Former Coronation Street star Lorna Laidlaw has spoken about how she challenged ITV bosses to better represent the Bailey family.
The actress, 61, appeared as matriarch Aggie Bailey on the long-running drama for four years between 2019 and 2023.
After a lengthy absence during the COVID pandemic, her final storyline saw her deal with the consequences of their fall from grace following husband Ed’s (Trevor Michael Georges) gambling addiction.
The clan – the soap’s first regular Black family – had been forced to downsize from desirable Alderley Edge, Cheshire and move to the terraced backstreets of Weatherfield.
Embarrassed by her new home, Aggie convinced her old neighbours that they were living in Sally and Tim Metcalfe’s (Sally Dynevor and Joe Duttine) plush house with a conservatory and hot tub.
Her last appearance was in June 2023, and it was later explained that Aggie had gone to stay in Birmingham off-screen to care for her unwell aunt.
At the beginning of the year, after Ed’s addiction relapsed, he returned from the Midlands with the news that she had ended their marriage.
Lorna has kept busy since leaving the cobbles – having filmed a role in the upcoming series of Channel 5 drama The Good Ship Murder, plus writing and directing Birmingham Old Rep’s production of The Wizard of Oz this Christmas.
During a conversation on the latest edition of the Chicken Soap for the Soul podcast with actress Elisabeth Dermot-Walsh – who she starred alongside in the now axed BBC medical drama Doctors – she addressed how she moulded the Aggie role.
‘I think [the producers] wanted [the Baileys] to have Jamaican accents and I questioned that’ she revealed.
‘I knew it wasn’t truthful. I said to them, “I would guarantee that all the actors you’ve auditioned don’t speak in a Jamaican accent because they were born here. I don’t understand why you give them a Jamaican accent because it makes you feel like they’ve just come here and it makes them that further apart from being rooted in Manchester or wherever you want them.”
‘So we had that discussion. There were lots of little discussions. You know, some people had rehearsed in a Jamaican accent and I just said that I think it’s wrong.
‘Let them feel like they’ve been born and bred. Let them own this city just like everybody else. But I still got the job. So when we started, I had to do a Manchester accent.
‘If you bring grandparents in, that’s a different thing. You know, it’s a different thing. But this generation, my generation, this age group was born and bred.’
Lorna also revealed that she questioned why Aggie and Ed weren’t seen to kiss on-screen.
‘Black love is a really big thing at the moment, and it is making sure that you see Black characters kissing, actually kissing. Those Black characters did not kiss.’
Elisabeth asked whether other character were seen to be in a romantic embrace on The Street, to which Lorna replied: ‘Yes, they do, but the writers didn’t write it.
‘The one thing about this family is that they loved each other, but it is that conscious thing, because you don’t see it very often.
‘It’s that you don’t think about it, and I’m going, “We need to see it, and it needs to be rooted in these soaps, that actually, these families are loving and they kiss and snog each other, just like all the other families” and none of the writers wrote that.’
She also spoke about her surprise at being part the show’s first regular Black family, almost 59 years since its inception.
‘You go, “Really?”, but it’s really funny because my family in New York called me and said “You’re in the New York Times.”
‘It was so big that this is the first black family in a soap as we go for 60 years to be on the street. So it went massive.’
Lorna also said that the idea of having three framed portraits of hummingbirds on the wall of No. 3 was her idea as a ‘homage to the flying ducks’ which once adorned Hilda Ogden’s living room.
