Coronation Street: Bet On Betty

THE world is a sadder place without Betty Driver. The Rovers Return will certainly not be the same without her and her hot pots.
But, for me, she wasn’t just the real star of Coronation Street, she was like a mother and best friend.
I last saw her a few days before she died – sat in a chair at the Alexandra Hospital in Cheshire, surrounded by devoted friends who I called the gay mafia!
Betty had a hobby of making covers for coat hangers. She insisted on giving me half a dozen of them. She often did them in silk but these she had knitted – and I will treasure them...

Julie Goodyear pays tribute to Betty Driver in The Daily Mirror.

Coronation Street: What's There To Smile About?

"Here’s the best bit of dialogue ever written. Someone asks Bet Lynch why she’s smiling. She says, “This isn’t a smile, it’s the lid on a scream.”
"I don’t even know who wrote that. Those gems – blinding gags, aching wisdom, sizzling insults – fly out of the screen five times a week on Coronation Street, too many, too fast, to catalogue. It’s the first show on which I remember noticing the written word; I’d watched, as a kid, happy with this world of matriarchs and milk stout – my grandmother ran a pub in Swansea called the Cornish Mount, so the Rovers seemed genuinely familiar – but then one day, on screen, some character with a broken heart said wistfully, “I was just building castles in the sky.” That wasn’t a cliché for me, because I was so young. It was new.
"It was honest. It was perfect. And that one little line forged a connection between me and Coronation Street that has lasted for decades, because that’s the moment when I actually thought: I love this. I also seem to remember that the character was beehived, smoking and drunk, so there’s a convincing argument to say that Coronation Street made me gay. If so, I love it all the more!"

Russell T Davies pays tribute to Coronation Street on its 50th birthday, The Times.