Elegant Violet Carson appeared as the hairnetted harridan in the first episode. Granada had wanted Tony Warren to axe the character, but she rapidly became one of Weatherfield’s most recognisable voices: “They think,” she said of Londoners, “we go around in loincloths waving knobkerries.” The caretaker of the Glad Tidings Mission Hall, bundled up in a double-breasted coat, she was a habitue of the Rovers’s snug: she, Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst were its Three Weird Sisters, gossiping over milk stout. Elsie Tanner said Coronation Street didn’t need sewers: it had Ena Sharples Photograph: Rex Features
The big, bald butcher who said everything twice, and boomingly, started out as a comic gargoyle and became ever sweeter: I said, became ever sweeter. Butchery was a passion: he once sold reindeer hamburgers outside Santa’s grotto. A glorious episode showed him initiating his secret son, Ashley Peacock, into the mysteries of meat by reverently unveiling “the Bugatti of bacon slicers”. John Savident’s performance made his failed love affairs moving and his death on his wedding day a calamity. John Betjeman thought Coronation Street was a latterday Pickwick Papers. Fred Elliott was the character who proved him right
This gallery was amended 23 November 2010. The original image displayed was not show John Savident as Fred Elliott Photograph: ITV
As Elsie, Pat Phoenix was the first and most compelling of the Street’s sirens. She set a pattern (the opposite of the EastEnders ideal) for voluptuous non-blondes: today, Rosie Webster has something of her smoulder. Red-haired and cleavaged, Elsie favoured cocktail dresses and a string of pearls for pottering round No 11, which had flying ducks on the wall and a clothesline in front of the grate. She had three husbands, many lovers and a talent for abuse. Of her old adversary Ena Sharples, she said: “That woman’s tongue. If it were a bit longer she could shave with it" Photograph: Rex Features
She had a star named after her (by the adoring Curly) and sported the sculpted cheekbones that are often hailed as the proof of aristocracy. Raquel, created by Sarah Lancashire, was the most luminous of the Rovers’s 51 barmaids. She was radiant, sad and innocent: she thought an own goal meant the striker had done it alone. She wore chiffon bows in her tumbling Dolly Parton curls, tiny skirts and plunging necklines. One of the men who made her unhappy called her “a walking Wonderbra”: she threw a packet of peanuts at him and worried about ruining the peanuts Photograph: Rex Features
“Good looks are a curse, Deirdre. You and Kenneth should count yourselves lucky.” Played in 830 episodes by Maggie Jones, Blanche made withering into high comedy. Deirdre’s long-faced mother (even their specs were related) specialised in bringing low her nearest. When Ken found a manuscript of his unpublished novel in the attic, she drawled: “So even the moths didn’t take an interest.” She reached excoriating heights at an AA meeting, when she spilt her family’s bad beans and delivered a commentary on the boringness of the speakers. Her glory days were as a funeral groupie, dating an undertaker Photograph: Rex Features
Coronation Street has always – it’s rare in a soap – had room for kindness. Royston Cropper (David Neilson) embodies this. He’s a hunched-up man with a nylon shopping bag who has an intricate knowledge of bus routes, belongs to a bat-protection society and makes people’s lives better. He does first aid; he loves Hayley (nee Harold), the gentle transsexual; he fostered fiery girls – Fizz and Becky – helping them become two of the street’s most beguiling and grateful characters. He cleverly renamed the cafe, where he sells fry-ups and lasagne, Roy’s Rolls; Roy himself had a camper van Photograph: PR
Thelma Barlow played her, with exceptional delicacy, in a variety of pastel pinnies, for 26 years. Vague Mavis – “I don’t really know” became her catchphrase – was neither siren nor battleaxe. She had budgerigars, a job in the Kabin and a tumultuous relationship with her soulmate, Derek, who courted her over lunch in the Crusty Loaf and who, on discovering she was having reflexology in the sitting-room, denounced her as a Jezebel. Wonderfully, she lost her timidity at Derek’s funeral, berating those mourners who had thought her a figure of fun. The viewers always knew better Photograph: Rex Features
Coronation Street never gives its characters personality transplants. It does allows them to grow up and change. Sophie Webster is proof of what dividends this pays. Her transformation from the neglected sidekick of her poutier sister, Rosie, makes perfect sense. First, she was sullen, then she became a Christian and started wearing a purity necklace. Now, dynamically performed by Brooke Vincent, she has come out as a lesbian, the first known to Weatherfield. She and her girlfriend shocked the vicar when they turned up hand in hand to choir practice. The 15-year-old informed him: “We are not an abomination” Photograph: Rex Features
There’s been a ginger, a brindle and, possibly (or is it a phantom?), a grey one, sidling along a red brick wall at the opening of the programme. The first appeared in 1976. It was an accident (the cat’s true owner was never discovered), but the idea of having a moggie was so popular that in 1990 a competition was held on ITV’s This Morning to cast a new creature. Cats suggest the domesticity and the solitariness of Coronation Street life. They guide your eyes down into the secret labyrinth of back to backs. They sidle in perfect harmony with Eric Spear’s melancholic, cornet-led theme music Photograph: PR
She’s gobby and she’s glamorous, but her knock-out quality is her intelligence. Intelligence explains her unpredictability. She took up with the coffin-voiced David Platt: he does have a brain. She abandoned marriage to Jason Grimshaw: he’s gorgeous but dopey. And intelligence enabled her to see that the philosophising, linguistically gifted, deeply unhip Graeme Proctor would be a good partner for her. She looks convincing even during patches of overplotting: her father drowning, Gail Platt being banged up on suspicion of murder and David’s general bonkerishness. That’s largely due to Michelle Keegan, who acts with lovely directness Photograph: Rex Features
