Former 'Coronation Street' actor Derek Griffiths decided to leave the soap because he got jaded with his role.
Derek Griffiths
The 75-year-old actor played mechanic Freddie Smith from 2016 to March 2017 before exiting Weatherfield and he admits that he lost his “freshness” due to the show’s gruelling shooting schedule and six episodes per week running time.
The ex-'Play School' presenter told Best of British magazine: “It's like a West End show, how do you maintain your freshness over a period of a year's run? It's very difficult to do. I've often been in shows where a laugh has disappeared, and you think, 'Where has that laugh gone that I had? I've lost it,' and so you try and get it back. Try too hard and you fall over, and it doesn't happen, so maintaining freshness is the difficult part.
"So, after a year, I thought time to move on, to pastures new."
Derek – whose character Freddie had a romance with 'Corrie' icon Audrey Roberts, played by Sue Nicholls - isn’t sure if he would want to return to Corrie, and says the writers would have to come up with a special storyline to entice back on to the cobbles.
When asked if he would like to go back to the ITV show, he said: “I don't know, I don't know the answer to that, quite honestly. You'd have to catch me at the time and I'd have to see what scripts they were coming up with and how one was involved.”
Tagged in Sue Nicholls