Our friends in the north

Growing up in the North West of England, Coronation Street is not just essential weekly viewing for me, it is almost a spiritual home. I’ve lived in London for over 25 years, but have retained my flat vowels – ‘bath’, never ‘barth’ – and my affection for the characters of the familiar cobbled street, as they battle through their dramas with their sharp humour and northern resilience.

I am also an inveterate Radio 4 listener, so when the actresses who played two of my favourite characters from The Street were guests, it seemed to be a happy confluence of two facets of my life.

Betty Driver played the plain-speaking, sometimes sagacious and often comic, bar-maid Betty Turpin, for over 40 years until her death months after her appearance on Desert Island Discs.  Her life was far more eventful than that of her character, whose legacy was the bastion of the Rovers Return’s menu, the legendary Betty’s Hotpot.

A gifted singer, the young Betty Driver was propelled into a life in films and variety by her cold and hugely ambitious mother who was determined she would rival her contemporary, Gracie Fields.  Escaping her domineering mother, Betty married a faithless bully of a man who spent all her money and abandoned her.

Actress Julie Goodyear, who appeared on, the programme earlier this year, played Betty’s fellow bar-maid at The Rovers, Bet Lynch. A brassy, sassy and quick-witted character, topped with a peroxide beehive, Bet’s life was peppered by love affairs and heartbreak until she finally settled with the portly and slightly bumptious Alec Gilroy, who, although he fell far short of the Prince Charming she’d imagined, made Bet Queen of The Street – landlady of the Rover’s Return.

The landscape of Julie Goodyear’s early life was not dissimilar to that of her character.  Julie movingly described her very close relationship with her grandmother, the woman in her own street who ‘laid people out’. As a child, Julie would help her and she was left completely bereft by her death.  A single mother after becoming pregnant at 17, Goodyear described getting the role on Corrie as ‘like winning the lottery’.  Whilst now happily married to her fourth husband, Goodyear’s earlier life surpassed any drama she played on screen, when her second husband left her for his best man on the day of their wedding.

What both these characters share with the women who played them, was a willingness to embrace life and a resilience to its exigencies: an ability to meet adversity and heartbreak with a sharp wit and a determination to paint on a smile. In searching for role models we often seek those with the qualities we imagine we may lack in ourselves and hope that they may drive us to discover those virtues in ourselves.

Both Betty and Bet, Betty and Julie, are like so many women I have known in reality and are a huge inspiration to me – the strong northern, working class women who have survived and thrived – and I urge you to listen to their stories.

Jayne Phenton