No one said it was going to be easy. For six decades Coronation Street has given us some of the most memorable characters on television.
The Sixties alone delivered such stalwarts as Jack and Annie Walker, Ena Sharples, Elsie Tanner, Hilda Ogden, Betty Turpin, Minnie Caldwell, Rita Littlewood (later Fairclough, then Tanner) and of course Ken Barlow.
You could make a Top 20 out of just the barmaids, landlords and landladies to have graced and served at The Rovers. And then there’s the bad boys and villains.
Our roll call stretches all the way back to the show’s beginnings. Yet the most recent has only been a series regular since 2015. Who are they? Take a look…
Hilda Ogden (Jean Alexander)
The street’s greatest gossip, nothing got past Hilda. Her cleaning duties at The Rovers might not have been done with great gusto but it was down to her efforts, not layabout husband Stan’s, that they kept a roof over their heads at no.13.
Her trademark curlers and headscarf saw her through 23 years at the pub and it was a special moment when she was tasked with performing its 1988 re-opening ceremony after the fire.
Her loyalty to Stan, despite all the grief she gave him, was unquestionable. The scene where she opened Stan’s personal effects after the funeral and found his spectacles is one of Corrie’s greatest ever.
Raquel Wolstenhulme (Sarah Lancashire)
In the hands of almost any other show, and possibly actor, aspiring model-turned-barmaid Raquel might have met a very different fate. Her naivety could be played for laughs but Corrie’s writers and Sarah Lancashire also recognised her as decent and trusting and worthy of much more.
She was badly treated by love-rat Des Barnes and was self-aware enough to realise she was settling with husband Curly Watts who she eventually left to once again pursue her modelling career.
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