Impressively, given that the shortage of major roles for women in TV has still not entirely disappeared as an issue, Coronation Street was, from its beginning in 1960, built around the dominating matriarchs and grandmatriarchs common to Northern working-class society.
As a result, the ITV soap became a powerhouse for female members of Equity, and the Hilda Ogden of Jean Alexander, who has died aged 90, was, for decades, the most powerful in any house in the fictional Salford area of Weatherfield.
It is a measure of the memorability of Alexander’s characterisation that Hilda won a Radio Times poll to find TV’s Greatest Ever Character, against competition from not just other famous shows but her own, in which she was ranked against a trio of formidable women, including Ena Sharples (Violet Carson), Elsie Tanner (Patricia Phoenix) and Annie Walker (Doris Speed), to whom Alexander had given a four-year start. She joined Corrie in 1964, having been picked up on the casting radar two years earlier in the minor role of a landlady, Mrs Webb. Before that, her TV acting apprenticeship had been in small parts in the police and medical procedurals, Z-Cars and Emergency – Ward 10.
Making an immediate impact on Coronation Street, Alexander’s Hilda was bossy and gossipy. Although her official profession was cleaner in the Rover’s Return, Hilda’s real role was as a combination of news agency and moral ayatollah. Her lips were seemingly always pursed at the bottom of a long face topped at all times with curlers, protected indoors by a hairnet and outside by a headscarf. Her wardrobe consisted of pinafore dresses, with cardigans for cold snaps or best.
Growing up in Liverpool, the actor had spotted this look among what were then called “factory girls.” The scarf was intended to stop their hair falling in the machinery they operated, while the all-day curlers were a precaution against being asked out on a date, allowing a rapid emergency coiffure in the ladies’ loos.
Alexander’s look and manner were so distinctive that “Hilda Ogden” went beyond the confines of the show to become shorthand for a stereotypical Northern woman, in much the way that “Alf Garnett” stood for bigotry or “Captain Mainwaring” for incompetent pomposity. The drag-act washing-line battleaxes that Les Dawson liked to play on television drew on similar real-life models to those Alexander had seen, but also increasingly contained a strong element of tribute act to Hilda.
Those who don’t watch or like Coronation Street often libel it as dour, but there has always been a strong strain of humour, which Alexander timed and delivered with relish. She could also, notably, do the opposite, as in a 1984 scene in which Hilda, at the kitchen table, opens the parcel of the effects of her’s dead husband, Stan, and sobs hopelessly into his spectacles case. As is often the case in long-running soaps, Alexander was able to channel genuine emotion from the loss of Bernard Youens, who had recently died after playing Stan for 20 years.
Fans today will remember the tragedy of that scene alongside the more frequent comedy of Hilda’s speech and appearance. Despite considerable anti-soap snobbery in the industry during the time she served on Coronation Street, television recognised Alexander’s skills by giving her an RTS prize and a BAFTA nomination shortly before, in 1987, she became one of the few performers to have genuinely chosen their own moment to leave a major show.
During a semi-retirement in which she settled, always living alone, in her native Merseyside, Alexander’s status as TV acting royalty was acknowledged through occasional cameo state visits to peak-time shows, most fittingly crossing the Pennines to Yorkshire where she joined Roy Clarke’s ranks of strong Northern women (led by Nora Batty), in the role of Auntie Wainwright in Last of the Summer Wine.
But it will always be Hilda Ogden, the curl of the lip matching the perm of her hair, to which rovers through the history of TV drama will return.
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