Veteran Coronation Street stars to be sidelined due to Covid-19 pandemic

\'Coronation Street\'s older actors could be banned from filming due to Covid-19.

Veteran stars including Bill Roache, 88 (Ken Barlow) and Barbara Knox, 86 (Rita Sullivan) could potentially be sidelined from the soap until 2021, in order to protect them from the respiratory disease.

A source told The Sun newspaper: "It\'s a huge risk to remove some of \'Corrie\'s biggest stars, but far riskier to allow them on set.

Maureen Lipman praises 'clever' Corrie but admits filming amid pandemic is 'frightening'

"In one respect, it\'s much simpler to focus on the storylines involving younger actors for whom returning to filming is less of a risk.

"But it\'s also a nightmare for the producers because an unusually large chunk of the show\'s cast are elderly and many of them had ongoing storylines sketched out for them months in advance."

Filming on \'Coronation Street\' is currently on hold but show bosses are working on plans to get the cast back to work next month.

Sally Carman almost curtsied when she first met Corrie legend Barbara Knox

Meanwhile, showrunner Iain MacLeod has revealed that the ITV soap will address the Covid-19 pandemic onscreen, although he insisted it will not dominate storylines.

Ian told The Daily Star newspaper: "The bottom line is we talked a lot about this, as you can well imagine, about whether \'Coronation Street\' would have a coronavirus presence in it or if we would exist in a parallel universe, everything proceeding in a pre-pandemic fashion.

"So while the virus will exist in \'Coronation Street\', we were also keen that it wouldn\'t dominate every single story and every single scene.

Bill Roache considered quitting Coronation Street in his 40s

"It will be there, you\'ll be able to see evidence of it in the way people behave, hand-washing protocols and things like that, the way our businesses will be tweaked to more takeaways and the like, as food outlets are doing in the real world."