Like most Granada drama directors, Coronation Street was my first drama directing job. I was 26 at the time and a snob. Contemptuous of lower-level TV drama, I had hidden in documentaries for two years making World in Action films but finally had to pass through the factory gates of Coronation Street before anything else was allowed.
Walking into that rehearsal room for the first time in 1978 was perhaps the most terrifying experience of my directing life but I immediately fell in love with it, both because of the incredible cast, Pat Phoenix, Violet Carson and Doris Speed were all still there, and because of the sharp-edged, comic writing that had been there since the beginning.
Tony Warren, however, was a ghostly figure, spoken of in hushed tones, referred to as “poor Tony” with rumours of his much publicised addictions to drugs and alcohol and chaotic private life. I never in fact met him and saw him only once – in 1981, the year Brideshead Revisited was transmitted, looking pale and fidgety in the Coronation Street rehearsal room, where with typical largesse Granada had decided to celebrate the programme’s 21st birthday.
Nearly 30 years later I met producer Rebecca Hodgson who had a script that told the story of how the young Warren (22 at the time) pitched and wrote the whole first series of Coronation Street in 1960 and I begged her to let me direct the film that was intended to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the series. “You’ll have to be approved by Tony,” she said, warning that this might not be a simple matter. In fact I already knew this, having some years before made an approach to ITV to see if they would let me tell the Warren story when I was very firmly told that there was no possibility of either the programme, let alone Tony himself, ever giving permission for a drama. Tony was 74 when we met at the Lowry hotel in Manchester but smoking and talking like the 22-year-old we were looking to recreate: camp, nervous, frighteningly quick and very entertaining. It is hard to exaggerate his sense that anything that focused on him would lead to disaster. Half a century of newspaper exposés about his chaotic personal life and drug and alcohol problems had left him with little confidence that his story could be sympathetically treated.
The more we talked, the more excited I became at the possibilities of the story and I kept asking for photographs and diaries and notes and old scripts, anything that would give me a better picture of that time. That night he wrote to me: “The fact that you say that you will try to be alert and sensitive to anxieties is reassuring. I hope I will be able to return the favour,” and he agreed to look through his “chaotic” house for pictures: “St Anthony has already been approached so perhaps you would add your prayers to mine?”
It was a Tuesday and, at the end of the meal before we parted, I made a deal that we would dine together every Tuesday from that day until the end of filming. We were seven weeks away from shooting and we never missed a date, nine dinners at the Strada, off Quay Street.
The conversations roamed way beyond the boundaries of the actual film we were making: his life in Soho, the chemist who used to mix his opiates, the alcohol, life as a gay man in Manchester in the 50s: “I was rather a sissified little boy. And outside the school gates there was a woman who always seemed to wait until my mother was out of earshot. And then she’d say: ‘Tony, you should have been a little girl.’ And I shouldn’t have been a little girl at all, I was uniquely qualified to be myself. People don’t realise that children can be gay from the word go.”
He talked about the genesis of the writing: “I used to sit under the kitchen table, on a cushion, on the flagged floor, and listen to how people talked. This is how men are meant to speak – and this is how women speak. And here’s me Auntie Renee who married money and she talks posh, and here’s lovely Auntie Gladys whose husband is a prison warder and she doesn’t. It was wonderful training.”
The Granada offices in Quay Street were still being built when Tony first worked there in the 60s and 50 years later the building still stood, inhabited principally by the Jeremy Kyle Show, which meant the car park was filled with junior researchers desperately trying to keep pregnant teenagers, unfaithful boyfriends and mothers who’d married their stepsons apart so that they could be led into the areas to fight in front of the daytime TV audience.
It is a uniquely intimate experience to try and re-enact the life story of someone who is standing beside you as you do it. But once Tony felt safe there was nothing he would not discuss and no detail that he could not refine. Getting hold of him was always complicated: he would email regularly but if you called you would always get his answering machine and then he would wait for the caller to announce themselves before deciding whether to pick up the phone or not. He loved actors and as the cast began to assemble he would take them aside, feeding them nourishing morsels of gossip that would give them a personal access to the characters they were playing, telling Jessie Wallace about Elsie Tanner’s costume: “The padding was there right at the beginning – cotton wool wadding – under a dress which was already on the tight side.”
He never visited the set, fearing rightly that he would distract from the work but I would call him and tell him how scenes had gone. He had a producer’s eye for the budget which in our case was very modest: “Oh they won’t let you do that … too expensive!” he would worry..
I think he was proud of the film we made together and I think he felt it was an honest account of something that even today would be an almost incredible feat, a 22-year-old being able to create 13 episodes of television in his own inimitable way. He was a generous admirer of the people who worked around him and understood the mix of hard work and luck that went towards making anything, but above everything he was that rare thing – a genuine television revolutionary.
I remember one story of that first night on 9 December 1960 that I did not include in the film: as the cast put the final touches to their makeup and Pat Phoenix was adjusting her Elsie Tanner padding, Tony slipped out of the studio: “I dived down the alleyways at the back of Deansgate and into the Hidden Gem – St Mary’s, Mulberry Street – a Roman Catholic church with almost perpetual Exposition. I think I knew enough, just about enough to genuflect to the high altar, made my way down the right hand aisle, dropped a coin in the iron box, dropped to my knees on the padded altar step, and added my candle to the ones already burning in the votive stand. The whole thing was over in one silent minute.” Characteristically he added, “Preface, or too sweet?” I did not use it as a preface because it might have looked as though I was suggesting a devotion that he certainly did not claim, but he knew that his life was in the balance that night 50 years ago, and he needed every friend he could lay his hands on.
So let it be an epitaph and I for one will be proud to light a candle.
Charles Sturridge is director of the Bafta-winning drama The Road to Coronation Street