Coronation Street terrified me, I was shaking & lost my voice, recalls soap star Barbara Knox as she marks 90th birthday
AS brassy redhead Rita Sullivan, she is now the greatest living diva of Coronation Street – but as Barbara Knox marks her 90th birthday she can still recall when she was the new kid on the cobbles.
This week she will celebrate the milestone with an ITV tribute show, Barbara Knox At 90, in which she will be joined by some of her Corrie co-stars that she counts among her best friends.
Together they will revisit the time in 1972 when she landed a full-time role in the ITV soap — and nearly cocked it up on her first day.
Barbara recalls: “I was so terrified.
“Bill Roache was there as Ken Barlow and he’s stood there saying whatever he’s saying and I’m shaking.
“I lost my voice. Nerves.
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“But Pat Phoenix (Elsie Tanner) was marvellous.
“She said, ‘It’s just nerves, you’ll be fine tomorrow when we’re in the studio’ — and I was.
“It was so magical and they were wonderful to me, made me very welcome and looked after me.
“I was very fortunate — I only had a short contract, three or four more episodes, but thank God somebody said after all that, ‘We’ll keep her in it’.”
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Sadly, Pat died of lung cancer in 1986 aged just 62, but Bill is still going strong at 91 and is a big part of the TV celebration.
And all these years later he had no idea that Barbara had been so terrified in those early days.
In the documentary he says: “If she was nervous, you wouldn’t have known it.
“She looked so relaxed.
“Impeccable comes to mind.”
Bill is just one of the soap’s favourite stars to sing Barbara’s praises in the hour-long special, which airs this Friday.
It is presented by Bradley Walsh — now best known as host of ITV quiz show The Chase, but in the Noughties he played Danny, nephew of businessman Mike Baldwin in Corrie.
Together with Bradley, Barbara casts her mind back almost 60 years in the tribute show to when she first appeared in one Street episode as Rita Littlewood, an exotic dancer who nipped into the Rovers for a drink.
Eight years later Barbara was invited back for a more permanent role, this time as Rita Bates, common-law wife of building site driver Harry Bates.
And the surname kept changing, as Rita went on to marry Len Fairclough in 1977, Ted Sullivan in 1992 and Dennis Tanner in 2012.
In the TV celebration Barbara is joined by former co-stars Malcolm Hebden, who played Norris Cole, and Thelma Barlow, who played Rita’s colleague in the Kabin newsagents, Mavis Wilton.
It also gives media-shy Barbara — who keeps out of the limelight when the Coronation Street cameras aren’t rolling — an opportunity to wax lyrical about her memories.
Bizarrely, the Lancastrian actress has the Rochdale fish and chip shop that was run by the family of music hall singer Gracie Fields to thank for partly inspiring her career.
Chip shop
In the documentary she explains: “It was a terrible time when I was growing up in Oldham.
“There was so much unemployment — the coal mining, the people who fished, everything was crap.
“We lived in a two up, two down — the three of us.
“My mother, Emma, worked in the mill and my father, Tom, worked in the foundry but during the war he went in the fire brigade.
“But when I was a little girl, every town had a cinema and it was buttons to go in, so I would go.
“I’d be quite young, really, about six or seven.
“The organ would come up, and then the film.
“There were lots of cowboys and musicals, and that’s what undid me — the glamour.
“It took you out of everything you were going through.
“I thought, ‘I’d like some of that’.
“The lady next door went to tap dancing classes and she said one day she’d take me.
“It was in Rochdale, and I thought, ‘Oh wow, glamorous’, because Gracie Fields’s chip shop was there.
“The journey back from there, you go through Rochdale and go down a very steep hill, and I used to want to sit on the top of the bus, because if you’re doing that and it’s dark there are all these lights inside, and I used to think it must be like that to be on Broadway.”
Barbara says she was only spurred on more by holidays to Blackpool, where she would spend afternoons at a children’s theatre, and evenings watching her parents dance at the Tower Ballroom.
She adds: “Blackpool was the place to go at that time.
“My parents used to bring me every year from when I was about seven until about ten, as you couldn’t travel too far during the war.
“There was something for everybody, and being a little girl I went every afternoon to the Tower to the children’s concert.
“We’d sit cross-legged and sing, and they’d tap dance for about half an hour.
“Then my parents would dance, with music and twirling around.
“It was delightful — they were very happy there and we had lovely holidays with the family.
“That was the next nudge towards showbusiness.”
It was only natural then that Barbara, while working as a Post Office telegraphist, decided to act in amateur theatre, where she was first spotted by Corrie producer Carl Paulsen, who was then head of the repertory theatre in Oldham.
She adds: “I didn’t attempt to join anything professional at all, but Carl came along from Oldham Rep and asked me to play a part in The Boyfriend.
“I was about 20 or 21. Then I never left.”
'Corrie was a very big deal'
It was Carl who got Barbara her first short-lived Corrie role in 1964, before she became an announcer for BBC radio’s Comedy Half Hour, and joined Ken Dodd’s sketch show Funny You Should Say That.
She continues: “When Corrie came along, it was a very big deal as I still had a few weeks to do the Ken Dodd show and they wanted me in a week.
“I went back to rehearsal with Ken the following morning, saying, ‘I know I’ve got seven weeks to do here, but they want me to go on Coronation Street and I would like to — what am I going to do?’
“We carried on rehearsing and then Ken just looked up at me and said, ‘Don’t let me down in Coronation Street. How about that? You can go’. I’ll never forget that.”
It paid off for all involved, if her now nearly six-decade career in Corrie is anything to go by.
Since her Street debut, Barbara has brought in Corrie’s biggest ever audience, with more than 27million viewers watching dramatic live scenes that saw her character’s abuser Alan Bradley killed by a tram in December 1989.
Barbara is now the second longest-serving member of the soap’s cast, just a few years shy of Bill Roache’s epic stint as Ken Barlow, who has been part of the show since it began in 1960.
And she is still part of the much-loved Street double act of Rita and Mavis, long after their time together in the show — as proved when they were reunited in a tearful reunion at the Chelsea Flower Show this summer.
Today Barbara still feels like the same unassuming young lass she was when she first joined the show, shrugging it off: “I can understand they would be interested in the Street, but not in me.
“It’s unbelievable, really — I’ve been on the Street for almost 60 years.
“I’ve almost lost track of the years, I don’t know where they’ve gone, and now suddenly I’m looking at 90.
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“But if they’re listening, I don’t want to retire.”
- Barbara Knox At 90 is on ITV at 9pm this Friday.
