Actor ‘faces real school caning’

 

Chris Cook, the 13-year-old actor who featured in the hit British TV soap Coronation Street, faced a ‘possible caning’ at his real school after he was caught by police in possession of cannabis near his home.

This was according to the local newspaper where he lived, although there was no evidence that this was indeed going to happen. This was 1993 and corporal punishment had been outlawed in state schools years previously. Chris attended a ‘public’ school (i.e.an elite private school) where the cane was presumably still available.

Headmaster Jim Durcan would not confirm to the newspaper what action he would take.

It seems the cane remained in the cupboard because 24 years later Chris (now known as Chris Hoyle for professional reasons) wrote a play based in part on his experience.

He told the Manchester Evening News in January 2018 he had been caught with a small amount of cannabis, and cautioned by police. He had played Mike Baldwin’s illegitimate son Mark Redman in the show affectionately known as ‘Corrie’.

While it didn’t immediately end his career by the time he was 14 his character was written out of the show.

Chris, recalling the scandal, told MEN: “I went from being a working-class lad where all my family were so proud that I was in Coronation Street, to being shamed really.

“At the age of 13 being on the front page of The Sun, and then my Corrie character being fizzled out, I just felt like a massive failure.

“It ended up in all the papers, I remember the Mirror headline was ‘What a dope’. It was all getting so big for something that was so silly.

“Yes, it was a silly mistake as a kid to make, but it was such a small amount it would never make the papers now.”

Later in life Chris became a writer and his debut play The Newspaper Boy, was a semi-autobiographical story about a teenage soap star who finds his private life splashed over the front pages of the papers when he ‘comes out’ to the nation when his relationship with a 21-year-old man is exposed by a newspaper.

To read more about the play click here.

As published in Middleton and North Manchester Guardian, 28 October 1993

 

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