This Is Your Life: Tony Warren

Tony WARREN (1936-2016)

THIS IS YOUR LIFE - Tony Warren, writer, was surprised by Michael Aspel during a photo shoot for 35th anniversary of Coronation Street with cast members on the set of the Rovers Return at Granada Studios in Manchester.

Tony, who was born in Manchester, attended theatre school before appearing regularly on BBC Radio Children's Hour as a teenager. After being expelled from stage school, he worked as an ASM at Hulme Hippodrome and later did some modelling work in addition to acting on radio and early television.

At the age of 21, he was employed by the newly established Granada Studios in Manchester as a scriptwriter. His idea for a series, Our Street became the ITV soap opera Coronation Street with the first edition being broadcast in December 1960. Tony wrote regularly for the programme until 1968 and then occasional scripts until the late 1970s. In the 1990s he wrote a series of critically acclaimed novels.

"In the words of Coronation Street - ecky thump!"

programme details...

Edition No: 926
Subject No: 903
Broadcast date: Wed 11 Oct 1995
Broadcast time: 7.00-7.30pm
Recorded: Thu 5 Oct 1995
Venue: Granada Studios, Manchester
Series: 36
Edition: 6
Code name: Rabbit

on the guest list...

Tim Justice
cast members of Coronation Street
Johnny Briggs
Elizabeth Dawn
Betty Driver
Anne Kirkbride
Bryan Mosley
Bill Waddington
William Roache
June Brown
Rene - aunt
Roy - cousin
Harry Elton
Doris Hare
Alan Rothwell
Jennifer Moss
Daphne Oxenford
Diana Davies
Ivan Beavis
Eileen Mayers
Doreen Keogh
Anne Reid
Madge Hindle
Julie Goodyear
Melvyn Bragg
Cate Haste
Susan Subtle
Jean Alexander
Judith Chalmers
Olive Shapley
Roy Barraclough

production team...

Researcher: Clare de Vries
Writer: Roy Bottomley
Director: Brian Klein
Associate Producer: John Graham
Executive Producer: Peter Estall
Producer: Malcolm Morris

names above in bold indicate subjects of This Is Your Life

related pages...

Street Life

from Elsie Tanner to Eddie Yates

Screenshots of Tony Warren This Is Your Life

Daily Mail 11 November 1995

PAT PHOENIX LOVED ME

SHE WAS WONDERFULLY WICKED, BUT SEX JUST NEVER INTERESTED HER; CORONATION STREET CREATOR TONY WARREN EXPLAINS HIS POWERFUL FRIENDSHIPS WITH THE STREET'S MOST MEMORABLE WOMEN

by Lynda Lee-Potter

TONY WARREN is the man who invented and wrote all the early episodes of Coronation Street when he was only 24.

The terrifying, stout-drinking Ena Sharples was based on his own granny and he says: 'I daily grow more like her. She used to say: 'Never get old, no bugger loves you when you're old.' He also created sexy Elsie Tanner and publican Annie Walker and thinks of the Coronation Street characters as his family. 'I always say that I had 24 children originally and they've spawned a massive number. My womb is rather wider than most, sometimes I'm afraid to cough.'

He does not drink anything stronger than black coffee having survived ten years in his late 20s and early 30s when he nearly killed himself with drink and drugs. 'I was a tramp fortunate enough to have a roof over his head. I was the town drunk. At one point I didn't want to survive but I knew that suicide was not the answer, that somehow it was only a very temporary solution.

'And then, what is so extraordinary is that those terrible cravings for drink and for hard drugs were lifted off me. These days, thank God, I'm 'Tony who doesn't drink'.

'I must have been a nightmare. Morphine was the worst. I got in touch with a bent chemist who seemed a friend at ﬁrst. I'd have taken anything.

I'd have drunk scent if there wasn't a drink going.'

He used to do a song and dance act in the dying days of variety and, with the exception of Jimmy Tarbuck, his voice carries further than anyone's I've ever met. He is now a hugely successful novelist, and his third book, Behind Closed Doors, about three precocious children growing up in Manchester during the Fifties is out this month.

'It's almost impossible today for people to understand the strictures of the Fifties, the fact that there were tramlines and your life was supposed to run on them. Ours was the generation that said: 'Why should we run on tramlines?' We were the people who burst out and rebelled.

'In episode one of Coronation Street nobody had a car, nobody had a passport, nobody had a telephone. When the pub in the street went on the phone in about 1961 that was a big moment.

Tony's a mesmeric storyteller and vividly conjures up a Northern working-class world that has gone for ever.It was an era when passing the scholarship and getting to the grammar school was a way out for clever Lancashire children and the deﬁnition of a slut was a woman who didn't pumice-stone her front doorstep.

Tony's parents had 'done well for themselves', as we used to say, and had moved away from the back-street terraces into their own semi-detached on the posher side of Swinton. His granddad was a clog dancer and barrel jumper who ended up as overseer in a cotton mill and his uncle Jimmy Lucas was a singing waiter.

He is an only child because his mother always says: 'One like him was enough.' His father was a fruit importer who spoke seven languages and Tony was a ﬁendishly clever 11-year-old, not unlike Peter, the central character of the new book.

Tony had his own gang but they were little girls, and he knew then that he was gay. 'I was never tortured about it. I just thought: 'I'm me, and I'm God's child and He doesn't make mistakes.' I was different and other children attempted to bully me. After I'd written Coronation Street I remember meeting sombody I was at school with. He was with his girlfriend and he said: 'We used to have great times at the grammar school, didn't we Tony?' I said: 'I can't remember. The last time I saw you, you were trying to push my head down a lavatory.'

'I get terriﬁed of the idea that maybe genetic engineering will come along and there will be no gay kids. Because society will lose a lot. We're ahead of the ﬁeld very often in anything that's to do with colour or style or entertainment. And the battle against Aids has brought the old and the young together, ageism has virtually vanished in a community that used to be very ageist.

'The common good has been fought for with remarkable ferocity. And what's more, I have seen real heroism in the very boys who were called sissy. I've seen people ﬁghting death on ﬁve fronts and staying alive for their birthday.'

Coronation Street celebrates its 35th anniversay on December 9 and Tony still remembers vividly the opening show. 'That was a night like no other night in television. There was a buzz around the studio, there was a hum, there was an excitement. We knew ﬁnally we were making something about us, we were making something about the North. I love this WHICH? town. The energy levels are very high, the sense of humour is wonderful and people have old-fashioned values about friendship.'

Last month Tony was the star of This Is Your Life and he says it was magic. 'Anybody who tells you what a terrible thing, and how intrusive it is, is talking rubbish.I loved being invaded, I thought it was wonderful.'

Julie Goodyear, who recently, of course, left the Street, was one of the guests, though they are not as close as the days when they were a dazzlingly ﬂamboyant couple.

'Julie and I have always gone to one another for the truth. But I think recently we've maybe been a bit too candid with one another. Words have stung and we've backed off a bit. Julie's made a mammoth contribution to the Street, but she has a lot in her that's never been used. It's just to be hoped that the right projects turn up because she has a superb talent.

Nobody can set an atmosphere in a scene and handle a one-liner like Julie.

She's been very brave and I wish her tremendous good luck.

'When she came on This Is Your Life, we both actually said: 'Are we speaking?' But of course we spoke and hugged. When it comes to it, we're there for each other. She is her own creation and she has every right to have a high opinion of herself. She is the extra who became the star. It's never been done on television before, so if she sometimes gets things wrong, what the hell. She's made it all up as she's gone along and she's done that triumphantly.'

Tony's always adored glamorous, over-the-top women and they've loved him in return. 'I think anybody who was brought up by my mother could cope with any actress in Britain, probably on Broadway as well. Life is her theatre and always has been. At 90 she can sing absolutely anything and she still recites what she learned as a girl: 'He who touches one hair of yon grey head dies like a dog.' ' Pat Phoenix, who played Elsie Tanner, was a close friend and was always there for Tony during his long, dark years and he was there for her when she was dying. 'Pat loved me, there are no two ways about that. I drove her mad as well and both emotions were mutual. On her deathbed, when nobody else believed in me, she said: 'You'll do it again.' We even managed to have a barney, which was wonderful, because she shouted: 'My mother never liked you.' We were like an old married couple arguing, and this was the day before she died.'

He lives now in a modest terrace house which, he says, is furnished like theatrical lodgings at the turn of the century. 'In the Sixties I actually needed the trappings.I had to have them to prove to me I was a success. Now I don't want any of that. I know where I stand in the scheme of things.

'I've no false illusions, but for many years I had a bigger talent than the ability to handle it. I saw Pat be a slave to bricks and mortar. She'd get big houses and then build more onto them. Even when she was dying she was having extensions built. All I really want is a very large bookcase.'

He is one of the few people who really understood Pat Phoenix and knew that despite her powerful sex appeal she was disinterested in sex. 'Pat was a wonderfully wicked woman, she really was. She used to try to get me to explain why other people found sex so interesting. She appeared to be a sexual lighthouse but it really did get in the way of her enjoying herself.'

When she was dying of cancer in hospital, Pat ﬁnally married actor Anthony Booth who is Tony Blair's father-in-law. They'd lived together for seven years and they asked Tony to be best man.

'Pat died in a goldﬁsh bowl.I remember her sitting up in bed saying: 'I've gone to second position on the ITN news', and she was still getting somebody to stick in her Press cuttings. It was bizarre, you couldn't go to the window because there were lenses trained on them. Then there was the wedding and Pat had managed to send out for the most amazing green and cream, wonderful antique lace outﬁt. She looked beautiful, and just before she died she actually said: 'The Press made me and without them I would have been nothing. I have to go out to thank them, to say goodbye' - and she did.

'There were the most hardened photographers and reporters with tears rolling down their faces. There was camera shake on half the pictures they were so upset. She was 62, she'd have been 70 this year and she'd have been rotten at being 70. She was not enjoying growing old.'

When his ﬁrst novel came out, Tony decided that he wanted to say publicly that he was gay. He told one journalist that he didn't want any more oblique references to the fact that he was a committed bachelor or not the marrying kind. 'I then thought: 'Oh God, I've got to tell my mother that I've actually said it', and she went up like a rocket. I said: 'Mother, times have altered but you haven't.' She said: 'I might accept these things but it doesn't mean I have to like them', to which there is no known reply. I said: 'Actually, you're the biggest queer-basher I've ever met', and we both howled with laughter.

'I'd told her the truth when I was about 16. I was off to a party, and there were going to be girls there. She said: 'I hope you can be trusted to behave like a gentleman.' I said: 'You've no need to worry about me, I'm queer,' but she thought I was just trying to make myself more interesting.' Nobody has more friends or is more welcome at a party but work is Tony's driving force. He has dedicated the new novel to Tim Justice, with whom he has lived for the last 12 years, but they have decided to separate.

'Actually, we've just decided that if we're to go on being fond of one each other for another 12 years we're better living apart. But it's entirely amicable and we're certainly taking our time about arranging separate lives.'

And he is happy with life: 'Now I'm where I want to be, I'm the luckiest man I know. Amanda Barrie (who plays Mike Baldwin's wife Alma) has been a friend of mine since we were teenage performers together. We had the same agent when we were 16 and Amanda is a magic person. Not long ago we were sitting in the Midland Hotel in the French restaurant and something suddenly dawned on me. I said: 'Amanda - we're who we thought we wanted to be when we were little.'

BEHIND Closed Doors, £9.99 (Century).

Coronation Street Blog 15 November 2012

Tony Warren on This is Your Life (1995)

For those of you interested in something a little different, I have recently come across Tony Warren's This Is Your Life episode on YouTube, and it's a great watch.

It tells the story of the man who created Coronation Street, and by learning more about him you can see how the Street came to be what we know and love.

There are some classic clips together with many new and old stories. It is great to see so many former cast members present - I spotted Madge Hindle, Daphne Oxenford, Alan Rothwell and Jennifer Moss among others. Having recently left the show, Julie Goodyear also makes an appearance, sporting hair which made me think of Judy Finnegan for some reason! Ms Goodyear knew how to make an entrance, that's for sure!

I got quite nostalgic seeing the cast of 1995 pose with Tony - it highlights how much has changed since then with so many much-loved characters now gone. Tony's novel "The Lights of Manchester" is also mentioned. Apparently it was Melvyn Bragg's wife who persuaded him to write it. If you haven't read it, it's definitely worth checking out.

And keep your eyes peeled for the mix up when they discuss Tony's father - it made me laugh out loud!

Series 36 subjects