The departure of Helen Worth from Coronation Street after 50 years as Gail feels to some of us like a rent in the primeval structure of the universe. Gail has been woven into the fabric of our lives. She was there when we started school, had our first kiss, our first job. She arrived in Weatherfield in the days of the Cold War, the Cod Wars and Roxy Music. She leaves in the era of TikTok, Ozempic and Taylor Swift.
When we think of soap stars, we think of the larger-than-life figures such as Bet Lynch or the quirky ones like Zak Dingle. Yet characters like Gail are the lifeblood of soap opera – the everymen and everywomen who keep them grounded in reality.
And there is nobody more everywoman than our Gail. She is wonderfully normal; reasonable, with no particular personality flaws. I worked as a storyliner on the show in 1997, and she was a very valued character. Worth hit every line of dialogue perfectly every time, which is a godsend in a highly time-stressed environment. When the futures and fates of characters were discussed, Gail’s name never came up as a potential victim. After all, she was our bedrock.
During my time on the show, one of the writers pitched a story where Gail, in the days before algorithms, was picked out as the most median consumer in the land, and spied upon by advertisers and pollsters as they covertly insinuated new products on her or asked for her opinions. This was, probably wisely, rejected, on the age-old soap precept that you shouldn’t take the mick out of your characters. But it’s significant – nobody else in the cast could have made that story work. Fellow long-timers are positively eccentric in comparison – take Rita, a woman with an exotic nightclub past and Queen Mother-ish aura of grandness, that is perhaps unusual for a purveyor of pick-and-mix.
Gail in herself is normal, yes. And yet she is at the centre of a vortex of calamitous events, like a dark lodestone of causality. Married six times (twice to the same man, of whom more in a bit), her life has been plagued by serial killers (one husband, her half-brother), being wrongly imprisoned for murder (of husband number 4), and a family that isn’t so much dysfunctional as actively dangerous.
How unlikely this all would have seemed to the 16-year-old Gail Potter of 1974. Friendly and cheeky and sweet, often wearing a scruffy Afghan sheepskin coat, the sensible friend for the flibbertigibbet Tricia Hopkins, daughter of the family then running (briefly) the corner shop. As these things often turn out, the supposed background character stepped into the spotlight. The Hopkins clan vanished soon after; Gail endured.
It’s not difficult to see why Gail lasted. Helen Worth has always been wholly believable. There is no sense to the viewer of another personality hidden inside a performance. A friend of mine once saw her at a Rachmaninov recital in Manchester – something Gail would obviously never attend – and was jolted. For how could Gail not be a real person?
That original, sketchy conception of the character – the voice of caution to the ditzy chum – has stayed true. Tricia Hopkins was swiftly replaced by the magnificently wild Suzie Birchall, and she and Gail moved in as lodgers with Elsie Tanner. In all this Gail was the foil, the straight woman, the one asking ‘Are we sure about this?’ The arrival of her scatterbrained live-for-today mother Audrey, in 1979 – again, initially only a guest character – cemented this function. Years before AbFab, Gail was Saffy to Audrey’s Edina.
At about the same time, fatefully, Gail met and married Brian Tilsley. (She later divorced him and then married him again, which is rather like jumping off a cliff and breaking your spine, spending years in slow and painful recovery, and then jumping off the cliff again). In accepting Brian’s proposal, Gail unleashed a terrible Wagnerian curse into the cosmic scheme of things or at least as far in the cosmic scheme of things as the Red Rec. From that moment she became the centre of a storm that still rages.
Brian’s mother, religious zealot Ivy, became an eternal thorn in Gail’s flesh, judging her and manipulating her, with regular threats of the fires of Hell. Brian was stabbed to death outside a nightclub in 1988. In 1989, to Ivy’s horror, Gail married Martin Platt, her gormless teenage assistant at the café, who gifted her the spawn of Satan, the demon seed that is David, and kicked off a mother-son relationship that makes Gertrude and Hamlet look positively wholesome.
Occasionally Gail seemed to drift a bit, turning up as the confidante of others having more exciting times. But even in these lulls she was valuable – for example, forming a much-loved comic pairing behind the counter at the café with Amanda Barrie’s Alma. This was the kind of everyday female work friendship we’re all familiar with from real life but which nobody is going to use as their main pitching point. Gail and Alma lived in their own small world, buttering barm cakes and frying chips, and talking apparent nonsense to each other.
But this light relief was a contrast to the drama of Gail’s life – and nothing was more dramatic than her relationship with husband number three, Richard Hillman – memorably described by Gail in her most famous line as ‘Norman Bates with a briefcase’ – who drove her and her kids into the canal at Weatherfield Quays.
Such dramatic storylines are inevitable, but they obviously debase the coinage of soaps as slices of life. The number of episodes has increased, and so much material is needed - for the viewer, watching a soap nowadays is making a major lifestyle commitment. But the ratings continue to shrink because of streaming, and so the stakes have to get even higher. I gave up watching Coronation Street a few years ago when it ran the story of serial killer Pat Phelan keeping Gail’s stepson Andy (he wasn’t actually her stepson but it’s complicated) imprisoned in a cellar for months in a story that was so dark, sad*stic and unpleasant that it edged into horror. It’s clear that the everyday cannot function in the current media context.
So how will Gail depart Weatherfield? She deserves an epic fate, I think. Perhaps she could throw herself onto a pyre that consumes her and all her offspring, finally banishing the Tilsley curse and redeeming the world?
Or maybe, given her stormy life, her end should be something trivial. She could slip on a barmcake. Or twist her heel on a wonky cobble and go down like a sack of spuds. Whatever her fate, Coronation Street without Gail will be less reassuringly real.
