Profile: Mike Baldwin: After 30 years, dozens of affairs, four wives and an accelerated battle with Alzheimer's disease, Mike Baldwin will leave the Street quietly, writes Shane Hegarty
If you have been leafing through the magazine racks this week, your eye might have been caught by a most striking cover of the Radio Times. It features a pastiche of the painting, The Death of Nelson, by Arthur Devis, except that instead of Nelson, there is Mike Baldwin. And instead of Hardy, it is Ken Barlow who is placing a comforting hand on his heart.
And where the surrounding characters should be sporting the epaulettes and brass buttons of naval uniform, they instead sport the gelled hair and over-cooked expressions of soap stars.
It is cheeky, and brash, and suggests a TV programme with bloated self-esteem. Which makes it just perfect for the character it eulogises.
On Friday night, Baldwin will die. The tabloids will tell you that he "succumbs to Alzheimer's disease", as if such a thing is medically consistent. He will, in fact, die of a convenient heart attack; an event that will round off an illness which has been accelerated - as everything is - by the odd physics of the soap universe. But the Alzheimer's Society in Britain has received a record number of calls to its helpline in recent weeks, so it seems that the character's final act has offered him a parting shot at redemption.
OTHERWISE HE MIGHT have been descending to soap hell. Because before there was EastEnders's Den Watts, before there was Brookside's Barry Grant, and any other number of wide-boy wannabes suffering from low-grade megalomania and a penchant for dangerous liaisons, there was Mike Baldwin. Played by Johnny Briggs, he arrived in Coronation Street in 1976 - an Eastender long before there was EastEnders. A Cockney in a northern drama, his sly grin revealed a gold tooth, and his hair swept back to reveal a line where the fake tan stopped. And when Coronation Street exploded from being a gentle tale of northern folk to a place in which serial killers ran loose and morals looser, it was Mike Baldwin who provided the spark.
The character arrived in the drama when there wasn't actually that much drama at all. In 1976, the street was generally forced indoors, not by Manchester rain but by the low budget.
Occasionally, they would be allowed to escape wobbly sets, but only as far as the dank viaduct or to stand outside Baldwin's clothes factory. It's odd to watch those episodes, in which the pace is languid, as if suffocated by the oppressive beige that dominates. There were only two episodes a week in those days, but no cliffhanger endings. No sudden peering into the middle-distance at the news that an old flame is actually a long-lost sister. Instead, it would simply peter out, ending with all the drama of a cooling kettle.
Baldwin would have four wives and a couple of dozen girlfriends. He would rule his factory with an iron fist, a Thatcherite before - and after - the reign of Margaret Thatcher. He would discover that his nephew was actually his son. He would be hit by a car, clobbered by a lorry, punched several times, and held hostage in a supermarket.
But ultimately he will always be remembered for an affair with Deirdre Barlow - wife of his arch-rival, the bookish Ken. Over 20 million people tuned in to see who Deirdre would choose to stay with. Her decision was flashed on the scoreboard at Old Trafford.
Surprisingly, it is not Coronation Street's most-watched episode. Five million more tuned in to see Alan Bradley disappearing under a Blackpool tram. But it remains the soap's defining moment; the storyline which marked the turning point, and which gave licence to every line of exaggerated drama that has followed - the crazed killers, the rapes, the hostage crises, the buried bodies and the teenage pregnancies.
The papers like to scream: "There's been affairs, marriage break-ups, a drug-addicted daughter, a son in trouble with the law . . . and that's just the actor who plays Mike Baldwin!"
Born in 1935, Johnny Briggs was a boy soprano whose first stage appearance was at the age of 12 with the Italian Opera Company before he went on to share the stage and screen with the likes of Joan Collins, Dirk Bogarde, Sid James and Audrey Hepburn.
Briggs made his first appearance in Coronation Street as a van driver in a 1972 episode, but four years later was initially contracted to play Mike Baldwin for three months. He quickly became one of its more indispensable characters, most notably through his long-running feud with Ken Barlow - the only surviving original character. He became the epitome of the neighbour no-one likes to see succeed. The one who gets the girls and the flash car and the power, while the Barlows of this world are constantly slapped in the face by fate. Apart from the affair with Barlow's third wife, Deirdre, he also eventually married Barlow's daughter, Susan.
Briggs likes to say that he and Bill Roache (who plays Barlow) enjoy turning up to golf events together. "If people see us in the bar they seem shocked that we're not at each other's throats. The only time I want to smash him for six is on the golf course!" The golf course is one of the places on which Briggs has attracted unfavourable comparisons with Baldwin. In 1997, he made rather ill-advised comments about women golfers. "I find women in golf clubs and on the course can be treacherous. They take liberties, don't know the rules, often have no idea of etiquette and sometimes seem to take over everything like cockroaches. In short they are a pain. A small number of clubs have seen the dangers and keep their women in their place."
THE PAPERS HAD some fun with it, and he was subsequently banned from a celebrity golfing event, meaning that he could not take his place beside such stars as the former Goodie Tim Brooke-Taylor. It doesn't seem to have done too much long-term damage to his chances of getting a free round of golf though. Only this week, he opened a new golf club, and made sure to mention just how much he had enjoyed his round with the lady captain.
Unfortunately there were less happy events in his personal life this week. His daughter Karen was back in the tabloids, allegedly under threat from heroin dealers, and one newspaper reported there was a note taped over her letterbox saying that: "We haven't been evicted or ASBO'd . . . please leave the post with our neighbour." She is not the first of his children to run into trouble. In 2003, his son Michael, then 22, was fined £1,000 (€1,439) after being found guilty of groping a teenager's breasts in a club. Meanwhile, there are claims that Briggs's second marriage is over, after surviving 30 years despite Briggs once having an affair with a 21-year-old air hostess.
Briggs claims that he decided to leave Coronation Street on the flip of a lucky silver coin he keeps and the 70-year-old will retire to Florida, where he plans to work on his golf handicap, while enjoying the winter sunshine - he suffers from seasonal affected disorder (SAD).
THERE WILL BE no such happy retirement for Mike Baldwin, of course. As the character's memory has washed away, he has been somewhat thrown back in time, becoming snagged on previous affairs and marriages. He turned up in the Rover's Return looking for Bet Lynch - his first conquest. He pleaded with his current girlfriend to leave in case his (third, dead) wife Alma turned up and caught her there.
It has allowed Coronation Street to indulge in some nostalgia for itself and for one of its most enduring characters before he is despatched. Baldwin may not have been shot by a bunch of daffodils, like Den Watts, or thumped by a tram, like Alan Bradley; his body may not be buried under a patio, or engulfed in a ball of flame, but it's been dramatic enough. And as the script writers have left him dishevelled and confused, it has stripped him of all the flash and ego that he had spent 30 years maintaining.
But Mike Baldwin will live on - not just in satellite repeats, but in the sly smile of every cocky, predatory, greedy, roguish, wideboy soap character to come.
The Baldwin file:
Who is he? Resident Coronation Street bad guy.
Why is he in the news? On Friday night, he will meet his end after 30 years on the show
Most appealing characteristic? He was a wide-boy love rat when the current soap versions were in short pants
Least appealing characteristic? Never quite adapted to life outside the 1980s
Least likely to say? "Not tonight love, I've got a headache"
Most likely to say? Nothing more, after next Friday