Bruce Jones has hit out against ‘Coronation Street’ writers for allowing the soap to lose its identity.
Bruce Jones has hit out against Coronation Street writers for allowing the soap to lose its identity
The 71-year-old actor played taxi driver Les Battersby on the ITV series from 1997 to 2007, and he has taken aim at the creative team for including too many murder plots and unrealistic stories which have diluted the kitchen sink drama.
Speaking to The Guardian newspaper, he said: “I watched it from day one, but now my wife says it’s not worth watching. You can’t have that many murders on one street.
“It’s not the actors fault. They’re all doing a good job, but it’s the writers that have changed.
“I think we’ve lost that element of what Manchester life is all about. The writers we had were all living Manchester city life.”
Bruce has called for 'Corrie' to return to its “community” roots.
He said: “Get it back to what ‘Coronation Street’ was … a community. The comedy was there and the tragedy came after.”
Bruce isn’t the only former 'Coronation Street' star to voice concerns over the programme’s current state.
Charlie Lawson - who played Jim McDonald - recently bashed the show for including “too many woke storylines”.
He told The Sun newspaper: “Viewers are getting turned off by too many young storylines.
“In my day, in the Nineties, we didn’t have any woke issues, we didn’t have any political correctness, we had none of that [redacted]. We were able to tell stories and tell them properly.
“I suspect now half the meetings that they have upstairs on the sixth floor are about what is politically acceptable, all this stuff that they feel they have to address.”
In 2023, the 'Coronation Street’ Christmas episode attracted only 2.6 million viewers - less than a quarter of what Charlie was seeing during his first Weatherfield tenure from 1989 to 2000.
Lawson believes the “very disappointing” viewing figures are directly related to the drop in quality of the writing.
He said: “I do know there are at least two long-term cast members who aren’t happy. There is a feeling there are too many episodes and that the production team don’t have time to give the attention to detail they did before.
"If you look at the quality of the writers we had, we had great writers. You know, we never worried about ratings because it wasn’t an issue. We were always getting ten to 12 million. And then Christmas time, like I think the McDonald family got 20 million once when there was a domestic violence issue.
“An awful lot of people are saying there’s nothing like that anymore — they can’t all be wrong.”
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