Latest news with #GranadaTV
Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Where is Coronation Street set and where is the ITV soap filmed? All to know
Most fans know Coronation Street is based in the fictional and often drama-filled town of Weatherfield – but where is it really set? Corrie is one of the most popular programmes on TV, having been on air since 1960. In fact, it's the longest-running soap in the UK. It was previously filmed at Granada TV studios in the Castlefield district of Manchester for more than 50 years, but recently changed location. So, where is the ITV soap filmed now? Let's find out. We're here for this 90's reference 💃 #Corrie — Coronation Street (@itvcorrie) April 2, 2025 For the last 11 years, the Corrie set has been based at MediaCity in Salford, just outside of Manchester city centre. The set has been purpose-built for the soap and has been home to the cobbles since 2014. To make the new filming set at MediaCity, 400,000 bricks were used to recreate the beloved neighbourhood - 144,000 of them were reclaimed from a derelict row of properties in Salford, The Guardian previously reported. The newer set was also built 80% of 'real life size' compared to 60% at the old location in the city centre. Meanwhile, the streets are now almost a metre wider to allow cars and fire engines to pass more easily - rather useful for all the emergencies in Weatherfield. Viewers might have noticed The Rovers Return has a new window upstairs to indicate the right number of bedrooms. "So that Steve and Liz McDonald don't have to share with Michelle any more", said executive producer Kieran Roberts at the time. He described the set move (which took two years to plan) as "the biggest, most dramatic change in the show's history". But best of all, you can see the latest Corrie set for yourself – as the soap offers an exclusive tour, the Coronation Street Experience. The experience's website shares: 'Once the cast and crew head home after a week of filming, we open the doors for an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of Manchester's most famous street. 'Join one of our expert tour guides and step in the world of Coronation Street like never before.' Recommended reading: Coronation Street icon gives update on soap character's future after 65 years Who is the highest-paid actor to ever appear on Coronation Street? When did Coronation Street start and how many episodes have there been? It continues: 'Gain exclusive insights into the making of Coronation Street as our knowledgeable guides share behind-the-scenes stories and trivia. 'Discover hidden corners and meticulous set designs, where you'll get a glimpse into the incredible craftsmanship that goes into creating the world famous television institution.' Book your visit via the Coronation Street Experience website.
The Guardian
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Carey Harrison obituary
My friend and sometime colleague Carey Harrison, who has died aged 80, was a prolific novelist and playwright, and a respected teacher of English. His early plays were performed at the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh and in the late 1960s he became resident playwright at Granada TV's Stables Theatre Project, through which his plays were shown on television – I worked with him on the first of these, In a Cottage Hospital, broadcast in 1969. He went on to write more than 200 plays and 16 novels, of which the best known, Richard's Feet (1990), won the UK Society of Authors' Encore award. Carey's interests were wide-ranging, from nazism and communism to Spinoza, and on to Freud and Jung. He celebrated their competing theories of mind and psychoanalysis in his 2009 play Scenes from a Misunderstanding, mounted at the Jewish theatre festival in Manhattan, New York. In the 1960s and 70s, he had a career as a political activist, and, with his first wife, Mary Chamberlain, he joined the London Recruits, a group of young people chosen by the African National Congress to smuggle ANC and Communist party literature into South Africa after their printing presses had been destroyed. The ANC Veterans League described him as 'one of the glorious band of internationalists who assisted our liberation movement during the fierce years of struggle, at great personal risk'. Carey was born in London, the son of the English actor Sir Rex Harrison and his second wife, the German actor Lilli Palmer, and was educated at the Lycée Français in New York, at Harrow in London, and at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied English. He and I first met when we staged his first play, 26 Efforts at Pornography, at the Traverse in 1967. Carey had written it for Sir John Gielgud; later I had lunch with Gielgud and asked him to do it at the Stables. 'Oh, dear boy,' he said, 'I'd love to … but I couldn't bear to spend six weeks in Manchester.' For a time in midlife Carey taught at the University of Essex and won prizes for his goat-breeding. Then, from 1996 until his retirement in 2024 he served as professor of English at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York, where his polymathic career found expression in the great variety of the courses he taught. His schedule included American, British and Irish literature, Renaissance poetry, Shakespeare and creative writing. He was highly regarded by his students. Two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, the artist Claire Lambe, whom he married in 1992, their daughter, Chiara, and Claire's daughter, Zoe; by Rosie, the daughter of his marriage to Mary, and Sam and Faith, the children of his second marriage, to Val Fletcher; and by his stepmother, Mercia.
Telegraph
17-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Lee Child: ‘I've been a pothead since 1969'
Lee Child shouldn't be here. The master of the killer thriller is supposed to be 'a retired guy', enjoying the fruits of his 28-year writing career: the four homes, the lifetime earnings he estimates at $200 million, the Renoir and the Fabergé watch that 'cost more than my Jaguar'. After writing 24 bestselling novels featuring his all-American 'knight errant' Jack Reacher, he handed the baton over to his novelist brother Andrew, 15 years his junior – working on four books together before leaving the youngest Child to it. So why is the 70-year-old sitting in this hotel suite in London's Soho talking to me? 'It's not really working out great,' he quips of his self-inflicted redundancy. In fact, the Jack Reacher franchise – based on the character he came up with in anger in 1995 after being let go from Granada TV – is not contracting, but expanding. First, there was the mixed blessing of Tom Cruise as a supposedly 6ft 5in, 17-stone ex-military police major in two films. Then there is Prime Video's Reacher, the third series of which – adapted from novel seven, Persuader – he is here dutifully to promote, having been remunerated three times 'for the IP [intellectual property]' as executive producer and as consultant. This season, Reacher finds himself inside a vast criminal enterprise while trying to rescue an undercover informant whose time is running out. The creators of the show, starring Alan Ritchson, are also working on a spin-off, Neagley, focusing on the protagonist's right-hand woman, played by Maria Sten. 'They want both halves of the year to be somehow dominated by the Reacherverse,' says Child of the drifter hailed by his literary agent, Darley Anderson, as the 'James Bond of the 21st century'. Child no longer spends each September 1 – the date he sat down to begin his first instalment, Killing Floor – launching into a new book, but celebrates 'not starting'. Otherwise, his lifestyle sounds remarkably unchanged. He used to drink up to 36 coffees a day, smoke 20 Camels and light up a joint while reclining on a 9ft sofa, poring over his drafts. 'I mean, I still drink a ridiculous amount of coffee and I've been a pothead since 1969 and so that's never going to change. It hurts my back to sit at a right angle so I love being horizontal. Yeah, it's a great life.' That said, there is one big shift. Child was born Jim Grant in Coventry, the son of housewife Audrey and John, a tax inspector, but had lived in the States for a quarter of a century. Last summer, he started pondering a move back to Blighty 'if it all goes bad in November', explaining he was 'too old and too tired to deal with the tsunami of crap that would be coming our way'. In so doing, he joined a galaxy of celebrities who said they would abandon America were Donald Trump to enter, or re-enter, the White House. Bruce Springsteen talked in vain about Australia, Barbra Streisand considered Canada and Cher joked about Jupiter. However, like his literary avatar, Child is a man of action. 'The morning after the election, I flew back to Britain, and bought a house in the Lake District,' he says, his slender frame – only one inch shorter than Reacher's – nestled in an armchair. 'So that's where I plan to spend most of the next four years.' Has the Trump presidency been worse than he feared? 'Hideous, yeah,' he says with a grimace. 'Hemingway said about bankruptcy, it happens at first gradually and then suddenly, and Britain needs to be vigilant about not letting it happen here.' I wonder, how do we go about that? 'The media has to take a very elevated view of truth over partisanship,' he says in his transatlantic drawl. 'Maybe it's inevitable, maybe we're moving into an era where everybody has their own reality, but the sense of what is real and what isn't seems to have totally disappeared.' Child has already given up his home in the south of France because climate change brought 'North African weather and North African insects'. He says he will also have to sell up his ranch in Wyoming, where he lived a life not dissimilar to that of his 'noble loner'. He now concedes that somewhere that involves a 90-minute round trip to get milk and where it is 'physically impossible to get out of the house because snow has drifted against it 20ft thick' is no place for a septuagenarian. (That leaves his brownstone townhouse in New York and 'winter escape' in Colorado). Yet even during his decades abroad, he never truly left England behind. Both he and his brother are Aston Villa fans, and he regularly named characters after former players. The author, who reads up to 300 books a year, has always been brazenly commercial. He chose his pen name because it is a word that evokes warmth and, alphabetically, sandwiched him on the shelves between the crime titans Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie. But he admits to one costly error. Reacher's proud lack of possessions – Child relished the review that called him 'Sherlock Homeless' – has written off a plethora of sponsorship opportunities, even though a survey once found he was the 'strongest brand in publishing'. He consumes as much caffeine as his creator and there is a Jack Reacher coffee. 'But apart from that, I blew all the marketing opportunities completely,' Child says with a chuckle. What about branded toothbrushes – the only item Reacher carries, apart from his passport? 'Could have a toothbrush, yeah, and people send me them all the time, as a sort of token. Literally, I've got a huge cardboard box full in my office.' He has also received less savoury bathroom products. When he included a verbatim passage he had been emailed by a US soldier in Iraq criticising the US government, readers tore out the page. 'Sometimes it was used as toilet paper and sent to me.' More recently, Reacher has been caught up in the culture wars. Last year, New York magazine said he was 'a glaringly white fantasy' and asked: 'Is it any wonder that Reacher has an entrenched right-wing fanbase?' The Daily Dot website reported that many 'celebrate Reacher's violent retribution as an example of what Trump will do to the libs'. 'They're talking about the psychotic Maga manifestation of right-wing, which is really something completely different,' says Child, who is married with one adult daughter. And he points out that he has had hate mail when Reacher's love interest has been black. 'Is he a white supremacist or is he in favour of mixed-race relationships? They can't have it both ways.' Child developed his pragmatic political instincts while working as transmission controller, and union shop steward, at Granada from 1977 to 1995. Battling mass redundancies, he, Reacher-style, commissioned the cleaners to fish any useful paperwork out of the bins. Among the documents was a psychological profile of Child. 'They called me cynical, and I've run into that many times. The pragmatism is somehow mistaken for cynicism.' What else did it say? 'That I'm stubborn, obstinate and so on, which is absolutely true. There is no human being more stubborn and obstinate than me.' Like all purveyors of 'commercial fiction', Child has absorbed the brickbats of critics – while reportedly shifting one staccato-sentenced novel every nine seconds. But slowly, more and more esteemed fans crept out of the woodwork, from Philip Pullman to Kate Atkinson and Haruki Murakami. 'What page-turners, what prose, what landscapes, what motorways and motels, what mythic dimensions!' gushed Dame Margaret Drabble. 'He does all the things I could never do.' Antonia Fraser is another admirer, but failed to persuade her late husband Harold Pinter, who sneered: 'I cannot understand the mentality of one who is awaiting the next Lee Child.' 'I mean, I don't need Harold Pinter's approval in any way whatsoever,' says Child himself. 'To be an entertainment professional who doesn't understand how parts of the market work is profoundly silly.' The Booker Prize committee understood, inviting him to be a judge in 2020. But is it about time that writers of his ilk were eligible for Bookers or Nobels? 'Nah,' he shrugs. 'It's greedy. We make a fortune compared to those literary guys.' A half-smile forms. 'I'd rather have my sales than their prizes, put it like that.' Season 3 of Reacher premieres on Prime Video on 20 February
