Katherine Kelly says Coronation Street is “a beast like no other” in terms of workload.

The 43-year-old actress played rough diamond Becky Granger on the long-running ITV1 soap opera from 2006 to 2012 and remembers her time on the show as being incredibly hectic, having to study, rehearse and film multiple episodes at once.

Writing in Metro newspaper’s SixtySeconds column, she said: “On television, it’s an animal like no other. When I worked with actors doing old-fashioned repertory seasons, they told me that they did one play in the evening, rehearsed another during the day and learned the next one.”

“That’s what my time on ‘Corrie’ was like, because this role was like playing ten characters and filming 15 episodes at the same time over four years!”

Since her time on the cobbles, Katherine – who was the 50th character as former convict Becky, worked as a barmaid at the famous Rovers Return Inn, had an unhappy marriage to Steve McDonald (Simon Gregson), tried to buy her sister Kylie’s nephew Max, but eventually left the Manchester backstreets to start a new life in Barbados – has starred in dramas such as Liar and Happy Valley, but has “no preference” about the type of role she takes on because it “just” has to be about the script.

She added: “I don’t have a preference, it’s just about the script. Even though these came out at the same time, I didn’t shoot them back to back – I was shooting something quite serious in between. I have a production company now called Make Me and we did a comedy fiction podcast called ‘Curl Up and DI’ in 2021 when they weren’t such a big thing.”

“The screenplay was written by Tony Pitts and stars Jim Moir (Vic Reeves), Morgana Robinson, Mark Benton and myself, and the film was really well received. With everything else going on, the world is hungry for comedy more than ever. People want to escape from everyday life.