Former star Lorna Laidlaw, who played Bailey matriarch Aggie in the long running soap, has admitted she was unhappy with elements of the writing for her character and pulled producers up on it. The Baily family were the first ever black family introduced to the cobbles and Lorna confessed she didn’t find the writing “truthful”.
“I think [the producers] wanted [the Baileys] to have Jamaican accents and I questioned that.
“I knew it wasn’t truthful. 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. 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.
“So we had that discussion. There were lots of little discussions. You know, some people had rehearsed in a Jamaican accent and I just said that I think it’s wrong.
“Let them feel like they’ve been born and bred. Let them own this city just like everybody else. But I still got the job. So when we started, I had to do a Manchester accent,” she said speaking on the Chicken Soap for the Soul podcast hosted by actress Elisabeth Dermot-Walsh – who she starred alongside in the now-axed medical drama Doctors.
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The Bailey’s were the first black family introduced to the cobbles of Coronation Street (Image: ITV)
“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,” she explained.
The familiy’s origins wasn’t the only element of the character the 61-year-old took umbrage with. She was also unhapy that she and on-screen husband Ed (Trevor Michael Georges) weren’t seen to kiss 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. Those Black characters did not kiss.
“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,” she objected.
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Lorna Laidlaw played Aggie Bailey in Coronation Street (Image: Getty)
During the chat Lorna also revealed she had contributed to the decor of the Bailey family home. Their living room featured three framed portraits of hummingbirds on the wall whch she said was a “homage to the flying ducks” which once adorned icon Hilda Ogden’s living room.
Lorna joined the show in 2019 afte the Bailey’s been forced to downsize from desirable Alderley Edge, Cheshire and move to the terraced backstreets of Weatherfield.
She was missing from the show during most the pandemic, occassionally appering on a video call to the family as her absence was explained as being due to her work as a nurse.
Her last appearance in the show was in June 2023, and it was later explained she had gone to stay in Birmingham to care for her unwell aunt. At the beginning of this year Ed returned from a vist to her in the Midlands with the news that she had ended their marriage.
Express.co.uk has contacted and ITV for comment.