Corrie’s Maureen Lipman slams ITV soap and insists current storylines must be ditched

Coronation Street’s Dame Maureen Lipman believes the show needs to return to its roots.

The 77-year-old actress, who plays Evelyn Plummer, understands why the writers include dramatic storylines about killers, domestic abuse and drug addiction. However, with soap viewership down 42% since 2014, according to Ofcom, Maureen thinks Corrie should reconnect with its past.

She believes it should instead focus on ordinary northerners living their lives, like it did in the 1960s with characters such as Martha Longhurst, Ena Sharples and Minnie Caldwell. On the Beyond The Title podcast, she said: “We’ve come to a point in Corrie now where people are getting murdered in knicker factories.

“We’re having domestic abuse. Anything that ticks the box of social problems in the 21st century is going to be in your local soap.”

“Whereas back then you had the freedom to put Martha, Minnie and Ena in the snug and have a conversation about Ben-Hur. It’s never been political but I always like it when the women sit down and go, ‘Ooh, Donald Trump, ain’t his hair shocking.'”

She added: “All those wonderful expressions that your parents come out with, like my mother saying, ‘Ooh, doesn’t a black skirt cover a multitude of sins.’ People talk like that, and we recognise it as true.”

Lipman is really happy that her character Evelyn in Coronation Street reminds people of the strong women from the show’s past. She also loves that she’s keeping up the work of her late husband Jack Rosenthal, who was one of the first to write for the ITV soap.

Lipman, whose character Evelyn has had a big story with her daughter Cassie (played by Claire Sweeney) who she told her grandson Tyrone was dead, wants the writers to stop trying to make Evelyn “nice”. She likes playing her as she is.

The actress said: “I don’t subscribe to the kind of, ‘Oh, you’re in a soap are you?'” She feels very lucky to play such a good role, saying Evelyn is a classic Corrie character.

Evelyn isn’t the friendliest person, and Lipman keeps fighting against making her too nice because she thinks people don’t really change. Jack wrote the 13th episode, and now she’s working on episode 11,184. She feels like she got Coronation Street from him. He wrote 150 episodes, and some of them are just brilliant.

Maureen, who’s been on the show for six years, says travelling from London to Manchester for filming is hard, but she plans to stay as Evelyn for a while yet. She said: “It’s a good enough job, it’s a little hard. There’s good and there’s bad but it’s a nice group of people, it’s nice being up North. I’ll stick around for a bit longer.”