Piers Morgan pleads with BBC to ask Williamson why he hasn't quit“That was the big decision-making time, but we'd already been running for a while."Bill made his debut as Ken Barlow in December 1960 and has since gone to be at the centre of many memorable storylines.The actor believes it wasn’t until 1983 when the media had started to take soaps seriously.At a Manchester United game, Bill’s character and his on-screen wife Deidre Barlow (played by Anne Kirkbride) were shown on the big screen.Recalling the moment, the actor added: “One of the papers actually took a photograph of the television screen and published that on the front page."Prior to that, soaps were not treated seriously.There were no soap reporters in papers, there were no.
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