CORONATION Street’s Maureen Lipman has taken a brutal swipe at the soap – urging bosses to scrap

gritty storylines and go back to basics.

The 77-year-old actress has played Evelyn Plummer on Coronation Street since 2018.

While Corrie is the UK’s longest running soap – having debuted in December 1960 – Ofcom reports that in the last 10 years soap viewership has fallen 42 per cent.

It’s prompted Maureen to say that the soap should reconnect with it’s rich history rather than focus on overly dramatic storylines involving serial killers and so on.

She said: “We’ve come to a point in Corrie now where people are getting murdered in knicker factories.

“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.”

Speaking on the Beyond The Title podcast, she continued: “Whereas back then you had the freedom to put Martha [Longhurst], Minnie [Caldwell] and Ena [Sharples] 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.'”

She added: “All those wonderful expressions that your parents come out with, like my mother saying, ‘Ooh, doesn’t a black skirt cover a multitude of sins.’ People talk like that, and we recognise it as true.”

Despite her tough critique of the show, Maureen is delighted that her character reminds viewers of strong women of yesteryear like those she named.

She also revealed how she keeps fighting against the writers to stop them making Evelyn “too nice“.

This is because she believes that fundamentally, people don’t change over time.

Maureen also revealed that the commute from London to Manchester to film the show is tough, but she doesn’t plan on leaving any time soon.

She said: “It’s a good enough job, it’s a little hard. There’s good and there’s bad but it’s a nice group of people, it’s nice being up North. I’ll stick around for a bit longer.”