Brown ale, ‘moody foreigners’ and no ginger cat: rewatching the first Coronation Street episode

The first thing you notice is that there’s no ginger cat on the opening titles. In grainy black-and-white, we wouldn’t have known it was ginger anyway. Still, there was no moggie at all when Coronation Street began on 9 December 1960. The famous shot of a ginger tom, curled up on the slated rooftops – as if it had contentedly sat down to watch the programme, just like us – didn’t arrive until 1976.

Revisiting the first episode, though, many other things are reassuringly the same. We’re parped in by Eric Spear’s plaintive cornet theme, aptly titled “Lancashire Blues”. There’s the familiar establishing shot of a cobbled, terraced backstreet in inner-city Salford, with a pub at one end and a corner shop at the other.

Most uncannily of all, dear old Ken Barlow (William Roache) is sitting at the dinner table; his side-parting is arrow-straight, and he’s bickering with his family. The only remaining member of the original cast, Street stalwart Roache is now 88 and the longest-serving soap actor in TV history.

His storyline makes up one of the main threads in the inaugural episode. Ambitious young “Kenneth” is home from university for the holidays. However, he’s had his impressionable head turned by academic life and the world outside Weatherfield. He now finds his humble roots something of an embarrassment.

A row brews as we see Ken eating chops, mash and gravy, wearing a silk tie and new pullover. He glances disdainfully at his postman father Frank (Frank Pemberton) in his shirtsleeves, slathering his food in brown sauce, “swilling it down” with a cup of tea and promptly lighting his pipe. We soon discover that Ken is meeting a girl for a date later – in the bar of the well-to-do city-centre hotel where his mother Ida (Noel Dyson) works as a kitchen hand. Ken is part of the upwardly mobile new generation, sure, but he’s also becoming a snob.

Other plot threads are deftly introduced. Florrie Lindley (Betty Alberge) has just bought the shop, and her handover chat with the previous owner enables Florrie (and the viewers) to be filled in about the local residents. We see her serve bulldog-faced battleaxe Ena Sharples (Violet Carson), who brusquely demands “half a dozen fancies but no eclairs”. She faintly resembles Les Dawson.

Ena wastes no time airing her disapproval of neighbour Elsie Tanner (Pat Phoenix) who, confusingly, is described as both a “bad ’un” and “no better than she should be”. Thus Coronation Street’s long tradition of warring matriarchs was quickly established. Later copied by rival soaps, notably its Cockney cousin EastEnders, this running theme is often attributed to the female-dominated environment in which series creator Tony Warren grew up.

We soon meet Elsie herself – the street siren who was dubbed “the working man’s Raquel Welch”. A sharp-tongued tart-with-a-heart, all fading glamour and bruised emotions, she thoroughly steals the show. She has a row of three flying plaster ducks on her parlour wall – part of the Corrie furniture which she would later pass onto Hilda Ogden (Jean Alexander).

Meanwhile, Elsie’s bequiffed, bad-boy son Dennis (PhiIip Lowrie, who returned to the show in 2011 after a 43-year absence) has just been released from prison after serving six months for petty theft. In The Rover’s Return - where drinkers wear flat caps or headscarves – he orders half a mild and asks for a pack of cigarettes “on tick”. Imperious landlady Annie Walker (Doris Speed) haughtily refuses. “Some mothers do ’ave ’em,” she notes with an eyeroll.

Ken Barlow sympathetically slips Dennis some smokes instead. There’s still a neighbourly heart beating beneath that snobbish exterior after all.

Incidental details provide a time capsule of the early Sixties. Everyone seems to smoke. Children chant nursery rhymes and skip in the street. We see a customer returning empty brown-ale bottles to the shop. The script includes references to “embrocation”, “a brass companion set” and “the Labour Exchange”. There are also glimpses of a different, less reconstructed world. When Elsie’s daughter Linda (Anne Cunningham) says of her Polish husband, “he’s that moody”, Elsie drily replies: “Foreigners are.”

As it’s 60 years ago, pretty much everyone we see – bar Roache, of course – has now passed away. This lends the viewing experience an elegiac feel, like gazing at a flickering cinéfilm of a long-departed relative.

Coronation Street was heavily influenced by the genre conventions of kitchen-sink realism: working-class characters living cheek-by-jowl in the industrial north, spending their time in cramped dwellings or backstreet pubs, their stories exploring gritty social issues. Corrie might be in full colour nowadays, with bigger budgets, more varied locations and the occasional large-scale set piece – crashes! fires! fugitive serial killers! – but the basic recipe is unchanged.

Granada originally commissioned only 13 episodes, all written by Tony Warren, whose ear for everyday dialect and camp humour remain in Corrie’s DNA today. So familiar is its tangy, whimsical tone, this opening episode occasionally feels like a Victoria Wood parody or Alan Bennett play.

Many inside Granada doubted the show would last beyond that initial run. One of the first press reviews, from The Daily Mirror, predicted it would be gone by Christmas. Yet it defied the sceptics to survive and by March 1961, had reached number one in the ratings. Three years later, it was attracting 21 million viewers.

Viewership would peak during the late Eighties, when 27 million of us watched Hilda Ogden leave the street and dastardly Alan Bradley (Mark Eden) try to kill his lover Rita Fairclough (Barbara Knox, the second longest-serving character with a mere 48 years) by suffocating her with a cushion. Alan would eventually get his comeuppance, courtesy of a Blackpool tram.

There’s a reason why Coronation Street is the world’s longest-running soap opera – because it’s the original and best. Right from the start, the ingredients are there: engaging characters, naturalistic acting, intimate domestic warmth and pacy plotting.

Tony Warren’s groundbreaking creation has become a beloved part of our national culture: quintessentially British, always there, durable and dependable. Over more than 10,000 episodes, it has entertained and comforted successive generations. By ’eck: not bad for a programme only predicted to last three weeks.