bigamy, Steve McDonald's wedding drama and Deirdre torn between a "dull be-cardiganed husband and a sex-god" become brilliant slapstick. There are nudges and a winks to moments of drama that have become part of a nation's folklore. "Come on, let's cross this very busy road," says Alan Bradley, as he steps out in front of a tram. Or Ken Barlow's first wife Val telling the audience she is just about to plug in the faulty hairdrier. The one that's about to electrocute her. The audience responds to these moments of tragedy with fits of laughter.

Much of the humour comes from Harvey's parodying of characters and plotlines, which is done with warmth and affection, and the endorsement of Coronation Street creator Tony Warren. Hilda Ogden shows off her "muriel" - Ogden-speak for wall-painting - to a disapproving Annie Walker; Jack and Vera wish they were normal; teenage Tracy Barlow listens to her tapes for a decade then emerges from her bedroom and decides she is going to be a bitch; Roy and sex-change Hayley share their first tentative kiss. The whole pick-and-mix pantomime is held together by Charlie Lawson (who played Jim McDonald) as the narrator.

It starts and finishes with the acid-tongued Blanche Hunt in dispute with St Peter at the pearly gates, eventually taking her place in the celestial snug alongside old-timers Ena Sharples, Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst. "So go on," she asks, after this breathless sprint through 2,000 storylines. "Any gossip?"

[Twirley]

OMG - I wish I could get to see this! Sounds terrific!

[SpursFan1902]

I second that, Twirls!

[faceless]

From gritty to glitzy, Coronation Street cast star in glamorous Vanity Fair-style shoot to mark show's 50th anniversary
Simon Cable
31st August 2010

By 'eck, things have changed a bit in Coronation Street. These two pictures show how, over 50 years, the cast of Britain's favourite soap have gone from Northern grit to metropolitan glamour. In the main shot, they pose in revealing ball gowns and sharp designer suits for a Vanity Fair-style shoot to mark the show's half century.

It is a far cry from the original lineup's first chilly photocall, when tweed jackets and overcoats were the order of the day. In the centre of the 1960 picture is Ena Sharples, played by Violet Carson - the battleaxe whose word was law in Weatherfield. Next to her on the left is Elsie Tanner (Patricia Phoenix), whose tempestuous love life often incurred Ena's disapproval. Other old favourites include Annie Walker (Doris Speed) and her husband Jack (Arthur Leslie), who ran the Rovers Return at a time when Newton and Ridley's bitter was a shilling (5p) a pint.

Sleek and chic: Marsh posed in a plunging full-length dress


Full length and fabulous: Danson and King also wore slinky numbers


Dressed in their best: McAlpine and Kelley also appeared in the Vanity Fair-style shoot