Brian Capron got 'lucky' on Coronation Street

rian Capron admits his historic \'Coronation Street\' performance was partly down to a fortuitous "confluence of circumstances".

The 71-year-old star is known for playing one of the most notorious villains in the ITV soap\'s history following his reign of terror as Richard Hillman from 2001 to 2003, but the actor insists he owes a lot of "luck" to a producer change which resulted in the show focusing on lengthier plots.

He said: "It was just a lucky thing. You can go into a soap and come out and nothing happens. It\'s a confluence of circumstances.

"I was there when the producers came in and decided to go back to the long burn storylines.

"The thing about my storyline, apart from him being a family-loving man, which is something we worked on, there was a lot of dark humour around him.

"One of my favourite bits was when I was walking down the road and I was after Audrey and she said, \'Hello Richard.\' And I said, \'Goodbye Audrey.\' "

One of Richard\'s victims of sorts was Duggie Ferguson - played by former \'Emmerdale\' star John Bowe - who the serial killer left for dead after he plunged two floors down when he fell through a bannister, and Brian fondly remembers John acting out the dramatic sequence.

Speaking on \'Lorraine\', he added: "He did the stunt himself. He fell through a bannister. He\'d done all this dodgy bannister work, so he killed himself in a way.

"I was just about to dial 999 and I thought, \'Oh, I know where the money is in his safe. I won\'t make that call just now.\' "

\'Corrie\' residents were terrorised by another serial killer, evil Pat Phelan (Connor McIntyre), recently - and while Brian recently admitted Connor "did a great" job on the plot, he thought the storyline was "a bit harsh".

He said: "I met him at the Soap Awards and he\'s done really well and done a great job with the storyline. But it [the Phelan storyline] was a bit harsh."