Soul on the Street

by William Roache

  He sat down and started to put on his make-up, chattering away all the time about his gout and how he was going to Hollywood soon to make The Prince and the Showgirl with Marilyn Monroe. Here I was, a complete nobody, sitting with the world’s most celebrated actor in his dressing room and feeling completely at ease. Eventually he said, ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Well, I’ve come into acting rather late,’ I explained, ‘and I’ve been told I should get out and find a more secure profession. I just thought that a word of advice from you would be worth a hundred from anybody else.’

  He replied, ‘Don’t give up, definitely don’t give up. I had two years myself that were absolutely terrible, with nothing happening at all. It was really dreadful. But if it’s in you, keep at it. As I said, I’m off to America soon. When I get back, remind me about this conversation and I’ll see what I can do for you.’

  He shook my hand and wished me luck.

  ‘Hope in its greatest and grandest sense illumines the way.’

  I walked out full of renewed determination. I was so amazed and thrilled that such a great actor should have taken the time to be so helpful to a young unknown. Later I realized that truly great people will always find time for you and always be kind and courteous.

  I didn’t get in touch with Olivier in the end, as I was wary of appearing sycophantic. I wanted to make my own way. What he did for me, though, was give me new resolve. I wanted to be good, I wanted to learn, and I was sure that the only way to learn acting properly was in the theatre. So I went straight to an agent, Daphne Scorer, and said that I had been in repertory theatre in Colwyn Bay. I hadn’t, of course – I’d only attended the theatre when I had been at school there – and here I was lying again, but I was getting desperate to move on and, after all, it had worked with Equity. So I decided to push my luck.

  If something is meant to be, it will happen. In no time at all the agent called me in to meet Norris Staton, a producer who was looking for someone to play the juvenile lead in a summer season at Clacton-on-Sea. I sat there while she told him what a wonderful young actor I was and about all the plays that I had been in at Colwyn Bay, which was a total lie because I had never set foot on a stage in my life.

  When she had finished he turned to me and said, ‘If you want the job, it’s yours.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  We signed the contract on the spot.

  The first few weeks at Clacton were hard and it was apparent that I didn’t know what I was doing. At first I didn’t even know the vocabulary – terms like ‘upstage’ and ‘downstage’. A quick lesson here was: never lie beyond your own ability.

  We rehearsed in the morning, then had the afternoon free and the performance in the evening. There was a lot to learn because we were doing a play a week. As I was obviously so inexperienced I was given smaller parts in the second and third plays, but I was learning fast and, with a little help from my colleagues, by the fourth play I was back to playing the juvenile lead. Donald Masters, the director, said to me, ‘I’ve never seen anybody improve so much.’ I learned a tremendous amount and will always be grateful for my time at Clacton.

  I was also pleased to discover that most of my fellow actors were sensitive and insecure, rather than the outrageous extroverts I had feared. It wasn’t all ‘Hello, darling!’ Of course there are more extrovert personalities in the profession. They tend to work in variety. But I found that most of the actors at Clacton were quite shy and acting was a way of expressing themselves.

  That season also gave me my first experience of showbiz digs – and that was a bit of an eye-opener. The landlady was very strict and you had to be sitting at the table on the dot for your breakfast and leave the house for the day straight afterwards. She was also very tough when it came to morals: there was one fellow in the house who was having an affair with a girl in the cast and she used to climb in through the window when they both thought everyone else was safely tucked up in bed. Anyway, the landlady’s husband had a pretty shrewd idea what was going on and one night I saw him tying string outside the window with tin cans attached to it. Sure enough the girl set them off rattling on her nocturnal visit and the following morning the man was told at breakfast – in front of all of us – to pack his bags and be off. How times have changed!

  I had a fling myself that summer with a young actress called Jill who fortunately had a more tolerant landlady.

  Looking back on those early attempts to become an actor I am reminded of someone once asking me, ‘What particular ability was it that made you want to become an actor?’ and I said, ‘It wasn’t an ability, it was an inability, a shyness, overcoming shyness.’ I think this is true for many actors. When you’re on stage, you’ve learned your lines and you know what you’re saying, so you have confidence in yourself, and the audience has to sit there and listen, and that gives you the opportunity to be something. I think it’s actually childish exhibitionism that initially makes people want to become actors.

  When you are working in television and films, of course, you don’t get the feedback from the audience and a lot of actors will finish a scene and then turn and say, ‘Was that all right?’ They just want the director to say ‘Well done.’ At some level we’re all insecure and seeking approval.

  I was coming along. My aim was to do mainly theatre and to be in films occasionally. At the end of the season I went home and wrote to Nottingham Rep., which had a very good reputation and the added advantage that I could live at home. They offered me the job of assistant stage manager, which involved shifting the scenery, sweeping the stage and taking on occasional small parts, all for £6.10.0d a week. I took it because Nottingham was known for its very high standard.

  This was a very different world from the summer season. It was far more serious, with some really good actors, strong direction and classical plays. It was just the place I needed to start my drama training in earnest.

  There were three ASMs and one of the others was Brian Blessed. We became good friends. After seven months of hard but rewarding work I applied for an audition to Oldham Rep., which also had a good reputation. Brian helped me to choose the audition piece, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and then coached me. It worked – I was offered the position of juvenile lead. This time I was up to the job.

  I stayed at Oldham for 12 months. It was weekly rep. and I only had one play off in the whole year. The plays included Tea and Sympathy, Meet Me by Moonlight, Charley’s Aunt, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Night Must Fall, Of Mice and Men, The Shop at Sly Corner, Death and Brown Windsor, Robin Hood, Dinner with the Family, Goodbye, Mr Chips, Solid Gold Cadillac, The Ghost Train, Hindle Wakes, The Long and the Short and the Tall, and many more.

  By the end I was brain-numb. Performing a play in the evening, rehearsing during the day and learning lines at night was hard work. There was no time for anything else. I went to the cinema once during the year and there was not a moment without masses of learning to do, but it was the best possible drama school.

  I had served my apprenticeship and now I really was an actor and ready for anything.

  CHAPTER 8

  Coronation Street

  ‘There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.’

  I moved back to London, took a small basement flat in Primrose Hill and started to pick up my old film contacts.

  While I had been at Oldham, Granada Television had started production in nearby Manchester. I had managed to squeeze into my busy schedule the time to do one or two small parts in their drama series Knight Errant, Biggles and Skyport.

  Not long after I had moved to London my agent – I was now with Terry Owen of the Lom Agency – rang to say that Granada wanted to see me about the lead in a play called Marking Time. It was about a young soldier stationed in Germany falling in love with a German girl. I went for the interview and was offered the part.

  The play was to be broadcast as part of the Play of the Week series. This was highly prestigious a
nd to have the leading role was a major breakthrough. So it was that I found myself back in Manchester for the most important part in my acting career so far, one that could really establish me.

  I enjoyed the play and when it was finished I went back to London to wait for it to be transmitted. I did two more small film parts, but was really waiting for Marking Time to be shown to kick-start my career.

  While I was waiting for my big moment, my agent rang again to say that Granada wanted to see me about a serial. He thought that it was a comedy, like Over the Garden Wall, and it was to be called Florizel Street. I said that I certainly was not interested in going back to the north, as I was sure that my TV play would lead to greater things in London. But later he rang back to say that there was nothing else happening and I might as well go for the interview. So I did.

  Isn’t it interesting how well you do if you don’t want something? There were about half a dozen people there, including the producer and casting director, but I was feeling quite relaxed, because I wasn’t bothered about the part. I had the Daily Telegraph with me and was asked to pick an article and read it ‘in Lancashire if you can’. I read an article about the Liverpool MP Bessie Braddock flicking ink pellets at a political opponent – not the most usual audition piece – and then left, not really thinking any more about it.

  Then they asked if I would go up to Granada to make a pilot episode. Again I told my agent that I didn’t want to do it, but he explained that it was only for three days, I would be paid and there was no other work on offer at the time. So I did the pilot, playing a university student, Ken Barlow, and again returned to London.

  Granada actually made two pilots, with different casts, though some actors appeared in both. In the other, Ken was played by Philip Lowrie, who eventually played Dennis Tanner in the actual series.

  I was still trying to find out the date for the transmission of Marking Time, as I wanted my agent to get as many directors and casting directors as possible to watch on the night.

  Then he rang again, this time to say that Granada wanted me for the serial. Anticipating my refusal, he quickly went on to say that it was only going to run for 13 weeks and that he now had the transmission date for the play, which would go out right in the middle of the run.

  ‘What a brilliant shop window,’ he said. ’You’re on twice a week in a serial and in the middle of its run you appear as the lead in Play of the Week.’

  I could see the sense in this. In any case I would only have a few weeks’ work after the play had been shown and offers would not come in immediately. So I agreed.

  Granada decided to change the name of the serial – which was a good idea, as everyone thought it sounded like a toilet cleaner – and it was now to be called Coronation Street; the first episode was to be broadcast live on 9 December 1960.

  All I can say is that it has been a very long 13 weeks.

  This was the time of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Kitchen-sink drama. Realism. Stanislavski’s method acting. James Dean and Marlon Brando. It was the beginning of the decade that burst upon the world with music, colour and new-found freedom.

  Coronation Street hit the screen with the full force of that genre. It was state of the art. ‘Soaps’ were unheard-of at the time – we were a television drama serial and highly respected. In less than a year we were top of the ratings.

  The great success took everyone by surprise. None of us knew what had hit us, not even the producer and the management. We were all instant stars, with all that entailed. And it looked set to continue. Before our 13-week run was over we had all been offered three-year contracts.

  The early days were heady stuff. The cast was only 15 strong and was a close-knit community. There were some powerful characters but none more so than Violet Carson, whom I insisted on calling Miss Carson out of respect for the tremendous air of authority she gave out and the fact that she was already a household name after a long run as the piano-playing Aunty Vi in Wilfred Pickles’s radio show. She was like a mother to the rest of us and if anything was wrong she’d be straight up the stairs to sort it out with the management. You didn’t mess with Violet Carson. What Ena Sharples was in the Street was exactly what Violet was in real life.

  Then of course there were also Doris Speed and Pat Phoenix, a mix that inspired the Poet Laureate, John Betjeman, to describe the Street as Dickensian because all of the characters were as strongly and clearly drawn as in Dickens’s novels. Pat, of course, was a particularly flamboyant character in real life and was the first to go out and do personal appearances – something Miss Carson would never do – but her attempts to vie with Vi in the studio were, it has to be said, less than successful.

  Tony Warren, the writer, was a man of his time and only today, nearly 50 years on, can he truly be appreciated. His scripts ranged from high drama to light-hearted comedy to powerful social documentary, all in the space of half an hour. He also established all the characters and the whole tone of the show. Many other writers came in afterwards, but he started everything off, he set the tone.

  At first there were two episodes a week, at 7 o’clock on Fridays and Mondays. The Friday episode was performed live, after which there was a break and then we recorded the episode for the following Monday. In those days the recordings couldn’t be edited, so doing a recording was just as stressful as doing it live. If something went wrong, we could start from the beginning again and redo it once, that’s all. So Fridays were absolutely nerve-wracking. You really had to concentrate and make sure you had everything right.

  Frank Pemberton, who played Ken’s father, and I used to deal with the tension by rehearsing our lines in every conceivable accent. Sometimes, for a change, we would say them very quickly or very slowly – anything so that we were word perfect for the live broadcast. I remember on one occasion Frank was particularly worried about a certain word. In that scene we were sitting at the breakfast table, so he wrote it down on his boiled egg. In the heat of the moment, though, he smashed the egg before he got to that word. All I could do was watch and hope. Luckily, he got through the scene without any trouble.

  We all settled into a routine. On Monday morning we had our first read-through, then in the afternoon we were given our moves for both episodes. On Tuesday morning we rehearsed the first episode and on Tuesday afternoon the second. By then we were expected to know them. I used furniture that was stored on the set for future episodes to build myself a cosy little hideaway where I could be alone until I was needed – just like the Colwyn Bay house I broke into as a schoolboy. That shyness has never really left me: I’m still not comfortable with large groups of people.

  Back to the weekly routine: on Wednesday mornings we ran through both episodes again and then in the afternoon we had the technical run-through when the producer, writers, cameramen, sound engineers and other technicians came in to watch. On Thursday we went to the studio and rehearsed with the cameras and lights. At that point we talked through the episodes rather than acted them. It was done purely for the cameras. So Wednesday night was when you could go out and hit the town if you wanted, but not Thursday night, because you had to be ready for Friday, the big day. That day we would have another run-through in the morning and a full dress rehearsal in the afternoon before doing the live show and then recording the second episode.

  After about three months there was a short strike by technicians, which prevented two episodes from being transmitted, and when we resumed there was no live episode. From that time onwards all of them were pre-recorded. This was a great relief, even though the method of recording still did not allow for editing or retakes, and it went on like that for the first ten years. After that they could edit a bit, though we still used to record the episodes straight through. But I think if any of them had carried on being filmed live, the show wouldn’t have lasted. It would have been too much of a strain.

  But the Street did continue, year after year, almost always at the top of the ratings. Through the whole of the ’60s there was l
ittle change, apart from one or two new characters. The quality of the writing was extremely high and this set the standard for the direction and the acting. This consistently high quality was the reason why top actors like Lord Olivier and more recently Sir Ian McKellen wanted to appear in the show. Sadly, only Sir Ian made it; Laurence Olivier got hooked on the show when he was in hospital for a spell and they actually wrote in a part for him but his health never allowed him to take it on.

  One of the reasons I was delighted with Coronation Street was that my family could see that I was working. You get a lot of very famous actors who are just appearing in the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company and their families never see them. But my family could see what I was doing and they were happy that I was in regular work.

  Off screen, we became something of a family too. Of course I already knew Jack Howarth, who played Albert Tatlock, from my first day at Rydal School. A long time had passed since then and Jack was now 65, but he was a stalwart professional and could always be relied on to deliver his lines perfectly. When he was telling rude stories, though, which he loved to do, he always managed to get things wrong somehow, which we all found much more amusing than the original story. I loved working with him. He was still working right up to his death at the age of 88.

  Because the cast was so small and we got to know each other well, every death hit us hard. One that seemed particularly cruel was that of Graham Haberfield, who played Jerry Booth, because he was only 35 when he died of a heart attack.

  Graham was a great practical joker and we were always messing around like a couple of kids. Once I was walking along a corridor when I saw him at the far end nip around a corner, ready to jump out at me. We often had mock sword fights and other tussles in the corridors and this time I thought I’d get in first. I ran quietly up the corridor and swung my foot round the corner to tap him on the leg. I did it fairly gently, but my foot met something soft and there was a huge yell. Horrified, I looked round and there was Graham. He’d been crouching down on all fours ready to jump out at me like a dog, and I’d caught him just above the eye and slit his face open.