From the cobbles of Weatherfield to the rooftops above it, Coronation Street is pulling out all the stops this September to really bring the drama – trust us, it’s going to be incredible! Corrie producer Iain Macleod sat down on Zoom to tease us with all the trouble heading out way in the coming weeks.
Does Stephen pose a threat, and was he brought back to be a womanizer and baddy?
Iain Macleod: He’s desperate, and will continue to get more desperate and dark as his story unfolds. He’s been brought back with a slightly different spin from the one we saw before. The beauty of his character is his longevity and connection to the show and a heritage family.
Iain went on to say that while we’ve seen him before, he’s ‘a bit of a blank canvas’, we don’t really know a lot about him. ‘In filling in the blanks, we’ll learn more about him and we’ve made him dark, dangerous, interesting, scheming, mischievous (is probably too light a word), but certainly machiavellian’.
Jenny’s made this mistake again in terms of the person she chose to make a mistake with, namely, Steven couldn’t really pick the worst person, and so yes, it will all go off um in fairly spectacular fashion across the month of September, and with long lasting consequences for the whole show.
What can you tease us about the big week of drama with Gary and Kelly?
Iain MacLeod: It’s a fantastic week with with Gary and Kelly at the heart of it, and some really special filming that we’ve not done before. In fact, not many people have done before. Well, we’ve decided to go full.
The centrepiece of the week is the secrets that we’ve shot using technology that’s more commonly found in things like the Mandalorian. It’s called Volume Wall, which is relatively new to me. Basically, it means you can put your actors anywhere that you can imagine. You can essentially design a 3D world like the surface of Mars, and you could stick, Ken, and Rita up there having a Mr. Kipling and a cup of tea, if you wish. Now clearly. We didn’t want to do that because That’ be slightly bizarre. So what we’ve done instead is create this incredible rooftop sequence of a twinkling Mancunian city state behind it, so that we can do things that you could never normally do in a location shoot.
During the week Gary has to retrace his steps back into the doom forest of Doom, where he once had to fight for his life with Kelly’s dad (Rick Neelan). Um. So yeah, it’s a really brilliant kind of tying up.
It leaves me with a heavy heart to say that we all know Kelly’s leaving the show. So we thought well, actually, the fact that Millie is going, and that therefore Kelly is going allows us to go really big and do something incredibly high state, and to maybe have some characters step on all these landmines that we buried. And so we’ve really thrown everything at this week to try, and, you know, bring out all the big secrets, lies, reveals and schemes.
On a slightly lighter note we finally get to meet the much mentioned and anticipated Dee Dee Bailey. So what can you expect from her arrival?
I love this character. I loved her long before she physically existed, just by the way she was described in the Bailey family. Essentially you can expect a certain amount of chaos. She’s got an incredibly big heart. She’s incredibly competent at her job and she’s the sort of person that will issue a kind of take down of a team of hotshot lawyers to defend her clients, but will then turn to leave the courtroom, and you realize that she’s done the whole thing with her skirt tucked into her knickers, since she’s just kind of abject chaos in every regard apart from that kind of incredibly sharp mind, but she’s loads of fun.
What can you tell us about Toyah and Spider’s drama?
Obviously the impending prospect of a life sentence for you ramps up all of our emotions around what’s happened, and specifically what she did to Imran and her guilt over all that, and she kind of reaches this huge emotional crisis point where she’s got this kind of burning desire to repent, and she ends up unburdening herself um entirely to Spider. How much of it was an accident, how much was it deliberate?
The idea is that you know she’s head over heels in love with this guy again, and reconnected with him instantly on his return to the street. And it feels like he’s so. One true friend of the world. Um, but she she might not be wrong, but she’s certainly making a huge mistake.
Spider was a great returning character. Wasn’t he? It’s it’s really added, like layers to this storyline, and and you know there’s there’s much more to come from him as well isn’t there.
Yes, and we had a a lengthy and heated debate about what Spider’s life looked like.
How has he gone about trying to change the world better since we last saw him, and I think the answers we’ve come up with are surprising. Shocking um interesting, and I think we’ll make the audience gasps slightly when we discover exactly what’s going on…
Coronation Street airs Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 8pm on ITV. Catch up on the ITV HUB.
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