New Coronation Street star Helen Lederer is hoping the soap’s writers rustle up some bedroom scenes for her and Ken Barlow. The actress, 69, who plays Wetherfield lothario Ken’s latest love interest Elspeth, says: “We do need to see the upstairs. It is about time there was some older love on Corrie.”
Elspeth and Ken, played by 91-year-old Bill Roache, meet at a singles cocktail night and soon get romantic. Helen says of her confident cobbles character: “I am a woman who is bold and who has needs and I am just going to go for them.” But she reassures fans: “I am not going to kill him off in the bedroom. I just want a nice snuggle.”
Helen, who had a brief love scene in Bottom with Rik Mayall, says her husband Chris Browne might be jealous seeing her in another man’s arms on TV. But she adds that as he’s a GP, he would control his emotions. “He’d say, ‘Helen, enjoy’, she laughs. She says of taking the role: “ Coronation Street, of all the soaps, is the most substantial and ironic with such humour, it’s really a class act. So when you get the call for Coronation Street, you drop everything.” Helen, who began as a stand-up comic alongside Mayall, Ade Edmondson and Ben Elton in London’s Comedy Store, adds: “To be offered a part playing a role opposite William Roache is even more exciting.”
The sketch-show veteran continues: “I had met him once before and I thought what a lovely man he was.” If there are bedroom scenes, Corrie veteran Bill should be an expert – in 2012 he boasted he had slept with more than 1,000 women. Helen opened up about her job at the launch of her new Mirror Books memoir Not That I’m Bitter at The Groucho club in London.
