DO you notice people who play the small parts in television dramas? You know, the barman polishing glasses in the background, the waitress, the bus conductor?

If you don’t — spare them more than a glance next time. You might be watching a television star in the making.

It isn’t enough to be a first-class stage performer if you are going to succeed on television. You have to be trained for the new medium — and for this reason most television companies have a system of trying out promising actors and actresses with small roles.

One system was initiated, in fact, by Margaret Morris — who has just taken over as producer of Coronation Street but who was then head of casting.

“In those days all actors and actresses in our plays were imported from London,” said Margaret. “But we knew that there was a huge reservoir of virtually untouched talent in the North itself, and we wanted to get that talent onto our screens.”

The Casting Department travelled thousands of miles up and down the region, following tip-offs — visiting scores of theatres, interviewing hundreds of performers.

Margaret made a number of real television discoveries.

Peter Adamson was one of her most exciting. Peter was working at Sale Repertory Theatre when Margaret spotted him.

“He had a rugged romantic quality, and a marvellous comedy ability,” she said. “But hardly any television experience.”

So Peter was introduced through bit-parts in a number of series and made a big impression with a small part in one in particular.

“And by the time Coronation Street came along, he was more than ready for the part of Len Fairclough,” she said.

“Pat Phoenix was another actress with a first-class repertory reputation but little television experience,” said Margaret.

Pat was first seen on ITV screens in a small part in The Verdict Is Yours. And her magnetism marked her out for future stardom immediately.

Doris Speed and Arthur Leslie were both bom into the theatre business — but they, too, went through the “digestive” process.

“Doris gave a most memorable performance as a precise and businesslike lady magistrate in a court series,” said Margaret.

“Arthur used that great quality of gentleness to best effect in one of his series. And after those they were natural choices for Jack and Annie Walker.”

Bill Roache came from repertory in Oldham to play the lead of a soldier with a social conscience — “a boy very similar to Kenneth Barlow” — in a play called Marking Time, after two other tiny initiating parts.

Ivan Beavis was the greatest gamble of all — because Margaret had only seen him in a Manchester amateur production before giving him his first chance.

But by the time casting was under way for Coronation Street, Ivan was already some thing of a television “veteran” with half a dozen brief appearances in other shows.

The post Learning to live in Coronation Street appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

YOU can’t always boil it down to imagination, nerves, or even indigestion!…

And people who have once had a sensation of the supernatural say they can never forget it — whether it is a premonition of future events, a hallucination, or that sense of having lived through a situation before.

Many viewers will give second thoughts to such experiences as a result of Granada’s Wednesday One Step Beyond, which dramatises outstanding and bizarre cases of psychic phenomena.

The first episode in this new series follows a young couple driving to their honeymoon hotel. All should be blissful — and is until the bride describes the landscape around the place they will be staying — a landscape she has never seen before.

The bride asks her husband to stop the car at a point overlooking the ocean. Then suddenly she speeds away, marooning her bewildered husband. What was the significance of the girl’s vision?

Another chilling episode tells of a young woman who unaccountably has a preview of the future at a party. She predicts a dangerous train trip for a sceptical guest. But when the guest boards the train his scepticism peels off as he goes one step beyond the realm of human understanding.

To find out if such strange phenomenon really do exist I asked a group of celebrities to tell me any of their real-life experiences which had taken them that extra “step beyond” explainable happenings.

Coronation Street star Pat Phoenix is someone who says she has fairly recent evidence of psychic phenomena. Since she recently moved into a Georgian house in Sale, Cheshire, she has discovered “a rather cosy sort of ghost.”

“I first began hearing a sound as if someone were getting out of bed on the floor above me, at about 10.30 each evening. Then later, when I was alone, I looked through the glass door leading to the hall and saw a small beige-coloured figure with white hair, holding what seemed like a candle.

“At first I thought it was imagination; but it happened again, so I invited some of my more sceptical friends to come and see for themselves.

“Sure enough, around 10.30 they saw her — it seems to be an old lady — crossing the hall to go upstairs carrying either a candle or a bowl of soup. One of my friends rushed out but couldn’t find anything.”

Another star who says she has always been sensitive to the supernatural is 1961 TV Actress of the Year Ruth Dunning.

“I often have premonitions,” she told me, “though not as many as I used to have when I was younger. Sometimes they’re dreams, and at other times its a spur-of-the-moment instinct of something that is going to happen.

“Thank goodness my experiences in this line have all been pleasant. For instance, I knew I was going to marry my husband when I first met him, at a party. And shortly before I received it I had a MOST uncanny premonition that I was going to win my award — though I hardly dared to believe it. And at that time the panel had not even begun to consider the short list.”

Actor Bill (“Snudge”) Fraser tells of perhaps the only case Forces’ history when a billet had to be evacuated because it was listed as ’haunted’.

But this was no Army Game — it actually happened when Bill was a corporal in the Army during the last war.

“We had to spend a time in Bradford,” said Bill, “and six of the men and myself were billeted in a big old empty house. For three nights we couldn’t sleep because of the noise of footsteps, banging, wood-chopping and tapping.

“But although the place was thoroughly searched, they couldn’t find any natural explanation of the noise. So we were moved out and the place was listed as ‘haunted’.”

Newscaster Huw Thomas said he had frequently had that “I’ve-been-here before” feeling.

“I know that many people have this sort of psychic experience,” he said, “but I still find it quite frightening at times.”

Huw is fervently hoping that his premonitions don’t extend to the dream world. He keeps having a dream in which he completely mislays some of his news sheets and has to carry out a frenzied and unsuccessful search on camera — with no one to lend a helping hand!

It wasn’t a dream, but a very vivid form of hallucination, which Bob Monkhouse recalls as his sinister experience. It happened in 1946 when he was working as a cartoon film animator at Cookham, Berkshire.

He and eight other young cartoonists were invited to spend Halloween at an old mansion.

“I was sleeping near the top of the stairs on the first landing,” said Bob, “and most of the others were on the top floor. At about two in the morning I woke up to a most amazing sensation.

“There was an almost blue, electric atmosphere about the room. We found later we’d all had a similar sensation.

“Suddenly, I heard the grandfather clock at the top of the stairs begin to make a noise as though rocking to and fro. The rocking became slower and the movement more ponderous, until finally, after a long pause, I heard it fall over.

“There was a smashing, slithering, sliding and jangling sound as it slipped down the stairs and into the hall, where there was another sound of splintering glass on the wooden parquet floor.

“Everyone in the house had heard it and rushed out to look at the damage.

“But the clock was still standing in its place.”

Of course, Bob couldn’t resist rounding off his psychic experiences with a spinetickling special:

“It was Walpurgis Night.

“I awoke with a jerk — who was sharing rooms with me. Tumbling from my white lips came the story of my dream, in which I saw two head hunters. They were watching Jayne Mansfield make a movie in Africa.

“Ten years later, to the very year, that dream was far from my thoughts as I sidled in through the exit door of my local cinema. There, on the screen was Jayne Mansfield in an African jungle film. And who do you think was in the background? The two head hunters? No, it was Tab Hunter and Ian Hunter.”

Stories of the supernatural have always given rise to a great deal of scepticism. And one man who has a number of doubts about it all is former Fleet Street journalist the Marquess of Donegall.

“I have investigated quite a few stories of the supernatural in my time, and each one turned out to be a fake of some sort.”

Compere-host Hughie Green also has his doubts as to the existence of some so-called psychic phenomena.

“The feeling a person gets that he has done something or been somewhere before is nearly always explained by the fact that the person is tired at that time. Because of this, part of the brain is thinking a step ahead of the other — so that when the thought registers in the other part of his brain, he has what he calls a psychic sensation.”

There are possibly similar explanations for all the other psychic phenomena that surround us. But maybe it’s safer to leave them one step beyond us.

The post Can we really go one step beyond? appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

‣ Introduction by TONY WARREN who brought the street to television

WHERE is Coronation Street? My unfavourite question and one I am asked every day. Why my unfavourite question? Because I simply don’t know the answer.

I’ve been told for a fact that it’s in Salford, Manchester, Leeds — even Birmingham. I am always meeting someone who knows someone who lived there.

Seven terraced houses, a pub, a comer shop and a whole lot of people.

Everyone knows their own Elsie Tanner, half-admires their Ena Sharpies, makes excuses for the Minnie Caidwell in their lives: “When all’s said an’ done she’s very good to ’er mother.”

A canal, a viaduct, the memory of a tram, the reality of the bus-stop at the corner.

You can borrow a cup of sugar, get someone to lay a bet and if you’re ill you can be sure your windows will never go dirty and someone will stone your step. You’ll belong. Belonging, however, can have its drawbacks. Everyone will know all your business though they’d never admit it, and should such a thing as a plain van draw up at your front door there’ll be a stirring of seven pairs of lace curtains.

On bonfire nights there’s parkin and treacle toffee, at Christmas port and sherry and the same at funerals with ham and tongue, tinned cling peaches and cream horns.

This then is the Coronation Street that is being featured on this page.

But where IS Coronation Street?

The answer: Just where ever you want it to be.

All their yesterdays

‣ A glimpse into the past… what was Coronation Street like 25 years ago… what were your favourite inhabitants like… in 1936

CATCH a 181 bus outside the Town Hall and fourpence will take you to Coronation Street. Look out for the stop outside Bessie Street School, walk 100 yds., turn left and you’re in the street that millions visit twice a week.

But it’s only during the past year that it’s become well, overcrowded!

What was it like 25 years ago? What sort of picture would you have seen back in 1936?

You’d have come by tram, of course. You’d have turned left at the Rover’s Return — and you wouldn’t have known the difference.

The bricks and mortar were the same … the houses, the factory, the Mission.

The forest of TV aerials hadn’t even been planted, of course, and there wasn’t a frozen food locker in the corner shop or plastic piping in the pub — but they were on the way.

It was only a question of time.

On the way too were Christine Hardman, the Barlow boys, Doreen Lostock and Dennis Tanner.

Mind, if you’d told this to Elsie Tanner, the child-bride at No. 11, she’d have said you were flamin’ mad! As far as she was concerned young Linda, sucking her dummy in the pram outside, was the first — and the last!

Bored stiff, not caring much for the neighbours, Elsie sat and smoked and waited for the sea to wash her sailor husband home again — or at least for something to happen.

And, 1,000 miles away, a boy named Ivan Cheveski ran around the streets of Warsaw where they hadn’t any TV aerials either. He’d heard of England — vaguely.

Down the street at the Rover’s Return, Jack and Annie Walker were in their first year as landlords. It wasn’t what Annie was used to, but she tried to think it had possibilities.

Some of the customers weren’t up to her standard, particularly some of the women who came in the snug, but she had ideas about that, too.

She didn’t say anything to Jack, of course, because there were other things to be got out of the way first — like starting a family. It could all be dealt with in good time.

Down the other end of the street, at No. 1, Albert Tatlock struggled hard to keep a wife and two daughters on a municipal clerk’s wage of under £4 a week.

His wife didn’t like the street very much, and he wondered sometimes if she wasn’t giving the girls ideas, but he supposed it would all work out in the end.

A bit of a philosopher, Albert, they all said, and a big reader. They respected him for it but he didn’t have many close friends.

A family called Leeming lived next door at the time — the Barlows didn’t move in until 1940. Sam Leeming died at Dunkirk and his wife went back to her parents.

It was Mary Hewitt, Harry’s mother, who persuaded Ida Barlow to get husband Frank interested in the empty house. Twenty-five years later, Harry Hewitt stood in the rain and watched them carry Ida out.

The Hayes were at No. 5.

Mr. Hayes, a quiet scholarly man who had obviously come down in the world, lived in the street but never really became a part of it.

Neither did his wife, who was an invalid and seldom seen outside the house. It was Esther the daughter, then a quiet 12-year-old who represented the family to the street, along with her brother Tom.

“A good little lass that,” they would say, watching Esther hanging out the washing in the backyard, or scouring the front step.

But when Tom’s name was mentioned they merely shook their heads, sadly, and predicted a sorry future for this wild, undisciplined boy.

It was like that in the street in 1936. They lived the present vigorously, or placidly, according to their natures, and predicted the future as they saw, or hoped, or feared it would be.

Flashback

‣ Births, deaths, weddings, trips, crises … they all made up the first exciting year of television’s most famous street. Here in next week’s supplement, we recall some of the dramatic highlights as viewers saw them at the time.

DECEMBER

Trouble at the comer shop where Florrie Lindley, who has just taken over the business from Elsie Lappin and is determined to make a success of it, has her first brush with the law. She finds she’s been committing an offence by selling a packet of fire-lighters after hours — to a policewoman, too?

JANUARY

Tragedy has come to the street with the death of Christine Hardman’s widowed mother. But it is not long before a new face comes into her life when she meets a handsome plumber called Joe Makinson. In Snape’s Cafe a romance begins to develop that has everyone in the neighbourhood taking notice.

FEBRUARY

Memories of the blitz come flooding back to the people of Coronation Street when a gas main explodes and the order goes out that all the houses have to be evacuated. The Mission Hall is turned into a temporary shelter where the homeless families spend a sleepless night until the danger is over.

MARCH

There’s an even greater crisis when Ena Sharpies overhears a chance remark and spreads the scare that the street is scheduled for demolition. Only when old Albert Tatlock calls in a council official (centre) is it found that the rumour is unfounded — and all the residents can breathe easily again.

APRIL

Ena is out of favour with everyone and gets her marching orders from Mission Hall secretary Leonard Swindley. It’s a highly emotional moment for the doting Miss Nugent when he asks her if she would like to take over the caretaker’s job. But they soon discover Ena is not to be dislodged so easily.

MAY

The sun comes out again and the people of Coronation Street patch up their differences and take an away-from-it-all coach trip — to Blackpool. Even Ena has to smile when her old cronies from the Rover’s Return, Martha and Minnie, invite her to join them for an afternoon paddle.

No. 13 – with the lid off

ONCE you’ve taken away the pub and the corner shop, the Mission Hall and the back wall of the raincoat factory, all that’s left of Coronation Street are seven very ordinary-looking terraced houses.

From the outside they are distinguished from each other only by the pattern of the curtains and the ways some of the doorsteps and windowsills have been subjected to more donkey-stoning than others.

But what are they like inside? Christine Hardman, who lives alone at No. 13, invites you in to see for yourself.

“I’m one of the lucky ones,” she says. “Most of the houses haven’t been touched since they were built, and that means when you want a bath you have to have it in a tin tub in the living room, and the only toilet is in that little outhouse at the back of the yard.

“But a few years ago my landlord had one of the three bedrooms converted into a bathroom, and it’s quite a posh affair.”

Besides the living room and the bedrooms, there are two other rooms — the front parlour, which is only used on very special occasions and, at the back of the house, the tiny scullery with a window looking out on to the yard.

For all this Christine pays a rent of 19s. a week.

‣ You don’t need o passport to visit Coronation Street. But to understand better what the natives are saying — especially in their more heated moments — non-Northerners would be well advised to study this TV Times digest of the local dialect. It has been specially compiled by Mrs. Elsie Tanner, who also posed for the pictures

Where they good old days?

‣ Continuing a glimpse into the past… what was Coronation Street like 25 years ago… and what were people doing… back in 1936.

THE cobbled streets of Lancashire, have worn well — and Coronation Street as well as any.

The bricks of the houses were soot-blackened in 1936. Today they are even blacker. But in the warm, steamy kitchens there was a sense of security which was a protection against grimmer happenings in the world outside.

Take the Hewitts at Number Seven. Matt Hewitt had a wife, daughter, and a stocky dark haired son Harr y— and none or them was very much aware of the changes going on in the world around them. If hard times came they probably couldn’t be any harder than those they’d already been through, especially in the depression years.

Matt had a steady job as a warehouse foreman. He earned enough to keep his family respectable and allow him the odd pint at the Rover’s Return.

Any night in the week, barring Sundays, Harry would be seen delivering papers in the streets round about. He shared the round with a pal of his from Mawdsley Street, a fair haired lad by the name of Len Fairclough.

On Saturdays, if they couldn’t get in without paying, they used part of the proceeds for football. The rest went on comics or pictures at the local Hippodrome. But they couldn’t wait to leave school and get working.

A few doors from the Faircloughs in Mawdsley Street lived Martha Longhurst. She lives there still, but in those days she had a railwayman husband and a daughter, Lily. The happiest day in Martha’s life was the day Lily got married. This was partly because they didn’t get on very well — Martha had never been one to suffer fools gladly — and partly because she’d made up her mind that Lily would get married the day her son-in-law-to-be put his feet under the front room table.

Martha’s husband didn’t long survive the wedding. But as Martha never tired of pointing out, he lived to see his life’s mission completed.

A friend of Martha’s, already a widow for some years, was Minnie Caldwell. She kept house for her mother in Jubilee Terrace. Because she had never had any children she took to loving cats — black cats, grey cats, smooth cats, in fact any cats in the neighbourhood that drifted her way.

Minnie might have married again, despite her mother (and the cats) but by the time her friends had convinced her of the reason for her Mr. Williams’ regular visits, he had long departed from the world.

Minnie’s great friend in 1936, and at indeterminate intervals ever since, was a rather fearsome woman by the name of Ena Sharpies.

“Whatever do them two see in each other?” people used to ask. They said exactly the same thing about Ena and her husband, Alfred, a frail man employed as timekeeper at a tailoring factory.

Alfred Sharpies died in 1937, and some said it was a merciful release. At the funeral Ena’s face was rigid as the stones which surrounded her, and remained so thereafter — at least in public.

A fortnight after his funeral she went to the Glad Tidings Mission for the first time. Two days later she moved in as caretaker.

If you ask people in Coronation Street which is the most important sound in their lives, some will say the distant hooters of the ships on the canal, others the church bells on Rosamund Street on a Sunday.

But in fact it is the bell on the door of the corner shop, which has jangled there so long and so often that everyone forgets it now. In 1936 a girl named Florrie who was staying with an aunt nearby called in the shop — she didn’t particularly notice it either.

The years went by and the faces in the street changed.

Some were born, and some died, and some just went away. Albert Tatlock will remember most of them and all their comings and goings. The arrival of Florrie and Concepta, Jed Stone and Jean, Doreen and Sheila. The departures of Billy Walker, Nancy Leathers, David Barlow … and his mother.

“Aye well,” says Tatlock, “that’s life…”

‣ The 25-year-old photographs appearing in on this page are from the albums of Violet Carson (Ena), Lynne Carol (Martha), Margot Bryant (Minnie), Ivan Beavis (Harry), Peter Adamson (Len), Pat Phoenix (Elsie), Doris Speed (Annie), Arthur Leslie (Jock), Daphne Oxenford (Esther), Jack Howarth (Albert).

NEVER before photographed – Coronation Street as it is on a typical Saturday morning. Everyone is here. Well, almost everyone. Kenneth Barlow shows his dad, Frank, a letter he’s just received from brother David. Len Fairclough, riding to work, stops outside the Hewitts’ to say hullo to Concepta and sympathise with Harry on his weekly window cleaning chore. Jack and Annie Walker are on their way back to the Rover’s Return after their early morning stroll while Elsie Tanner, collecting the milk, has a few choice words to say to Dennis on the perils of oversleeping. Christine Hardman, who is another late starter most Saturdays, gets a polite greeting from Leonard Swindley and his ever-faithful Miss Nugent. Florrie Lindley rests from brushing the pavement outside her shop to pass the time of day with Esther Hayes and Albert Tatlock, and on the corner Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst are gossiping as usual. No prizes for guessing the missing face. Our photographer was told that Ena Sharples was away on a day trip, making one of her rare visits to her daughter and grandson.

Flashback

‣ Continuing a month-by-month review of some of the dramatic highlights in the lives of the people you meet in television’s most famous street. The pictures reproduced here show scenes as viewers saw them at the time.

JUNE

A happy event is awaited by Linda Cheveski and her Polish husband Ivan, who are now happily settled in No. 9. Before the month is out the street is celebrating the arrival of baby Paul — and Elsie Tanner, enjoying the idea of being a grandmother is seen in a novel light — as an expert on baby care.

JULY

Dennis Tanner, Elsie’s layabout son, is hypnotised by the overnight successes of young men with the same haircut as himself and decides it’s time he earned a living. Fixing his sights on fame among the bright lights he buys a guitar and keeps the street awake at night as he gets to grips with the mysteries of the pulsating rhythm of rock ’n’ roll.

AUGUST

After a quarter of a century in Coronation Street, Annie and Jack Walker are asked to leave to take over a new hotel. But they turn it down when they find plush furnishings and taped music a poor substitute for the beer-stained tables and homely gossip they are so used to in the Rover’s Return.

SEPTEMBER

The world of post-office sorter Frank Barlow and his university-educated son Kenneth is shattered when news is broken that well-loved Ida Barlow has been killed in a bus accident, and Frank’s sorrow is further deepened by the non-appearance at the funeral of his other son, David. The whole street goes into mourning.

OCTOBER

Smiles again at the wedding of widower Harry Hewitt and the perky Irish barmaid from the Rover, Concepta Riley. Harry’s 11-year-old daughter, Lucille, is bridesmaid and his dart-playing pal Len Fairclough acts as best man. For the honeymoon they fly off to spend a fortnight in the Isle of Man.

NOVEMBER

Tempers rise in a kerbside brawl and Ena Sharpies goes on the offensive after Elsie Tanner publicly accuses her of being the writer of a poison pen letter she has received. Doors and windows fly open and the whole street comes out to watch as the long expected battle finally gets going.

See what their lucky stars foretell

‣ Ever since Ena Sharples had her hand read at Blackpool during the summer, fortune-telling has been the top talking-point among the women of Coronation Street. To find out what the stars have in store for them in 1962, TV Times has called in JOHN NAYLOR the world famous astrologer. Here are his predictions starting with Ena herself

ENA SHARPLES

Birthday: Nov 14. Number: nine. Stone: bloodstone. Colour: violet.

The Spring of 962 brings benefits which result from changes made around your 1961 birthday. Do-it-yourself talents are put to good use and lead to the development of a new hobby or interest because others admire your work.

MARTHA LONGHURST

Birthday: Sept. 2. Number: two and five. Stone: topaz. Colour: grey.

Sudden and unexpected events next March affect future prospects. Despite a stroke of luck in July a discontent prevails which stems from two causes, lack of ready cash and envy of successes others achieve! Late 1962 early 1963 brings an increase in income however.

MINNIE CALDWELL

Birthday: Sept. 30. Number: six. Stone: sapphire. Colour: rose.

Usually gentle and long-suffering, you’ll become impatient with two people, both much loved, whose demands and quarrels make life a burden. Health may give trouble during May. A delightful spending spree becomes possible late in 1962 — due to an unexpected windfall.

ESTHER HAYES

Birthday: May 10. Number: six. Stone: turquoise. Colour: light-blue.

A long-held business ambition will be achieved April-June. This helps you push recent emotional up-sets into the background. April brings a chance to undertake a trip with someone you get on well with; late in 1962 you spend heavily on your home.

ANNIE WALKER

Birthday: Aug. 11. Number: one. Stone: diamond. Colour: gold.

A critical year; a hard-working year. Psychologically, you experience a feeling of loneliness, are easily depressed. Early 1962 brings business problems, much responsibility, troublesome holdups. Prospects brighten mid-1962. A new relationship transforms your life late in the summer months.

ELSIE TANNER

Birthday: March 5. Number: seven. Stone: amethyst. Colour: green.

Everything goes with a swing! More money, better prospects, a relationship now growing in important to you is put on a lasting basis next spring. A fortunate meeting with someone important brings benefits because they take to you.

CONCEPTA RILEY

Birthday: Jan. 15. Number: eight. Stone: garnet. Colour: chocolate brown.

An enjoyable success to start the year off and it stems from something you have done in the past! The achievements of a loved one give much pleasure in the summer. July-September sees much coming and going involving a relative.

FLORRIE LINDLEY

Birthday: June 12. Number: five. Stone: Topaz. Colour: primrose-yellow.

More prosperous conditions, a favourable decision, quickly disperse late 1961 anxieties. The autumn finds you deeply involved in a relationship which starts in May. In November an ambitious venture is started which necessitates a heavy outlay but offers glittering prospects.

The post TV Times guide to Coronation Street appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

THIS is the story of Mr. Robinson, and the night he was snatched from the lip of the grave by Patricia Phoenix — Elsie Tanner of Coronation Street.

You won’t know Mr. Robinson. He was just another mongrel pup of obscure parentage, scrawny, sick and starving — the sort of stray you would find wandering around the centre of any big city in Britain.

The city in Mr. Robinson’s case is Manchester, where he was picked up and taken to a home for stray dogs. Life wasn’t too bad for him for a while. He had a place to sleep and some good, solid food.

But the dogs’ home can’t afford to feed stray dogs forever. And as no one had come along to claim him. Mr. Robinson faced execution.

That was when Patricia Phoenix came into the picture.

Pat had just lost one of her own two dogs, Scamp. He had been knocked down in the road outside her home — and her pedigree corgi, Mr. Smith, was pining for him.

“At first I thought of buying another pedigree dog like Mr. Smith,” said Pat. “and then I remembered how much fun we had had with Scamp.

“He was a mongrel I found outside the studios, being led away to a dogs’ home and eventual execution, too.

“So I decided to get in touch with the home again and find out if there were any other mongrels due to be destroyed.”

There were indeed. A number of dogs, including Mr Robinson, were destined to be killed the following day.

The home closed at five o’clock that evening, and Pat couldn’t get away from the studios in time to get there.

In view of the exceptional circumstances, however, the authorities agreed to waive their rules and let Pat visit the home in the evening to choose a dog.

And it didn’t take her long to select Mr. Robinson.

Why?

“I couldn’t leave him there to die,” said Pat, when I met her the other day, exercising an exuberant Mr Smith and a regenerated Mr. Robinson.

“It was the way he looked at me — like the saddest little dog in the world.”

Mr. Robinson, I’m told, is settling down very comfortably in Pat’s elegant Cheshire home. And life, it seems, isn’t always such a dog’s life, after all. Even for stray dogs.

“It was a pity we couldn’t save all the dogs that were due to be destroyed, though,” said Pat. “You’d think there would be enough people in a place as big as Manchester to find homes for a handful of strays, wouldn’t you?”

The post It’s a (gay) dog’s life for Mr Robinson appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

WHAT makes a girl give up the security of a nine-to-five office job to go into the theatre? What makes a girl defy the advice of her family for a profession as unpredictable as acting?

Ask any actress — and you’ll probably get a different answer every time. We all have our own reasons.

My reasons?

Well, I suppose they were mixed.

First and foremost, I had a compulsive need to act. I always have had — and I hope I always will have.

Then, of course, I’m an explosive, emotional person — and if my exploding emotions can be channelled to entertain people on stage or in front of a camera, then so much the better for everybody.

And finally, I am an ambitious person. I was determined to get to the top, right from my early teens. And the theatre seemed to be the most likely way of getting there.

I suppose it’s odd, really. You see, I’m not a “theatrical type”. I loathe those theatrical parties where people call you “dahling” and drown you in insincere flattery, then stab you in the back the minute you turn round.

I loathe people who “gush”. I loathe the falseness which is so prevalent in many parts of the theatre today.

That’s why I enjoy Coronation Street so much. Not one of our team is the theatrical type, either. Maybe that’s why they play their homely down-to-earth characters so convincingly.

When I decided to become an actress in my early teens, that aspect of theatrical life was, of course, as foreign to my experience as the moon.

I was wide-eyed, naive and innocent — and all that I could see were the bright lights of fame ahead, just waiting to announce my name.

I got my first professional break on radio in Manchester — and I think I got it, as so often happens, by sheer cheek. I was 14 at the time — and had written for an audition.

They agreed to hear me — but I couldn’t find a speech that I thought was suitable. So I wrote one for myself — as Lady Jane Grey, speaking from the scaffold.

I think they were so taken aback at my nerve that they gave me a part in a play. And a number of broadcast plays followed.

My full-time professional career as an actress started when I was 18 — with a company, called Manchester Arts Theatre, doing one-night stands in Service bases all over Britain.

It was an incredible nonstop life of acting, eating and sleeping. But I loved every minute of it. It may not have been the glamorous theatrical life that I had imagined, but it was different, and it was exciting.

The going could not have been tougher. The producer was magnificent — but ruthless. Nothing mattered to him but the theatre.

Remorselessly he analysed every failing that I had. I used my hands too extravagantly, he said. So I had to rehearse with them tied behind my back.

I stooped too much when I was registering emotion, he said. So I had to wear a harness that bit into the skin of my throat every time I leaned forward!

It was with that company that I learned the lesson which every real actress must learn — absolute dedication to the theatre.

Life on tour had its lighter side of course.

I remember one night, at Cirencester, leaning against a piece of scenery just before the curtains opened, while a stagehand was making frantic last-minute adjustments to the set behind me.

The curtains opened, I moved away from the wall — and left my dress behind me. The stage-hand had nailed it to the floor!

The first real challenge of my career came after about a year with that company, when I was asked to play a 38 year-old woman in Clemence Dane’s Granite.

People outside our company laughed when they heard about the casting, and said that I couldn’t do it. I hadn’t got the guts, or the stamina or the ability, they said.

I’m glad they did. I couldn’t have asked for anything more likely to inspire me to succeed. The part was a roaring success, and as a result I was invited to play it at Chorlton Repertory, Manchester.

In the years that followed I worked in repertory all over the provinces. I never made the big-time in the West End — but I got more than my share of success in the North, and I played most of the parts that actresses dream about playing.

My favourites?

Blanche in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and Sadie Thompson in Somerset Maugham’s Rain.

Not all the parts I’ve played have been dream-parts, mind you. Some of them have been nightmares.

Like most actresses I was usually short of money, and that meant doing small parts in films — usually horror films.

It was a most unnerving experience, getting mixed up with werewolves and vampires and monsters from the other side of the solar system.

Particularly as I invariably found myself getting eaten up by one of them before the end of the picture!

On one occasion, in Wales, mind you, I nearly found myself in the middle of a real-life ghost story. It happened when I moved into new theatrical lodgings.

I went downstairs for the first meal of my stay and was halfway through my boiled egg when the owner of the house suddenly hissed at me and told me not to move.

“There’s a ghostly hand poised right above your head and you’re surrounded by a pink aura,” he said.

I got out of there in a hurry. He was, I discovered later, a leading spiritualist!

The post Turning the corner to Coronation Street appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

EYES that have launched a thousand glares widened in disbelief. The most famous hair-net in Britain shook in amazement.

“l just can’t understand it,” said Violet Carson, who plays fire-eating Ena Sharpies in Granada’s Coronation Street.

“I wouldn’t have believed that so many people could be so concerned about what happened to a bad-tempered, vindictive old woman like Ena.”

Violet’s surprise is perhaps understandable.

After more than a year with one of Britain’s top television programmes, she has come to accept fan-mail as routine. But even she has been taken aback by the reaction there has been to the collapse of Ena Sharpies in the Mission Hall a few weeks ago.

“There have been letters, get-well cards, flowers,” said Violet.

“People have telephoned from all parts of the country inquiring about Ena. I’ve been stopped in the street dozens of times and asked how I was.

“Two little girls even wrote to tell me that they were praying for my recovery!”

But Violet is not the only member of the cast who has found herself in this sort of situation.

The programme has taken such a hold of the national imagination that thousands of people all over the country absolutely refuse to disassociate the actors and actresses from the characters they play.

You couldn’t meet a more amiable chap than Peter Adamson, who plays Len Fairclough, for instance. “But I can’t walk down a street in Manchester now without finding people glaring at me with hatred in their eyes,” said Peter.

“It started when I thumped Kenneth Barlow in the snug of the Rover’s Return,” he explained.

“And it’s got even worse since I had a fight with Harry Hewitt about Concepta.

“Threatening letters arrive for me every day. I’ve been called everything from a beer-swilling moron to a thug. To tell you the truth, I love it. If people are reacting as violently as this, my performance must be doing something to them.”

After his skirmish with Len in the Rover’s Return, Bill Roache, who plays Kenneth Barlow, was flooded with letters.

“Two hundred schoolgirls signed one letter, telling me that they agreed with everything that I said about Len Fairclough and the people in the street,” said Bill.

“One frantic father wrote to tell me that his little girl hadn’t stopped crying since seeing me knocked down.

“She refused to be convinced that Peter and I were only acting, and the father begged me to write her a letter telling her that I was, in fact, all right.”

Bill wrote the letter.

Frank Pemberton, who plays Kenneth’s father, still receives sympathetic inquiries from all over Britain. “And many of them now want to know when I’m getting married again,” said Frank.

Wherever they go, Ivan Beavis and Doreen Keogh, who play Harry and Concepta Hewitt, can’t get away from the fact that Concepta is expecting a baby.

“People have sent us presents for the child — bootees, a matinee jacket, a lovely model of a stork with a baby hanging from its beak,” said Doreen.

“A midwife rang the studios to offer her advice and services when the time came.

“And wherever I go, I’m offered a seat for the sake of the baby.”

Minnie Caldwell’s love of cats brings in regular invitations for Margot Bryant to visit cats and cats’ homes.

“I accept as many invitations as I can,” she said.

Arthur Leslie, who plays landlord Jack Walker, could get a job as a licensee any time he wants.

And Doris Speed, who plays his wife, is constantly being asked by people to stop nagging her easy-going husband.

“I’ve given up trying to convince them that it isn’t me who’s nagging him but Annie Walker,” said Doris.

Elsie Tanner, of course, has half the country agog at present over her relationship with Len Fairclough.

“There’s nothing in it,” said Pat Phoenix, treating me to a Tanner-sized wink.

“We’re just good friends.”

The post Get well Ena! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.