Daniel Brocklebank has shared that his Coronation Street character Billy Mayhew was not always meant to be called Billy. The actor, who has been portraying the vicar since 2014, revealed that initially the character was named Hugh, but it was deemed ‘too posh’ by the show’s executives.

Speaking to Inside Soap magazine, Daniel disclosed: “My character was originally going to be called Hugh. But the bosses decided that made him sound too posh, so they changed it to Billy! “.

Reflecting on his character’s evolution, Daniel said that Billy seemed “a lot cooler” in his initial episodes than he does now, describing his current persona as a “nerdy geek”.

He elaborated: “I was told right from the start that the fact he was gay was very incidental; it wasn’t a defining characteristic. When I look back on those first episodes, Billy was a lot cooler.

“He’s more of a nerdy geek now, but everything he’s been through would have a detrimental effect on his coolness, I suppose. Or it could be the fact that I’m a massive geek, and I wasn’t able to uphold that coolness for 10 years.”

The storyline has taken a poignant turn recently, with Billy grappling with his husband Paul Foreman’s diagnosis of motor neurone disease (MND), which is particularly close to Daniel’s heart as his own grandfather suffered from the condition.

Daniel expressed: “The past six months have been really gruelling to film, in terms of the emotional content that Pete and I have had to do. In a lot of ways, this MND story has been the most difficult one for me to play, purely because it’s so close to my own lived experience.

“The writing and research teams have been so brilliantly accurate with the way they have portrayed Paul’s illness and Billy caring for him, it’s certainly made me revisit things me and my family went through while caring for my grandfather.”