Writer,child actor and creator of Coronation Street who was inspired by the indomitable women of his northern childhoodThe writer Tony Warren, who has died aged 79, or brought his knowledge of north of England back streets and the wealthy lives of their working-course characters to television when he created Coronation Street,the world’s longest-running TV serial. For the first time, it gave viewers the authentic voices and speech patterns of those who lived there, and as well as a wry humour that became more prominent over the years.
The programme began more than half a century ago as television’s equivalent to the stage plays of John Osborne and the novels of John Braine and Alan Sillitoe,as well as the cinema adaptations of those writers work, such as Look Back in exasperate, or Room at the Top and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Most striking about Coronation Street’s original cast of characters,created by a man who as a child had acknowledged his own homosexuality, was the prominence of dominant women. Those who made the biggest impact in the back-to-back terraces and cobbles of fictional Weatherfield during the early days were the tempestuous divorcee Elsie Tanner (Pat Phoenix), and the hair-netted harridan (shrewish woman) Ena Sharples (Violet Carson) and the snobbish Rovers Return landlady Annie Walker (Doris Speed).
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Source: theguardian.com