Coronation Street star Lorna Laidlaw has revealed how she changed plans for the Bailey family.
The star, who previously appeared in Doctors, starred as Aggie Bailey on the ITV soap until last year and explained in a new interview that she pushed for changes as the
soap introduced its first Black family in 2019.
“I think [the producers] wanted [the Baileys] to have Jamaican accents and I questioned that,” she told the Chicken Soap for the Soul podcast. “I knew it wasn’t truthful.
“Actually 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.’ They went, ‘You’re right, yeah.’
“I said, ‘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.'”
Lorna recalled that there “were lots of little discussions a little bit like that”, as she opened up further about formulating the accents.
“You know, some people had rehearsed in a Jamaican accent and I just said that, ‘I think it’s wrong. Just going to put that out there, and I think if you give them a Jamaican accent I don’t want to do it, because I think it’s wrong for the character’.”
The star added: “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. Let them feel like they’ve been born and bred. Let them own this city just like everybody else.
“That’s one of the things they changed. But I still got the job. So when we started, I had to do a Manchester accent.”
Lorna said it was “great to be listened to” by the soap and for them to “understand why [she] is saying this”, though admitted she also wondered why Aggie and Ed’s love wasn’t shown 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,” she noted. “I did two years in Corrie, and those Black characters did not kiss.”
Lorna explained that other characters’ love was shown, “but the writers didn’t write it”, adding: “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.”
