Dame Maureen Lipman insists ITV Coronation Street needs to go back to roots to win viewers back

Dame Maureen Lipman has shared her thoughts on the future of Coronation Street, insisting that the ITV soap needs to go back to it’s roots

Coronation Street star Dame Maureen Lipman says the soap needs to stop trying to shock and get back to its northern roots to win back viewers.

Maureen, 77, who plays battleaxe Evelyn Plummer, says she can understand why ITV writers include sensational plots about killers, domestic abuse and drug addiction.

But with overall soap audiences down 42% since 2014, according to Ofcom, Maureen believes Corrie must reconnect with its past and show normal people living their lives – as it did with characters such as Martha Longhurst, Ena Sharples and Minnie Caldwell in the 1960s.

Speaking on the Beyond The Title podcast, she said: “We’ve come to a point in Corrie now where people are getting murdered in knicker factories. We’re having domestic abuse. Anything that ticks the box of social problems in the 21st century is going to be in your local soap.

“Whereas back then you had the freedom to put Martha, Minnie and Ena in the snug and have a conversation about Ben-Hur. It’s never been political but I always like it when the women sit down and go, ‘Ooh, Donald Trump, ain’t his hair shocking.’

All those wonderful expressions that your parents come out with, like my mother saying, ‘Ooh, doesn’t a black skirt cover a multitude of sins.’ People talk like that, and we recognise it as true.”

Lipman is very proud that her character Evelyn is like the great Weatherfield matriarchs of the past, while she is also proud to continue the legacy of her late husband Jack Rosenthal who was one of the first writers on the ITV soap.

Lipman – whose alter ego Evelyn has been embroiled in her own sensationalist plot with the appearance of her drug addict daughter Cassie (Claire Sweeney) who she told her grandson Tyrone was dead – has urged the writers to stop trying to make Evelyn “nice”, something she continues to resist.

The stage star said: “I don’t subscribe to the kind of, ‘Oh, you’re in a soap are you?’
“I’m very lucky to have basically a great character, she is a great character; old school Corrie.

“She’s not particularly nice, they keep trying to make her nicer but I keep resisting because I don’t think people change much. Jack wrote episode 13 and I think I go back to do episode 11,184. I inherited Coronation Street from Jack. He went on to write 150 and if you look at classic Corrie, some of them are just wonderful. Because they’re not really about anything.”

As she enters her sixth year on the cobbles, Maureen admits the shooting schedule and trips from London from Manchester are taking their toll but she intends to keep playing Evelyn for the foreseeable future.

She said: “It’s a good enough job, it’s a little hard. There’s good and there’s bad but it’s a nice group of people, it’s nice being up North. I’ll stick around for a bit longer.”