William Roache: 'Blanche's funeral was upsetting'

Coronation Street's William Roache, who plays Ken Barlow in the soap, has revealed how difficult he found it to film the funeral of his on-screen mother-in-law Blanche Hunt. The actor said filming the funeral at a similar time to attending the memorial service for the actress Maggie Jones was "really upsetting". He said: "What was quite bizarre was that on-screen we were doing the death of Blanche and then we had to break off and do the memorial service for Maggie. "It really got very complex. I have never had a confusion of reality and non-reality before and it was really upsetting for a lot of us. "You didn't know what you were upset about either, you were losing the actor, a friend, a colleague and the character." Maggie, who had played the character since 1974, died in a Manchester hospital on December 2, aged 75. Soap bosses hastily wrote a storyline where Blanche flew to Portugal with a friend. The funeral will be screened on ITV in May. Click here to watch whatsontv.co.uk’s weekly soaps video preview, the Soap Scoop

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Patrick McLennan is a London-based journalist and documentary maker who has worked as a writer, sub-editor, digital editor and TV producer in the UK and New Zealand. His CV includes spells as a news producer at the BBC and TVNZ, as well as web editor for Time Inc UK. He has produced TV news and entertainment features on personalities as diverse as Nick Cave, Tom Hardy, Clive James, Jodie Marsh and Kevin Bacon and he co-produced and directed The Ponds, which has screened in UK cinemas, BBC Four and is currently available on Netflix.

An entertainment writer with a diverse taste in TV and film, he lists Seinfeld, The Sopranos, The Chase, The Thick of It and Detectorists among his favourite shows, but steers well clear of most sci-fi.