When Coronation Street began in December 1960, Tony Warren’s television creation instantly made its mark with distinctive, believable characters such as Ena Sharples, Elsie Tanner, Annie Walker, Albert Tatlock and Ken Barlow who portrayed life in a working-class back street in the north of England. Around them, Warren peopled the cobbles of the fictional Weatherfield with other equally authentic “residents” in one of television’s first contributions to the social-realist revolution that was already under way on stage and in the cinema.
Angela Crow, who has died aged 86, joined the ITV serial for episode 12, screened in January 1961, as the 19-year-old Doreen Lostock, a machinist at Elliston’s raincoat factory in Victoria Street. The ritual of Doreen and her workmate Sheila Birtles (played by Eileen Mayers) buying their favourite lunch from Florrie Lindley’s corner shop earned them the nickname the “barm cake girls”, a term that fixed the soap in time and place.
