OLIVER HOLT: My mum played Emily Bishop in Coronation Street for 56 years. It’s only after I cleared out family home and found all the scripts she’d hoarded that I discovered just how adored she still is

The red-brick cottage where my mum and dad grew old stands alone in fields at the point where the Cheshire Plain thinks about rising towards the Peak District. 

A clump of oaks loiters to the west in the middle-distance. The River Dean burbles busily beyond the confines of the cottage’s little walled garden.

A lifetime ago, before my son was born, my wife and I would make the journey up from London and stop the car at the end of the driveway so my daughters could race down to the front door, ring the bell and squeal with delight when my parents feigned astonishment that their two angels had appeared out of nowhere.

My dad died during the Covid pandemic and at the end of 2024, my mum, who played Emily Nugent, later Emily Bishop, in Coronation Street for 56 years, moved to a home for retired actors, actresses, directors, producers and musicians on the north-west outskirts of London. 

She is happy there. She will be 95 next month.

The week after I drove her away from Kennel Cottage, I went back to deal with what was left behind. My parents were hoarders. 

They reached the stage where my dad refused to throw away aluminium foil bottle tops from pints of milk and my mum was seized with anxiety whenever I visited lest I tried to throw away some of the old newspapers that stood in solemn piles, like sentries, at every turn in every room.

The house was stuffed with the story of our lives. I found all my old exercise books from King’s School, Macclesfield, all my old football jerseys.

I opened a suitcase and found cuttings of every article I had ever written for The Times, The Mirror, The Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail. 

Mum had snipped them all out with her trusty pair of big silver scissors.

Even though my kids had grown up, my parents had never dismantled the brightly coloured toy house that sat in one corner of their dining room and had provided hours and hours of joy as an imaginary cafe from which my daughters served imaginary lunches.

My younger daughter had drawn a picture of the globe on a page of Coronation Street script paper, and written on it: ‘Best Cafe in the World’ and it had been stuck to the kitchen door with a piece of Sellotape for nearly 20 years.

I located The Beatles autographs that John, Paul, George and Ringo signed when Mum met them at Granada TV when their superstardom was in its infancy. Mum kept them in a concealed drawer that could only be opened by reaching into another drawer and pressing a hidden lever.

There was a lot of brown furniture. An auctioneer arrived. He told me no one buys brown furniture any more. I hired skip after skip after skip for it and for the mountains of bedding, clothing, papers, books and bric-a-brac that spilled from the cottage’s every pore. For a few months, I became Cheshire Demolition’s best customer.

It sounds melodramatic, I know, but there were times when I stood by the side of one of those skips, holding a well-thumbed road atlas that had been my dad’s bible or my mum’s old dressing gown or the place mats we had laid out on our dining room table during my childhood, the ones with impressionist paintings of Montmartre and Notre-Dame on them, and froze.

They were time machines that transported me back 50 years. I am an only child and I was holding things my parents had treasured in my hands. 

Now I was betraying them. I apologised out loud to my dead father and my absent mother for what I was about to do. ‘Sorry Dad, sorry Mum,’ I said, as I hurled something else they had loved into the bright yellow abyss.

I opened armies of albums and gazed at battalions of faded black-and-white photographs of relatives I did not recognise and family friends I did not know and wondered if another human being would ever look upon their faces again.

The thing that haunted me most was my dad’s handsome old desk. We always called it ‘Karl’s Desk’ as it had been bequeathed him by a Swiss friend and Dad had, somehow, managed to strap it to his Land Rover in the 1950s and shepherd it back from Interlaken to Stockport. 

In my mind, this feat had assumed such epic proportions that I imagined it as a scene from the epic movie Fitzcarraldo.

But I didn’t have any space for Karl’s Desk at home. I felt I was being dreadfully disloyal to my dad when I persuaded the auctioneer to take it away. I felt like I had let him down one last time. It sold in the Macclesfield branch of the auction house for £50.

It was when I moved into the garage that I found the Coronation Street scripts. They were crammed tightly into cardboard boxes that had been brought with us from house to house over the years. 

There were reams and reams and reams of them. Some were typed on pages of light blue, some on pages of off-white.

The later ones had ‘Eileen Derbyshire’ printed in capitals across every page. Derbyshire was my mum’s maiden name and her stage name. The dialogue and stage directions leapt up at me. They read like the transcript of my mum’s life.

She brought Emily home through her good times and bad times, too. In January 1978, when I was 11, Emily’s husband, Ernest Bishop, was shot and killed in a wages snatch at Baldwin’s Casuals.

Now, suddenly, I found myself staring at a blue page dated 20.12.77, the script for the episode that dealt with Emily’s grief in the aftermath of the murder. I turned the page over. 

‘Emily is coming downstairs,’ the direction said. ‘Her face is a mask. She moves woodenly, mechanically. As she reaches the hall, a couple of letters, circulars drop through the letter box.’ I moved on to the first page of dialogue.

Bet Lynch is in the bar of the Rovers Return, talking to Fred Gee. ‘Come on, cock,’ she says. ‘Get them crates up, eh?’

I was uneasy with my mum’s fame. I have always been very proud of her and everything she stands for but when I was a kid, I was embarrassed by her celebrity. When Ernie was shot, a lot of the older kids at my school had a field day. 

They’d come up to me, heads bowed in faux solemnity. ‘So sorry to hear about your dad,’ they’d say. ‘My sincere condolences.’

A few times, Mum took me to the Granada studios, where the show was filmed. I’m biased, of course, but she was unfailingly kind and generous and everybody loved her. And so the make-up girls made a fuss of me, too, and the people in the wardrobe department treated me like a little prince and the rest of the cast greeted me like an old buddy.

I went into the Rovers and sat in a corner while a scene was being filmed. Julie Goodyear, who played Bet Lynch, came over to give me a hug. She was wearing one of her leopard-print outfits with a plunging neckline.

I was a shy seven-year-old. I didn’t know where to look. But, mainly, I thought being on set was a bit boring. They went through take after take until the director was satisfied. It took for ever.

At Christmas, there was always a present under the tree for me from Betty Driver, who played Betty Turpin, and her sister Freda. 

Sometimes, we’d drive over the Pennines to Shipley to have lunch with Bryan Mosley, who played Alf Roberts, and his family. But Mum was emphatically not a party person. As she grew older, she withdrew from anything approaching public life.

So we tended not to go on fancy holidays or city breaks where there were lots of people. Mainly, we went to the Scottish Highlands, where we could take our dogs on long walks through the bracken. 

My mum was a serial pet rescuer. By the time I was in my early teens, we had five dogs, including a three-legged Afghan hound, and seven cats.

People who cared for animals, my mum thought, were the best of people. When I go to visit her now, I take our dog, Meryl, with us. 

Meryl is named after Meryl Streep. She is a greyhound-whippet cross who was left in a bucket on a doorstep with the rest of the litter and rescued by the RSPCA. Mum very much approves of Meryl.

Mum was nothing like strait-laced Emily, whose default expression was a worried frown and whose character was defined by jilting Mr Swindley at the altar, losing Ernie and marrying a bigamist called Arnold Swain.

Mum was warm and loving and funny. She was a brilliant mimic. She made sure I knew how much I was loved and she has been unfailingly generous to me and my wife and her grandchildren. I owe her and my dad everything.

I kept going back to the cottage and hiring more skips. I found more boxes with more scripts packed inside. Some were in the rafters, some concealed under musty blankets, or crammed into a battered wardrobe.

Some kept close company with the old Strepsils tins, full of thousands and thousands of rusted nuts and bolts and screws that my dad had saved for a day that never came.

I knew I couldn’t add the scripts to the skip list. They were too precious. An idea started to form in my mind.

There were other mementos, too. I found a shoe box full of postcards sent to me by Margot Bryant, the actress who played Minnie Caldwell, when I was a child. 

Margot was one of my mum’s best friends in the show and she sent me a card wherever she travelled. Pictures of Venice and Nice and Paris and Lisbon emerged from that box with Margot’s neat, copper-plate writing on the back of every one.

There were invitations to Coronation Street’s 30th and 40th anniversary parties. My mum kept the invitations but never attended the parties.

There was a sweatshirt with ‘Free the Weatherfield One’ printed on the front, a relic of a storyline in which Anne Kirkbride’s character, Deirdre Rachid, was wrongly imprisoned.

Hidden away in a careworn trunk with broken hinges, a green Post-it note affixed to a clear plastic bag with a garment inside said: ‘Coat worn by Miss Nugent in early days of the Street.’

My younger daughter and I teased it gingerly out of that bag last week and held it up to the light. It was knee-length and charcoal grey and the label said Aquascutum. I half expected it to fall apart but it remained intact.

And finally, there were the letters. Bags and bags of fan mail, forwarded on by Granada and put away until Mum could answer them.

My mum was like Superwoman to me. She worked in Coronation Street, she looked after me, she and my dad looked after my grandma when she fell ill, she made my meals, she came to my school parents’ evenings, she was the bread-winner in our family. The fan letters, asking for an autographed photo, were the only thing that defeated her.

She wanted to find the time to answer them, but instead they sat there reproaching her. I knew that the guilt of not replying to them tormented her so I took a bag of those letters home with me and thought I’d try to fix it. I found some photos that my mum had autographed and began to reply to those letters that had included stamp-addressed envelopes.

Many of them were 20 years old. Some of them were from people who wanted an autograph for a sick relative. Some were from ardent schoolkids. It tore at me just like it had torn at my mum. Many of the people who sent the letters would have moved by now. Some of them would have died.

But it was worth a try. Mum did everything for me and I have done very little for her. She was pleased when I told her what I had done but I still have no idea if anyone received those replies they had been waiting decades for.

Then there was the other idea: the pages and pages of script. What about giving some of those away? I didn’t want to do anything on a large scale that might upset ITV, which had always treated Mum with great respect. 

I didn’t want to make any money out of the scripts. I just wanted to help Mum get rid of the regret she felt about not answering more of those letters.

So I put a post on X explaining what I wanted to do and said I’d send out a couple of pages of script to each of the first five people who replied. I was inundated. It was beautiful to be inundated. Ten years after she left Coronation Street, it was a joy to be reminded there is still an awful lot of love for my mum out there.

I learnt a long time ago that Coronation Street Twitter is a kinder, gentler place than football Twitter. In my job as a sports writer, much of what I post on X is met with a stream of invective and abuse. Coronation Street Twitter is an island of peace and love on social media.

I got more than five replies. I got hundreds, some inquiring warmly after my mum, some containing lovely recollections from former cast members, some asking to take me up on the offer of a couple of pages of script and telling the story of their devotion, either to my mum in particular or the programme in general.

I bought a job-lot of hard-backed envelopes, asked my respondents to message me their addresses, gathered sheets of different scripts from different eras and sent a couple of pages to as many people as I could. It didn’t take long and it didn’t cost much. It was a small thing.

After the pages of scripts arrived at their destinations, I received a series of lovely acknowledgements.

Some people said they were going to get them framed and give them to their mum for Christmas, one man said they were to be a gift for his dying father, others said that the scripts and the dialogue took them back to their own childhoods, sitting in front of the television with their families, back to what seem now like more simple times.

I enjoyed the next time I went to the care home. I took some old pictures of the Coronation Street cast with me and we talked about old times and Mum’s old friends and colleagues. Meryl came, too, of course. She takes on the role of celebrity visitor when we visit now.

Mum and I talked about my teenage son and how he had played Don Lockwood in a production of Singin’ In The Rain and how he had performed in a play at the Edinburgh Fringe.

I reminded her the family acting gene had skipped a generation with me but that she has passed it on to him.

Then I told Mum about the scripts and the outpouring of love for her and a smile creased her face.

I told her about the people who said they were going to get their scripts framed and how much it had meant to them and how keen they were to send their best wishes to her.

Then someone came to take her to lunch and led her past the pictures of Cary Grant and Laurence Olivier that hang on the wall, next to the old theatre programmes and lampoons.

And when I got home, I delved into one of those boxes of scripts myself, picked out one with Emily Bishop’s name on it, and began to read.