CHAPTER 13 CHAPTER 13 ‘Adverse experiences are priceless gifts that hold a promise of better things to come.’
When Edwina died, all my colleagues were terrifically sympathetic and supportive, and even the press managed to show a modicum of decency. Pretty early on a reporter knocked on our door and told us that a pack of reporters was at the gate. He asked us what we wanted them to do. ‘Would you please leave us alone?’ I said, and they did.
We also received a huge amount of support from total strangers. Letters arrived from all over the country and Sara and I were touched by the concern and the thoughtfulness that people had shown. Knowing that there were so many good, caring people out there gave us both strength.
Many of the letters were from people who had suffered a similar loss and I felt I was able to share something with them. I wrote back to as many of them as I could and I hope I was able to offer them some comfort.
Of course, people knew what was happening to me because by then in a sense Coronation Street had become part of the national consciousness. Nobody had anticipated that. It hadn’t been expected to last for very long, really. When it started, it did have a special quality, though. It is still highly respected but after 15–20 years similar shows started up and gradually we got surrounded and the term ‘soap’ came in and people started calling us ‘Corrie’. It hurt to be called ‘just a soap’.
I’m not complaining, though. Working on Coronation Street is very rewarding. You get scenes in it that are as good as you’re going to get anywhere. One of the directors once said to me, ‘You know, these particular scenes here are as good as you’d find in an “A” feature film or a West End play.’ I know that after some of the bust-up scenes with Deirdre I would find myself in floods of tears, which is a testimony to the high quality of the writing. Every so often you’re hitting really good stuff. There’s job satisfaction there, certainly. And it’s nice to know it’s popular. We still top the ratings, there still is something special about the show and we’ve been going for longer than any other serial anywhere, I think, which says something. When you think that children who started watching it at their mother’s knee have now not only got children but in some cases also grandchildren growing up watching it, you know that you’re really reaching people.
One compliment I received for my work gave me particular pleasure. One day back in the ’70s I was on the phone in the studio corridor and as I put the receiver down, a voice behind me said, ‘I would just like to say how much I enjoy your performance in Coronation Street.’
I turned round to find that it was Laurence Olivier. He had come up to Granada to play King Lear.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I’m so pleased to meet you. I’ve got a story to tell you.’
As we walked up the corridor I reminded him of how we had met 20 years before in his dressing room and how kind he had been.
He looked at me with tears in his eyes. ‘What a wonderful story,’ he said.
‘You were wonderful,’ I said. ‘You gave me the will to go on and are responsible for me being here now.’
I always found Olivier inspirational. He was a very different actor from me – very intelligent, very technical. A lot of people found him cold, because he did work his performances out, but he was a superb actor and, in the theatre particularly, a great power.
In its own way Coronation Street has a type of power. Some people really take it to heart. When Ken left Deirdre and had an affair with Wendy Crozier, I was dropping my children off at school one morning when a mother pulled her child away, saying, ‘Don’t go near that man!’ Apparently her husband had had an affair and she’d taken what I’d been doing on screen so personally that she believed I was like that in real life. Now in a way that’s a compliment.
Ken is a very well-established character by now and the writers know exactly what he’s like. There have only been only a couple of occasions in nearly 50 years when something in the script has struck me as not being right. One was during the big Ken/Mike/Deirdre battle. Imagine that your wife is having an affair with somebody and you’re having a row about it in your own hallway when there’s a knock at the door and the guy that she’s having the affair with is there, right in front of you, saying, ‘You all right, Deirdre, he’s not bothering you?’ and then you just stand there for a page of dialogue. When we came to the scene I said to the director, Brian Mills, ‘Sorry, I just cannot do that.’
Brian was someone with whom I had always had a particularly good working relationship and he was open to ideas. He said, ‘Well, what would you do?’
I said, ‘Well, I’d go to hit him or something…’
‘You can’t do that because it’s not followed on in the script.’
‘All right,’ I replied, ‘well, let me attempt to hit him and let Deirdre slam the door.’
‘Great, let’s go for that.’
So we did the usual thing – quietly going through it, with the moves, getting the words in, making sure we knew what we were doing – and then Brian said, ‘Right, let’s go for it.’
We started off, but Anne Kirkbride, playing Deirdre, was far too slow for me, so I had to grab hold of her and slam her against the door, because I wasn’t going to let Mike get a word out. She burst into tears and said, ‘Oh, I didn’t think it was going to be like that!’ and I said, ‘Well, it is,’ and she cried, but still we carried on. And we got awards for that scene. It’s one that is often shown on programmes of Coronation Street highlights. There was a lot of genuine frustration in that scene and it did work well.
On another occasion Ken had a baby by the hairdresser, Denise Black, and he was very protective of him. She’d gone off with another man and left the baby behind, and Ken wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Then we had a script where he went out one night and had a babysitter in and she rang and said she’d come with her boyfriend to take the baby. And from having been so strongly protective earlier, Ken turned up and in one short scene said to her, ‘OK, just take him, take him.’ As an actor I thought that was improbable, so I said so. I couldn’t believe Ken would do that. I am, after all, his guardian and I will fight for him when I have to.
The director said, ‘This is the way they want it to happen and they want Ken to rationalize that if he lets the boy go he stands a better chance of getting him back.’
I found it difficult to play. I had to ratchet myself down, literally in a few paragraphs, from wanting at all costs to hold on to this child to saying, ‘Take him.’ That was difficult. Normally the writers are brilliant, but on that occasion they were in a hurry to get the situation changed. Such moments are rare, however.
It’s always interesting to play big emotional scenes. When you do, you’re releasing adrenaline, just as if it were for real. I don’t like that too much. Particularly when I have to lose my temper as Ken. It’ll never stop, though, not with Blanche and Deirdre around!
Rows make good television. But I learned from Dr Maugham that you could be very hard on someone but not lose your temper. There’s an important difference. Losing your temper means exactly that – you’re out of balance, you’ve lost yourself, and you’ve gone. Emotion has taken over. Reason is out of the window and so is everything else. When somebody loses their temper it’s actually quite frightening because they are out of control and that can lead to all sorts of awful things. When I see somebody who is really angry it disturbs me because you can see how far removed they are from their true self, their spiritual self. They’ve let the animal take over. When you fall into anger, you’re relinquishing your higher eternal self and letting your emotional temporary self take over. Taken to extremes, that anger causes all the violence, war and abuse in the world. So with Ken now I try to take the view that he may seem to lose his temper but he’s actually giving someone what he thinks they need – with love. I try to be like that myself. Of course, we’re all imperfect, but I try to look at it from that perspective.
In the early days of Coronation Street we were restrained from doing other shows in order to keep our characters believable, but now we are allowed – sometimes encouraged – to appear on different shows.
I have done a fair number of other shows and they can be very enjoyable. On Stars in their Eyes, I went on as Perry Como and sang ‘Catch a Falling Star’. I can’t sing, but I managed to get away with that very simple song in a very laid-back manner. That was a big achievement for me, possibly the highlight of my lamentable musical career – even though I was terrified. The truth is, I would love to be a singer. I think it must be the most wonderful thing in the world to get up there – as Al Jolson did – and grip an audience with beautiful music, but sadly that’s a talent I don’t have.
However, as I said earlier, if I’m asked to do something and I really feel I can’t, I’ll always say yes. By accepting a challenge you move yourself forward. You don’t accept your limitations.
I was asked to speak at the Oxford Union once and I was really terrified because I’m not an intellectual at all. The topic for debate was: ‘Will Margaret Thatcher’s legacy be a good one or not?’ This was when she was still in power, and having met her on a number of occasions I knew she was not a woman out to win popularity polls but a sincere conviction politician. It was quite a mixed audience, but there was some incredible hostility towards Mrs Thatcher and a very powerful left-wing girl really attacked me, saying, ‘You climbed up on the backs of the workers!’
I was quite amazed to hear all this. I could understand her viewpoint in a way, because prior to the formation of trades unions, workers were treated extremely badly and still are in many ways. But I hadn’t been part of it and I hadn’t climbed up on the back on anybody. I hadn’t inherited anything and had earned all the money I had off my own bat, so I was slightly upset, but curious also. Yes, I had a good education but why should that be held against me? It was the first time I’d come across someone who, while sincere, seemed totally unable to see anyone else’s point of view.
In fact I always felt, right from the beginning, that I shouldn’t have to turn to my parents for anything. I wanted to fend for myself, to do my own thing, earn my own money, make my own career. I was never one for running back home or wanting money from my parents, though there were times when I desperately needed it because for years I lived beyond my means – the pay you get as an actor in a soap is not that of a big-selling recording star or even a headlining comedian and yet we are regarded as being in that category and expected to live up to it. But the pay simply isn’t sufficient to finance the lifestyle that we are believed to maintain, and I’m not talking super-extravagance here. Today Sara and I have a house in Abersoch, North Wales, and we like the occasional bottle of champagne, but that’s it. Mind you, our daughter’s love of keeping horses did stretch the budget at one time.
My parents worked hard and then enjoyed their retirement. Uncle John died of lung cancer in 1975, at the age of 70. Although my father had diabetes, he still managed to enjoy life, but then he got bowel cancer when he was 82 years old. He chose to stay at home and be nursed by the Royal Alexandra nurses, who were wonderful, rather than go into hospital.
As he lay dying I tried to talk to him about spiritual matters, but he never wanted to discuss such things. A kind and loving man, he would talk about the family but he didn’t want to know anything about what happened after death. He stayed like that right up to the end. That didn’t hurt because I always wanted to be helpful to him; if it wasn’t going to be, then it obviously wasn’t right to pursue it.
He actually died of pneumonia. They call it ‘the old man’s friend’. I remember his heavy breathing. Then suddenly its pattern changed and then stopped. And that was it, he had passed.
My mother went on to be 95. I don’t know what she died of in the end. She was very independent, living on her own right up to about the age of 93. Then she fell and broke her hip and that really did for her, she had to go into a home. I actually got to know her better then. I used to visit her there and we laughed about a lot of things.
Finally she went into a sort of coma. I remember going to see her once and she was lying there as if she was asleep, but her eyes were open. The nursing staff got a light and shone it across her eyes, but there was no response. In the end she just went to sleep. She died of old age, I suppose.
My mother was a great character and had real strength. Sara used to say my voice always changed when I spoke to her on the phone, that I was on guard. Possibly I was. I knew my mother had really made the most of her life. She had had no education as such and had left school at 14, but she had gone on to get a diploma in drama and become a magistrate and a director of the Townswomen’s Guild drama group. She had done well, and I think I recognized that. I always wanted to please her.
I had very good parents and I hope that in turn my own children do not find me that bad really. Just over a year after the death of Edwina, Sara and I had a son, William. The hurt of Edwina’s loss was unbelievable and I wasn’t sure whether we should have another child, but William’s arrival turned out to be a wonderful thing, a very happy event. As the children grew up we found ourselves involved in a great many activities, including horse-riding, as Verity became an excellent rider and competed very successfully with the British Show Pony Society. With family activities, sport, charity events, my glittering singing career and of course the drama of Ken and Deirdre’s marriage, life was very full both on and off the Street.