Philip Lowrie: We all became very good friends. Tony was bringing it to TV with a cutting edge kitchen-sink drama serial.Īnne Cunningham ( Linda Cheveski nee Tanner 1960-1968, 1984 ): Everyone spoke standard English in television plays in those days, but Granada was ahead of its time and there was this sort of northern vogue. He thought people wanted escapism but we were part of a new realism with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and James Dean and Marlon Brando in the cinema. William Roache: Bernstein didn’t want to do the show either.
I’d had one line in Dixon of Dock Green, but my agent had seen that this was a series set in Manchester, where I was from. Philip Lowrie ( Dennis Tanner 1960-1968, 2011-2014) : I remember we were having a coffee break from rehearsing on the Monday when Harry Kershaw came and said: “You’re going out live on Friday at 7pm.” We all fell on the floor because hardly any of us had done television. He has starred in more than 4,600 episodes, and had multiple relationships – most famously with his on-screen wife Deirdre (played by the late Anne Kirkbride ). Roache, whom Warren had spotted on stage, is the only member of the original cast still in the show.
My agent said: “Look at this way, it’s only going to run for a few weeks.” And in those days ITV was broken up into regions so it was like doing local radio. I had a flat in Primrose Hill and my career was about to take off. I’d grown up in Derbyshire, but I was a young actor on stage in London. William Roache (Ken Barlow 1960-present): I absolutely didn’t want to do it. Next: the search for actors to bring his characters to life. His work stunned the script editor Harry Kershaw, who wrote later: “You closed your eyes and you could see the antimacassars and the chenille tablecloths … You sniffed and you could smell the burning sausages and the cheap hairspray and the tang of bitter beer.”
Warren, who was 23, was allowed to write 12 episodes – plus a finale in case they bombed.
Elton agreed, despite scepticism from the Granada supremo, Sidney Bernstein. Desperate for an outlet for the characters buzzing in his head, Warren begged the producer Harry Elton for a shot. There was a yearning for recognition and self-assertion among the working class. But as a junior writer at Granada, which had only begun broadcasting in the still starchy world of TV in 1956, he grew tired of writing Biggles scripts.
Photograph: ITV/REX/Shutterstockīack in Manchester, Warren also absorbed the speech and personalities of gay men at pubs such as Paddy’s Goose.