Veteran Hong Kong actor Law Lok-lam had an unusual run of bad luck when he set what could be a record by dying in five different soap operas in a 24-hour period last week.
It’s just one of those things that happen in a small TV territory that loves its soaps but has a limited supply of actors.
Twenty two years ago, I was bought lunch in the Granada canteen, though I should say that I enjoyed this privilege in the condition of a sidekick. I was along for the ride.
There was a bar in the corner got up as the serving area of the Rovers Return and presumably used as such when the filming demanded room to swing a cat. There was a knot of Coronation Streets stars of the time bellied up against the bar, and I mean a knot: they were all rammed up against each other out of preference, united by mutual loathing. They had to stick together because no outsider could understand how much they hated each other. They were a band of radioactive brothers and sisters and they were obviously shunned by everyone else in the room. I couldn’t stop looking at them.
A couple of years later, we took our kid and his best mate on the Granada Studio tours, a key component of which was a stroll down “Coronation Street”. And there was “Ken Barlow”, who I had last seen in the flesh crammed up against a fake bar, trapped against fake Newton and Ridley bar pumps. On this occasion, Druid and lifelong Conservative William Roache strolled across the road and rubbed my child’s head with every appearance of pleasure and we had a photo taken of us all together. It later got cut up as part of a collage requirement for some school project. But now I appear to be rambling.
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