![]() I think he and Harry worked on them towards the end, shaping and doing stories. He wrote the first thirteen scripts himself. Tony worked through Harry Kershaw and Harry Elton. So I carried on for a year running the two things side by side. I went back to the engineering firm where I was working in Rochdale and said ‘I’m sorry but I’ll have to resign because I’ve had this marvellous opportunity’ and they said ‘Would you come for a half a day a week and we’ll pay you the same as a consultant’. A couple of weeks later they offered me a year’s contract so I said ‘OK’. My wife and I were absolutely stony broke and Harry Kershaw was on the phone and he said ‘We like your script, we’d like you to do another’. I always remember it was Christmas Eve when the phone rang at home. ![]() There must have been a dozen or 18 writers on Coronation Street at that point coming in and out but I was the only one who survived that first stint They were trying people out. Apart from being able to earn a living, I owe Coronation Street that debt. Coronation Street taught me construction, Harry Kershaw in particular. They said you’re like an exciting boxer, you come out from the corner, with your fists going and then nothing happens. Up to that time I’d always had great difficulty in constructing a play, I had loads of half-finished plays which had no endings and the BBC tried to encourage me. The characterisation in that first script was terrific. So I saw Harry Kershaw who was script editor and he commissioned me to do episode 24. Straightaway after I’d read it, I said ‘This is it, I’ll do this’. It hadn’t gone on then, Tony was still writing the script and he gave me a copy of Tony’s first script. Then he said ‘we’re doing this thing Coronation Street’. He offered me all these different series they were doing at that time but I didn’t like any of them so I said no. I sent a play into Granada and Derek Granger wrote and said he wanted to see so I went had a chat. ![]() ![]() If you go straight into television from university what do you write about. When I look back an enormous amount of the stuff I’ve written is based on experiences. He helped create some of the Street’s greatest characters, such as Ena Sharples, Else Tanner and Len Fairclough, writing dialogue that has rarely been surpassed. John Finch was one of the first writers on Coronation Street, joining the programme from the beginning. ![]()
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