When it comes to Coronation Street’s most memorable moments, it’s not always the high drama that sticks with the stars – sometimes, it’s the unexpected chaos of a rodent.
As Colson Smith departs from his role as Craig Tinker, he shares a memory about one of Corrie’s most delightfully bizarre behind-the-scenes slip-ups: the day Darryl the rat stole the show. “Little moments mean as much as anything, Darryl the rat, I mean, come on.”
The moment saw Darryl, originally part of another storyline, escape and find his way into the Rovers Return, just as a health inspector arrived, Colson recalled. “I remember the rat escaping in the Rovers, and the health inspector coming in, because that wasn’t meant to happen.”
It turns out the chaos came from a hastily rewritten storyline after another actor fell ill. “It was meant to be another story, and someone had gone off ill. And then Darryl the rat escaping and being found in the Rovers next to the panini maker with the health inspector. That all kind of happened in a day.”
Despite the frantic behind-the-scenes scramble, Colson says it’s exactly this kind of unscripted magic that defines Corrie at its best. “The scripts were written, and we kind of had to just go and do it, and make it up,” he explained. “And I remember Phil Collinson coming onto the floor, basically being like, ‘We can make this work.’”
“Stuff like that, where you get nothing, and you make a bit of Corrie. That’s the stuff that I remember the most.”
Rats, rewrites, and Rovers chaos is just another day on the cobbles.