Almost exactly 31 years after he first appeared in Coronation Street – on a two-episode contract as a guest at a wedding – Jack Duckworth, one of the soap's stand-out characters, was written out last night. Jack's death – his heart giving out in his armchair after celebrating his 74th birthday in TV's most famous pub, the Rover's Return – fulfilled the request of the actor who plays him, Bill Tarmey, to leave during Corrie's celebration of 50 years in the ITV schedule.
In a rare injection of magical realism into a show that has always aimed more for social realism, Jack was seen posthumously dancing around the living room of his terraced home with the ghost of Vera, his late and long-suffering wife, who voluntereed for the scriptwriters' bullet three years ago.
In a tribute to the closeness of her working relationship with Tarmey, the actor Liz Dawn came out of retirement to perform this spectral shuffle. Although soap opera is often criticised for formulaic storylines, the genre's death scenes frequently achieve a depth unmatched in other drama because the actor and their colleagues are saying goodbye to someone they have lived with for many decades. Tarmey admits in his recently published memoirs, Jack Duckworth and Me, that he cried real tears while filming Vera's funeral after Dawn's departure and the same will surely have been true of his character's obsequies.
A pigeon-fancying, flat-cap-wearing, wise-cracking, philandering, Sinatra-loving Lancashire lad, Jack epitomised the vivid character comedy in which the serial specialises: in one memorable sequence, dressing in drag to infiltrate a women's bowling team. But his popularity and longevity were due to the acting skills and physical resilience of Tarmey, 69.
The actor is unusual among the Corrie cast in that his right arm appeared in the Rover's Return some months before the rest of him. A singer on the northern nightclub circuit, he did occasional work as an extra on the Street, making his debut on that occasion as a drinker who was just out of shot. Subsequently, he was given single lines to say before producers spotted the possibility of a Punch and Judy marriage with Vera.
Tarmey never gave up the night job, though, and later parlayed his soap opera fame into a number of bestselling albums. In an affectionate send-off, the scriptwriters ensured that Tarmey's favourite songs were infused throughout the final episode, with Wind Beneath My Wings – his biggest hit as a crooner – playing on the Rover's jukebox as Jack left the pub for the final time, his face heavy with the guilt and ghosts of his highest-profile storylines of being a poor husband and father.
As is inevitable in a long tenancy in soap opera, aspects of Jack and the actor playing him increasingly overlapped: both suffered heart attacks and subsequent surgery and it is mainly to reduce the risk of another real coronary that Tarmey felt it was time for Jack to have a fictional one.
In his early days in Coronation Street, reluctant to abandon his work as an extra just in case, Tarmey was a "background artiste" during the filming of Laurence Olivier's King Lear at Granada. At the stage door, Britain's greatest stage actor of the day was ignored by autograph-hunters, while Tarmey was mobbed. That scrum of viewers marked the start of a ratings-topping reign that reached its last dance last night.
