The birth of Coronation Street

Part 7.- You are going to read an article about a British TV soap opera called Coronation Street. Six paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A-G the one which fits each gap (41-46). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

 

The birth of Coronation Street

Scripwriter Daran Little has dramatised the beginning of the first British soap.

He explains how sneers came before success.

 

I was 21 and fresh from university when I started work as an archivist on Coronation Street. My role was pretty simple: I had to memorise everything that had ever happened in the show and so help the writers with character stories.

 

41.- ______

The Road to Coronation Street, is about to go on air. I moved on to become a writer on the show in the early 2000s. But those early black and white episodes will always be close to my heart, and so will the genius who created the show.

 

42.- _____

 

Last summer, I was sitting and chatting with colleagues about the latest plot twist in Coronation Street. While I was doing that, I suddenly realised what a compelling piece of television drama the creation of the programme itself would make.

 

43.- _____

 

Tony Warren was a one-time child actor with a passion for writing who turned up at the infant Granada Television with a vision for a new form of story-telling – a show about ordinary people and their everyday lives. It had never been done before.

 

44.- _____

 

It was that Granada had a condition, as part of its franchise, to create locally sourced programmes, an obligation it was not meeting at that time. One of the owners. Sidney Bernstein, was a showman who loved the entertainment business and was keen to develop it. He created Granada television in 1956 and shortly afterwards employed a Canadian producer. Harry Elton, to help nurture talent. It was Elton who employed Tony Warren, and it was these two men who would eventually change the face of British television.

 

45.- 

It should have ended there. A script written and discarded by a broadcaster, Warren and Elton should have drowned their sorrows and moved on to the next project. But they didn’t; they fought to change the bosses’ minds. The Road to Coronation Street tells the story of how, against all the odds, a television phenomenon was born, and how a group of unknown actors become the first superstars of British television drama. On December 9, 1960, Coronation Street was first broadcast. With minutes to go before transmission, Warren was feeling sick, one of the lead actors was missing, and so was the cat for the opening shot.

 

46.- _____

 

It’s a story I’m proud to have brought to the screen.

 

   A

  Luckily, I wasn’t the only one to be persuaded of this, and within a fortnight I had been commissioned to write a script. In a world of prolonged commissioning debates, this was highly unusual – but then the story of Coronation Street is also highly unusual.

 

B

At that point, its creater Tony Warren had given it the title Florizel Street. The first episode was broadcast live and it was envisaged that there would be just 13 episodes of the show.

 

C

Half a century later, that inauspicious beginning is a far cry from the ongoing success of one of Britain’s most-watched soaps. My drama is more than a celebration of that event, it’s a story of taking chances, believing in talaent and following a dream.

 

D

I first met that person, Tony Warren as a student, after I wrote asking to interview him. We chatted about the show he had created when he was 13 – a show which broke new ground in television drama and brought soap opera to British television. I was fascinated by his story, and have remained so ever since.

 

E

Tony Warren developed a show set around a Northern back street with a pub on the corner called the Rovers Return. Its characters were drawn from Warren’s past. A script was written and sent ‘upstairs’ to management. He was old, in no uncertain terms, that this wasn’t television. It had no drama, the characters were unsympathetic and if it was transmitted, the advertisers would withdraw their custom.

 

F

At that stage, Coronation Street had been on air for 28 years and it took me three-and-a-half years to watch every episode that had been made. That’s 14 episodes a day, which means that I went a bit stir crazy somewhere between 1969 and 1972 and was a gibbering wreck by the time a lorry crashed in the street in 1979.

 

G

In fact, no original piece of television featuring regional actors had ever been broadcast. Television was ruled by Londoners who spoke with rounded vowels. The only Manchester accents on thee screen were employed in a comic context. For broadcasters, the language of the North of England didn’t translate to television drama. Besides, even if it did, no one in London would be able to understand it – so what was the point?