Tony Warren, who has died aged 79, created Coronation Street, Britain’s longest-running and most successful television soap opera.
First transmitted in December 1960, Coronation Street represented a cultural revolution on the nation’s black-and-white television screens, treating of working-class life in a Salford back street where everyone spoke with authentic northern accents.
Originally commissioned for a run of 12 episodes, Coronation Street has run for almost half a century and at its height of popularity attracted huge audiences, being regularly watched by some 20 million views in Britain alone. It was seen in almost every continent on the planet, and earnestly studied for degree dissertations.
Just 23 when he created Coronation Street, Warren attached a brief memo to his original outline, describing in three brief phrases the street and its characters: “A fascinating freemasonry, a volume of unwritten rules. These are the driving forces behind a working-class street in the north of England. Coronation Street sets out to explore these values and, in doing so, to entertain.” His memo, a charter for the Street, still hangs on the wall of the producer’s office.
British television scriptwriter Tony Warren
A spare, Puckish figure, Warren was a remarkable invention of his own devising. Although a misfit at school, he gained confidence as a child actor, was precociously widely-read and at ease with perfect strangers, whom he would beard in trains and in bars in the course of his research for his brainchild.
Described on various occasions as “completely volatile”, “mad” and “a total maniac”, Warren’s way of persuading Granada Television to let him write Coronation Street was unconventional. “I burst into tears,” he recalled, “and climbed on top of the filing cabinet He stayed there, flailing his arms, until they agreed to let him try. Within 24 hours of being coaxed down – according to Granada folklore – Warren had produced a draft script.
Coronation Street was the high point of Warren’s writing career, although he wrote no more than a dozen episodes unaided. When he left the programme to try writing for the stage he failed, and returned to Granada as part of the scriptwriting team.
Warren’s mischievous flamboyance was perhaps the result of his early induction into showbusiness. His grandfather had started the family’s performing tradition by becoming a champion clog-dancer in Eccles, and his father George, a multilingual fruit importer from Manchester, carried it on. A former major in the Intelligence Corps during the First World War, Warren’s father supplemented the family income by playing the musical saw in his band The George Simpson Tonics Dance Orchestra.
Born Anthony McVay Simpson on July 8 1936 in Eccles, now Greater Manchester, Tony Warren was educated at Clarendon Road primary and Eccles grammar schools, where he was bullied for being “posh” and for “not liking rough games”. His remedy was to play truant and he stayed away “for almost a year, almost every day” by mimicking his mother’s voice on the telephone in calls to the school secretary. When he was finally traced to the local library, Tony’s headmaster asked him what he had been looking at and gave him a further reading list.
His taste in reading ran to plays and books about the theatre, and he had been writing and producing his own plays for local children from the age of seven. He was 11 when he persuaded his mother to allow him to attend the Shelagh Elliott-Clarke stage school in Liverpool, where Tony found the corridors filled with children in dancing shoes and tights. “I felt,” he remembered “as if I had come home.” Aged 12 he wrote to the producers of the BBC’s Children’s Hour to tell them that he was better than any of the child actors they were using. His subsequent audition earned him radio work which lasted through his teens, and brought him some theatre, film and television roles. On Children’s Hour Warren met and worked with Violet Carson, the actress he would later immortalise as Coronation Street’s grumpy gossip Ena Sharples, and who smacked him for misbehaviour.
Expelled from stage school s for rabble-rousing, at 17 Warren ran away to London where he took acting jobs, modelled for knitwear companies, and performed a cabaret act he had written himself called Gee But It’s Great To Be Young. When he discovered it was more profitable to write for other people than to perform, he sold his act and became a full-time writer.
Tony Warren with broadcaster Melvyn Bragg on the set of Coronation Street in 1985
In the event, he spent much of his time, as he put it, “hanging around the Arts Theatre Club” where he met Sean Connery and Michael Caine and began a friendship with the actress Fenella Fielding, whom Warren recalled as “big, very big, plain as a lavatory brush and wearing specs held together with a paper clip”.
It was around this time that he had the idea for a drama about a street of terraced houses. Late one night, returning to Manchester from London on the sleeper train with the BBC producer Olive Shapley (who created Woman’s Hour), Warren woke her up to confide his idea. “Oh, Tony,” she replied, “what a bore” and went back to sleep. Despite this, in 1958 he wrote Our Street and sent a copy to the producer Barney Colehan at the BBC. He never received a reply.
After an unhappy homosexual love affair in London, Warren returned for good to live in Manchester, and badgered Granada with a half-finished script for an episode of a police drama series called Shadow Squad. Attached was a note: “If you want to know what happens next, phone this number.” But the typescript was mislaid in the production office and Warren had to call repeatedly to persuade anyone to read it.
Eventually a producer called Harry Elton, a giant Canadian, read Warren’s script and offered him a single episode of Shadow Squad. In the meantime Warren took a £30 a week job in Granada’s promotions department, which he hated. He escaped by making himself “indispensable” on the regional magazine called People and Places, working up to 16 hours a day for a year and supplementing his income by “devising new routines for strippers”.
In 1960, when he was 24, Warren suffered a breakdown and spent two weeks in Scotland recuperating and planning Coronation Street, which he said was based on his own family. On his return, Harry Elton was impressed with his idea and Warren auditioned over 600 actors for parts in the show. His original title, Florizel Street, was changed when the Granada tea-lady told him it reminded her of a brand of disinfectant.
Violet Carson who played Ena Sharples and Tony Warren pictured in 1962
Last-minute panic broke out over the casting of Ena Sharples. Doris Speed, who had appeared in Shadow Squad, had already been cast as the pub landlady Annie Walker, and Warren finally cast Violet Carson, with whom he had worked as a child actor.
Although Coronation Street was an immediate success with viewers, Warren felt temperamentally unsuited to the cut and thrust of front-line television and quickly tired of the series, leaving Granada after writing the first 12 episodes. He tried writing for the theatre and in 1963 his play Strumpet’s Daughter was performed in Sheffield to critical indifference. In 1965 he devised the film Ferry 'Cross the Mersey.
Returning to Granada, Warren resumed writing Coronation Street but was credited only with the “original idea” and not with every script. In 1968 his wartime drama The War Of Darkie Pilbeam was dismissed as “a crude exercise in nostalgia” and Warren himself as being “as subtle as a sandbag”. The following year Warren contracted to write a novel about London with the proposed title The Sun Is Always Shining. Warren explained that it was to be a novel about happiness, because he was “so sick of Northern gloom and misery”. It was never published, but his autobiography I Was Ena Sharples’s Father did appear the same year.
Tony Warren in the 1980s
Warren’s early success took its toll as an increasing drink and drugs problem took hold. He went to New York in 1970 and travelled across America in a Greyhound bus. He found himself in San Francisco and ended up at Berkeley, witnessing the student riots in People’s Park, an experience he later used in his second novel Foot of the Rainbow. Having conquered his addictions, he returned to Manchester to work as a consultant with Granada.
Towards the end of the 1970s Warren became something of a recluse and reportedly an alcoholic once more. When he attended Violet Carson’s funeral in 1984 he was described as “a lonely figure in the background”.
In 1986, a week before her death, Pat Phoenix (Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street) asked Warren to be a witness at her wedding to the actor Tony Booth. Warren later described it as “very serious and moving” and told reporters that “everybody was crying, even the priest”.
Returning from the Edinburgh television festival in 1989, Warren’s chance meeting on a train with the documentary-maker Cate Haste led to his resuming serious work. She encouraged him in his ambition to write the Great Provincial Novel and promised to harangue him until he had. Warren’s novel The Lights Of Manchester finally appeared in 1991, and was listed by The Sunday Times as its pick of the year. His second novel Foot of the Rainbow (1993) was followed by Behind Closed Doors (1995).
Warren was proud of having created Coronation Street, and of having fans of the calibre of the poet laureate Sir John Betjeman, who likened the soap to The Pickwick Papers. When the Queen – herself reportedly a fan – visited the new Coronation Street set at the Granada studios in 1983, she asked Warren: “Where is the real Coronation Street?” “In the hearts and minds of your subjects, Ma’am,” he replied.
He was awarded the MBE in 1994.
Tony Warren was a colourful, exuberant character with a wicked sense of humour. His emotional ups and downs made him supportive and welcoming to others, qualities that won him many friends.
He never married.
Tony Warren, born July 8 1936, died March 1 2016
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