Darrell Buxton wonders whether Weatherfield was built upon an ancient Indian burial ground…
1960 was a watershed year for horror movies. Hitchcock’s Psycho was released to British cinemas in September, Michael Powell’s equally ground-breaking Peeping Tom had emerged a few months earlier, Roger Corman kicked off his extensive Poe series with House of Usher, and the likes of Village of the Damned, Eyes Without a Face, The Flesh and the Fiends, The Brides of Dracula, and The City of the Dead were scaring audiences silly at the beginning of this new and soon-to-be-swinging decade. UK viewers would have to wait a while for classics from further afield, such as Mario Bava’s Black Sunday or Nobuo Nakagawa’s Jigoku, but the monster times were clearly a-changin’.
Television too was doing its level best to scare the wits out of viewers, who might find themselves captivated, enthralled, and surprised by The Twilight Zone, first out of the blocks from the wave of thoughtful and unnerving fright fare being imported from America.
Independent commercial channel ITV was still relatively novel in Britain, having hit the airwaves just five years earlier. Their big plans for 1960 included the launch of Florizel Street, a Manchester-set drama detailing the everyday lives, loves, and woes of the residents of a close-knit community dwelling in a row of shabby-looking terraced houses. By the time it came to air, the programme had been renamed Coronation Street, with an initial run of thirteen episodes planned. Was it a hit? Well, it’s never stopped airing since.
Street stars, and in particular their characters, soon became near-legendary. From Ena Sharples, Elsie Tanner, Annie Walker, and Ken Barlow, right up to today’s Sally Metcalfe, Dev Alahan, Gail Rodwell, and, erm, Ken Barlow, the names trip off the tongue of any telly addict worth their salt. Violet Carson’s terrifying hair-netted harridan Ena proved popular immediately, and her scenes in the ‘snug’ at the street’s pub The Rovers Return Inn usually saw her mouthing off to her pensioner pals Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst. The latter, played by Lynne Carol, was killed off during a 1964 episode, dying suddenly from a heart attack while in the Rovers snug. Several years later, barmaid Betty Turpin claimed to have heard Martha’s voice, after spotting a pair of spectacles lying on the Rovers bar top similar to those worn by Mrs.Longhurst; and as late as 2011, Roy Cropper too heard a strange unexplained voice, and Dennis Tanner (Philip Lowrie’s character who had recently returned to the show after decades of absence) remarked that it must be Martha’s ghost.
The Black Ball Butcher (Coronation Street, December 2018)
A pre-Dad’s Army Arthur Lowe gained renown via his Street role as the slightly pompous Leonard Swindley, manager of clothing outlet Gamma Garments. Leonard left the series but was sufficiently popular to be granted his own spin-off show by Granada TV, a mid-sixties comedy called Pardon the Expression. Following two series of this proto-Are You Being Served? set in the ‘Dobson and Hawkes’ department store, Lowe played Swindley in a further outing – 1967’s Turn Out the Lights, in which he and fellow Dobson and Hawkes employee Wally Hunt (Robert Dorning), having been dismissed by the retailer, decide to become astrologers and investigators into the paranormal! Six episodes ran during January and February: ‘The Boyhood Haunt’, ‘Hail to Thee, Aunt Shelmadine’, ‘A Big Hand for a Little Lady’, ‘The Happy Medium’, ‘You Can’t Get the Wood’, and ‘One For Yes, Two For No’.
My mum has been a lifelong fan of Coronation Street, so I began absorbing the show almost by osmosis once I was old enough to stay up later than 7.30 pm. It didn’t take long for me to become addicted too, and I’ve hardly missed an episode since the early seventies. One of my very earliest memories of the programme was a literal shocker – the electrocution of Valerie Barlow, one of Ken’s many wives over the duration. You can still view a two-minute clip via YouTube – as ‘Keep on Running’ plays over the wireless, Valerie (Anne Reid), herself running late for a party, plugs a faulty or overloaded connection into a wall socket and is frazzled. Already a budding lover of grim telly (I’ll never shake the experience of having watched Doctor Who Yeti six-parter ‘Web of Fear’ on its original broadcast at the age of five), I imagine that this scene was the one that hooked me on the Street, and I’ve never looked back.
Valerie fries:
To my endless joy, Coronation Street has maintained a parade of shocks, disasters, violent incidents, deaths, murders, and so on to this very day. It’s almost become the English answer to Dan Curtis’ Dark Shadows, the American costume/period soap that perked up its ratings by throwing vampires, werewolves and spooks into the mix. The Street has never gone quite that far, although as we’ll see, it has occasionally dabbled in the realm of the supernatural (usually with ambiguity and a psychological get-out clause, but always left in the eye of the beholder); and frequently features serial killers and psychos to rival the best cinema equivalents.
With Martha Longhurst setting the trend, Weatherfield has had its fair share of spooks and spectres. In an early 2021 storyline, the imprisoned and ailing Johnny Connor, losing his sight and possibly his faculties, spied visions of cats, swarms of cockroaches, and his suicide-victim son Aidan, though medical professionals explained this away as his brain attempting to compensate for his lack of vision. When beloved Street superstar Jack Duckworth (the great Bill Tarmey) passed away quietly in an armchair at home, viewers were astonished to witness his late wife Vera make an appearance (“Put your paper down and come with me!”), close-clinch dancing her hubby into the afterlife in a beautiful, tender scene which, again, you can relive via YouTube. Vera’s old pal Ivy Tilsley may or may not have already revisited, in a 1996 episode where Mrs Duckworth claimed to have seen her late friend’s ghost, on the landing of Ivy’s former home at number 5 Coronation Street. Granddaughter Sarah Louise Platt also recorded a sighting of her at a window.
Duckworth death dance:
Walk-in freezers have been utilised for dark purposes on a number of occasions throughout the show’s history. In a rather unlikely stalking plot, Street astronomer/former binman/general geek Curly Watts (Kevin Kennedy) found himself the target of Anne Malone, an obsessed junior managerial colleague at the store he now ran, Firman’s supermarket. Rejected by Curly, Miss Malone attempted revenge by smearing WD-40 over foodstuffs in the company deep freeze – only to be locked in accidentally by a passing security guard, and found doing her best ‘Jack Torrance at the end of The Shining’ impersonation the following morning, frozen solid. In early 2021 an elaborate scheme by dodgy businessman and serial rapist/sex offender Ray Crosby, intending to purchase properties by stealth and then bulldoze half of the street to erect a skyscraper hotel, concluded with him attempting to abscond to Turkey, having locked Street stalwart Kevin Webster and his sister Debbie (with whom Crosby had been in cahoots) in the cold store of the Viaduct Bistro; on the verge of passing out, the shivering siblings were fortunately located and released by Kevin’s partner Abby. In a previous reversal of the concept, the bumbling comic trio of Ashley, Kirk and Tyrone had once conspired to entrap a bothersome local drug dealer in the freezer of Elliott’s butcher’s shop.
You’ll often find fleeting gag references to horror movies within the dialogue of the show – over time I’ve heard Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby, Day of the Triffids etc mentioned by various characters, with the occasional and inevitable comment about “a nightmare on Coronation Street” when the scriptwriters are feeling particularly playful/lazy. During a literary discussion with Ken Barlow’s teenage son Daniel, headmaster Brian Packham once remarked on how he “always kept a Poe under the bed”! Oddest moment of this type occurred during a brief passage of filler dialogue from the chatty character Mary Taylor, often given to seeming flights of fancy or bizarre anecdotes from her past which you can never quite establish the veracity of. On this occasion she was enjoying a drink in the Rovers, and happened to recommend a movie that she had recently watched called The Baby. I guess one of the writers must have seen the 1973 Ted Post cult classic and elected to include a bit about it in the show! Mary described the plot, in a few quick words (even then getting portions of it slightly wrong), and amazingly also referenced the poster tagline “What goes on in this nursery isn’t for kids!”
Coronation Street is so very immersed in matters gothic that it even has its own undertaker! Archie Shuttleworth was played sporadically by Roy Hudd across a number of years, and at one point he even hired salon owner Audrey Roberts to apply her skills to the hairdos of the deceased prior to their funerals! Following the sad passing of Mr Hudd, the Street introduced a replacement – Archie’s son George, for whom there seems to be plenty of booming business. And let's not forget Roy and Hayley Cropper's 2009 excursion to Transylvania, complete with Vlad The Impaler facts and figures from Roy and a visit to Dracula's castle, in the DVD feature-length spin-off Coronation Street: Romanian Holiday.
Soap opera villains are invariably outsiders or newly-introduced figures, brought in as bogeymen to terrorise the regular cast for a few weeks before being seen off by a collective stand or a hushed-up act of retribution. So it has been odd to witness the development of the Gary Windass character in Coronation Street, admittedly a taciturn and hard-to-warm-to guy at the best of times, but lately transformed into a vengeful, violent assassin. A plot in which Gary fell into debt, at the hands of Manchester loan shark and thug Rick Neelan, ultimately led to him shooting Neelan dead and burying his body in the woods. At time of writing, this carefully-unfurling plot is still cooking away in the background, with Rick’s teenage daughter popping up every so often wondering where her dad might be. Coronation Street’s most notorious interment, however, was that of Callum Logan. Callum was a low-life council estate hoodlum who wormed his way into the affections of Sarah Platt, all while exercising a reign of terror over the rest of her family, particularly brother David and his partner Kylie (Callum’s ex, and the mother of his son Max). Things reached a head when Callum caught Sarah recording his boasts of his criminal exploits and tried to attack her – Kylie hammered him over the head with a wrench, and the family dumped his corpse down a manhole on their property, currently undergoing a building conversion. The plastered-over ‘grave’ then took on Poe-like significance, Sarah gradually being driven (temporarily) insane by her guilt, and was later uncovered when Tyrone Dobbs crashed a works vehicle into the Platt family garage.
A time-honoured soap cliché, certainly as far as the Street has been concerned in recent years, has been the entry of an unassuming, often pleasant and likeable character, who is suddenly revealed as shiftier – sometimes to the point of dangerous, or even psychotic and murderous, behaviour. Amiable and handsome builder Charlie Stubbs struck up relationships with several Weatherfield women, but we viewers found him to be a manipulative, controlling gaslighter who mentally abused Rovers landlady Shelley Unwin, reducing her to an agoraphobic hollow shell of her friendly, outgoing self; he also attacked Peter Barlow, tried to drown David Platt, and took up once more with former lover Tracey Barlow, trying to exert similar abusive techniques upon her, not realising that she was plotting against him in turn. Tracey bashed him over the head with a hefty ornament, doing time for his murder, and revelling in her reputation ever since her release and triumphant return to her family home. Into the 2020s, jovial magician and hospital DJ Geoff Metcalfe is revealed as a psychological torturer of various wives and partners over the years - latest spousal victim being pillar of the community Yasmeen Nazir (Shelley King), who is so affected by months of his ill-treatment that she is driven to slash Geoff with a broken bottle, serving a prison sentence while he takes control of her restaurant business, amassing huge debts in the process. Despite falling to his death from the roof of their home in a final confrontation, Geoff scarred Yasmeen's mind so much that she continued to be affected and influenced by him, hearing his commanding voice, 'seeing' him whenever she spoke to any challenging or argumentative jobsworth, freaking out at the mere mention of his name.
Violent alpha-male types such as gangster Jez Quigley (tormentor of Steve McDonald and owner of a pair of vicious dogs) and businessman Tony Gordon (ladies’ man who has Liam Connor killed by a hitman, gaslights his widow Maria, attempts to do away with Roy Cropper, and binds and threatens Roy’s wife Hayley and Carla Connor, before himself being shot and then blown to bits) would surface from time to time, keeping viewers on the edge of their seats. Series regular Fiz married a young enthusiastic English teacher named John Stape, little knowing that he would accidentally blunder his way into a series of murders, this all after having an affair with Rosie Webster and then abducting and imprisoning her in squalid conditions for over a month. Lots of corpse-dumping, false identity use, and other mayhem ensued; even on the night of his daughter Hope’s birth, Stape all-but-kills his accomplice Charlotte Hoyle (her injuries prove so severe that life-support is turned off in due course) and uses the Street’s spectacular live 2010 tram crash as camouflage for his deadly bungling. It came as no surprise when little Hope turned out to be something of a Damien Thorn-style problem child and infant arsonist; nor once it was revealed that John had an older daughter from a previous relationship, the scheming and unhinged Jade Rowan. Daddy of this whole scene had to be Alan Bradley, played by Mark Eden, who dominated the Street during the late 1980s, wooing but then tormenting the queen of the newsagents Rita Fairclough, and meeting a grisly end under the wheels of a Blackpool tram after tracking the terrified Rita down to her hiding place in that seaside resort.
When it comes to the upper echelon of Coronation Street psychos, however, three stand out above all; Richard Hillman, Maya Sharma, and Pat Phelan.
Richard Hillman (played by Brian Capron 2001-2003)
The story begins with ex-Rugby League player Duggie Ferguson (John Bowe), a popular new character around the turn of the century, who got into property development. Richard Hillman was a dark, mysterious stranger who turned up at Alma Halliwell’s funeral and soon began flirting with Gail Platt, embarking on a relationship with her. No-one knew much about Hillman’s background but he soon forged a business partnership with Duggie. Until, that is, the day Ferguson fell through some banisters at a house the pair were working on – and Richard took advantage of the situation, simply leaving his critically-injured partner to perish.
Before long, an ex-wife, Patricia, turned up. Only to be clobbered with a spade and buried in the foundations of a block of flats.
Hillman next plotted to murder Audrey Roberts so that he would benefit from Gail’s inheritance; and when that plan failed, despite him setting fire to her home, he tried to drive her insane in classic villainous style. Richard then offered equity release to street residents, and signed Emily Bishop up to the scheme, with the intention of bumping her off. One evening (while Emily babysat for Ashley and Maxine Peacock, engrossed in a tense horror thriller playing on telly), Hillman – disguised as a local teenager – stole into the Peacock home, armed with a lethal-looking crowbar. He stoved in the fragile Mrs Bishop’s skull – and then Maxine returned home unexpectedly, to have the same treatment meted out. Remarkably, Emily survived the horrific assault – not so the younger woman.
Events continued to spiral beyond Hillman’s control, until ultimately his now-wife Gail caught on to his murderous and criminal activities, memorably dubbing him “Norman Bates with a briefcase”! There was only one thing for it – pack the entire Platt family in a car and head for the nearby canal…
Maya Sharma (played by Sasha Behar 2003-2004)
Dev Alahan has been my favourite Coronation Street character for a while now. He’s an acquired taste. Imagine that you live in a normal, everyday street, and then Frankie Howerd moves in to take over the corner shop, and that’s pretty much Dev. Extraordinary pronunciation, strange vocal sounds, odd facial expressions, extended vowels, all part of his make-up. It isn’t ‘acting’ in any accepted sense, but I love it.
Dev is more of a ladies’ man than most in the Street, which is saying something. And in his early days he constantly expressed pride in his ‘empire’, the seven small convenience stores he owned in the district. In 2003 Dev was hoping to rekindle a romance with former girlfriend Sunita Parekh, revealed as suffering with a brain tumour – however, there’s a tussle for his affections as the Croppers’ solicitor, Maya, takes a liking to the shopkeeper too. A highly professional but extremely disturbed individual, she is seen to be a petty thief, kidnaps Tyrone Dobbs’ dog, and goes on a hair-raising car journey with Dev, increasing her speed until he agrees, under intense pressure, to marry her. Later, when Dev reveals that he still loves Sunita, all hell breaks loose. She trashes his home and corner shop, then sets out to marry a number of illegal immigrants while posing as Sunita, and as a consequence of her next big step, Dev’s retail success story is reduced to ashes as six of his seven shops are set ablaze.
Sunita and Dev are lured to the one remaining property but are bound and gagged in an upper room; Maya ponders whether Dev believes in reincarnation (having previously threatened to batter Sunita to death using a statue of Lord Ganesh, an act that prompted huge controversy and complaint from UK-based members of the Hindu community), and sets the seventh shop alight…
2020 saw rumours that Mad Maya might be making a return to Coronation Street – if true, this proposal may have been cancelled due to the global coronavirus outbreak, so maybe we’ll see her in action again once everything settles down a little?
Pat Phelan (played by Connor McIntyre 2013-2018)
“There were four bodies. Four souls. And I bore witness over all of them. Do you really want to know what I am? (points into the bleak night air) I’m that. I am the Darkness and the Light! I am a Creator and a Destroyer! And the Accuser – and the Prosecutor. I am the Lord of Hosts. I’m the Layer-in-Wait. And the worst thing you can imagine.”
Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter or Cape Fear? Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter or Unforgiven? No. Connor McIntyre on Coronation Street in the spring of 2018.
McIntyre’s performance as the loathsome Pat Phelan, on that sea-spray-soaked pier, as his partner Eileen Grimshaw finally comes to realise that the rumours and suspicions of his wicked, conniving, and more recently, murderous activities are all true, was one of the TV high-spots of the last decade. Genuinely cinematic. Operatic, even. And it climaxed (though, crucially, did not complete!) a long-running plot thread that had seen Phelan develop from dodgy builder to near-Biblical demon. For months he’d held sway over construction rivals (and now his humble employees) Owen Armstrong and Gary Windass (who was clearly learning from the master, unwittingly, if his later activities are anything to judge by); and had coerced Gary’s mum Anna into meeting him for a sleazy afternoon tantamount to rape. But it was Phelan’s cold, callous gunning down of young mechanic Luke, a popular new addition to the cast, that really cemented him as utterly ruthless. Another up-and-coming Street star, Andy Carver (played by Oliver Farnworth) tangled one time too many with Pat, and wound up in a Saw-like plotline, held hostage and chained to a cellar wall for weeks on end. By the time victims were piling up and a desperate Phelan was pouring wet cement into foundation mouldings to cover up the corpses, all bets were off. All credit to the scriptwriters for a magnificent extended saga across a number of years, culminating in a spectacular pay-off – followed, perhaps fittingly in a twisted sort of way, by a resurrection and a highly satisfying ultimate fate.
On New Year’s Eve 2018, Coronation Street threatened to mutate into Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? via the eerie legend of the Black Ball Butcher. Peter Barlow had purchased a derelict warehouse with the aim of transforming part of the building into a snooker hall. Dev Alahan and Kirk Sutherland took a look around the place, only for a nightmarish red-eyed, green-glowing butcher-aproned apparition to loom large before them, eventually revealed as Carla Connor in disguise! Within months, however, Carla faced unimaginable horrors of her own…
Owner of the perhaps aptly-named ‘Underworld’ lingerie production company (or “knicker factory”, as its staff invariably refer to it), Carla suffered a lapse into all-consuming depression following a (Gary Windass-engineered) roof collapse which resulted in the tragic death of young nurse Rana Habeeb. This mental health-themed plotline continued to varying degrees for some time throughout 2019, another case of the scriptwriters taking their time over an important issue and a key character event. All built to a head on May 31st that year, with a simply stunning episode showcasing a magnificent performance from Alison King – usually playing Carla as a vivacious, man-eating, wine-guzzling, life-loving, work-hard-play-harder type, this shock-induced variation allowed her to truly show her acting chops, never more so than during this pivotal point in the drama. Carla’s plight reaches the proportions of something straight out of the pages of Kier-La Janisse’s book ‘House of Psychotic Women’, as her ongoing paranoia and state of disintegration hit a chilling peak. Even something as simple as her reflection in a breadbin cover took on a distorted, twisted quality reminiscent of Polanski’s Repulsion, while later, cameras prowled around a hospital room, suggesting a ghostly presence. At one point Carla is startled by a bunch of rubbernecking onlookers staring at her from the end of an alleyway – it is indicated to we viewers that they don’t exist. Carla then has a conversation inside her own head with her dead brother, sees multiple poster images of herself pasted to a wall (very Black Swan, this), heads for a nearby park only to spy a scuttling red-cloaked entity behind the hedges – non-Street types will immediately call Don’t Look Now to mind, fans of the show will pick up on that too but will also be aware that this might be a vision of Carla’s best friend Hayley Cropper – you guessed it, dead for several years. Thinking it is Hayley, Carla pursues the crimson-clad individual all the way back to Coronation Street, back to the factory, up a set of rickety metal steps on to a high balcony. Cornered, again a la Nicolas Roeg’s classic 1973 film, the hooded figure slowly, deliberately, turns around – revealing itself as the deceased Rana…
Maybe you don’t watch Coronation Street. If you’re into horror films and television, your only overlap with the soaps might well be that you’ve seen some of Dominic Brunt’s zombie or gore movies (Before Dawn, Attack of the Adult Babies etc.) or possibly bumped into Dom himself (better known to most of the population as ‘Paddy from Emmerdale’) at a film festival or convention. But I hope that this terror-trawl through the history of the Street indicates that this show’s writers are just like you and me. They’ve seen The Baby. They know how to evoke that Pete Walker-style atmosphere of urban dread when they tackle a serial killer storyline. They know how important and how scary the final moments of Don’t Look Now are. And should it all get too much for you, then please relax with a “Betty’s hot-pot” and wash it all down with a couple of pints of Newton & Ridley’s best bitter, before daring to set foot on those cold, clammy cobbles once more…
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