Evelyn Plummer (Maureen Lipman) has been a firm favourite of Coronation Street viewers since 2018.

Fierce and uncompromising, Evelyn’s delightfully acidic tongue and caustic putdowns have put her firmly in the battle axe hall of fame, alongside the legendary likes of Ena Sharples (Violet Carson), Hilda Ogden (Jean Alexander) and Blanche Hunt (Maggie Jones).

After a five year run as a full-time cast member, though, actress Maureen decided to step back following an extended hiatus from the street, with Evelyn becoming a recurring character so Maureen could spend more time at home with her new husband, David Turner.

Chasing her long-time passion, Evelyn left Coronation Street after being convinced by her best friend, Roy Cropper (David Neilson), to follow her dreams and pursue a university law degree, though she’s reappeared several times when daughter Cassie Plummer (Claire Sweeney) and grandson Tyrone Dobbs (Alan Halsall) have needed some tough love and putting back in line.

Maureen announced at the time that she would be taking a ‘gap year’ from the show, explaining that Evelyn would be ‘in and out’ so that the actress could ‘have a bit of a life’: ‘I’ll be absent for a while, and then coming back. I’m not going to die but then I’ll be in and out of it because I want to have a bit of a life. David and I are thinking of having a bit of a gap year.

What would it take to bring Evelyn back to Coronation Street?

Talking to The Mirror, Maureen revealed what it would take to secure her for another stint as Evelyn: namely, a proper storyline.

‘I love Corrie but I don’t know when I am going back,’ she began.

‘They asked me at Christmas. I said, ‘I will come back, but you will have to give me a proper storyline. I am not just coming back to stand in the Rovers Return and say, ‘I’m back’. Who cares?’

She then added: ‘It is a perfect job and I could be in it for the rest of my sane time.’

Maureen’s last appearance saw her stumble across the aftermath of Will Driscoll’s (Lucas Hodgson-Wale) brutal attack on Daniel Osbourne (Rob Mallard), discovering the bloodied and beaten teacher laying prone in the ginnel while walking her dog, Freddie.

Maureen’s thoughts on Corrie changes

Ever since Iain McLeod, Executive Producer for Continuing Drama at ITV, discussed the changes he’s looking to make to both Coronation Street and Emmerdale, a fierce debate has opened up, drawing in both fans and cast members.

‘What we don’t want is to be left behind. If your mum’s now watching Squid Game on Netflix, you don’t want those viewers to turn on Corrie or turn on Emmerdale and it looks like a completely different century – or genre, even,’ Iain said while discussing his intentions for the ITV soaps.

‘We want to evolve our look so it retains some of the cinematic flavours that we saw in Corriedale recently.

‘That will, we hope, engage a slightly younger audience and maybe drive those younger viewers into the main soaps?’

Not long after, former Corrie star Sally Ann Matthews, who played Jenny Connor for various stints between 1986 and 2025, vehemently disagreed with Iain’s ambitions.

‘I was switching off from the show a bit, I was supposed to go into The Kabin and then they couldn’t get The Kabin set in because there were lots of hospital sets and police station sets…’

‘We, as a cast, have been having these conversations for three or four years, and the crew – their family and people in the street, saying they don’t watch it anymore. They said ‘Oh it’s all about the police, I don’t know who anybody is.’

‘If I wanted to watch a police drama, I’d watch Line of Duty. If I wanted to watch a hospital drama, I’d watch ER! I really think the soap genre should stick to its USP!

‘Obviously for ITV, Corrie brings in a big audience, which helps them hugely with their overall figures and it would be a big risk for someone to take, but Corrie needs to stay in its lane and be what it is – which is a soap!’

Often as outspoken as her character, Maureen herself previously spoke on her dissatisfaction with shows direction on the Beyond the Title podcast and came down on Sally Ann’s side, feeling a lot of what made Coronation Street special has been lost.

‘We’ve come to a point in Corrie now where people are getting murdered in knicker factories’ she said.

‘We’re having domestic abuse. Anything that ticks the box of social problems in the 21st century is going to be in your local soap. Back then you had the freedom to put Martha, Minnie and Ena in the snug and have a conversation about Ben-Hur.

‘It’s never been political but I always like it when the women sit down and go, ‘Ooh, Donald Trump, ain’t his hair shocking.’