Template:60Years 1968

 ~ 1968 ~ 1968 was a make-or-break year for Coronation Street. After staving off cancellation by Granada in 1967, producers made a concerted effort to update the programme. Everitt hired as story consultant novelist Stan Barstow, who believed that instilling social issues into storylines was the way forward and submitted many suggestions of his own. His most notable success was the Clegg family, led by alcoholic Les who regularly beat his wife Maggie. Barstow was also behind Emily Nugent's fling with Hungarian Miklos Zadic, and Elsie Tanner's meltdown in front of Len Fairclough after the failure of her marriage to Steve. Many of his more radical ideas were vetoed, among them introducing the street's first black family, Jerry Booth coming out as gay, Lucille Hewitt becoming a drug user, and Emily falling pregnant out of wedlock. Barstow left the programme at the end of his three-month contract.

Work had already begun on weatherproofing the wooden studio set for outside filming and in anticipation of street filming moving outdoors the Glad Tidings Mission Hall and Elliston's Raincoat Factory, which lay on the opposite side of the street were marked for demolition. The set was erected against scaffolding and had no roofs. As it was only a façade, there were no back yards or ginnel, and directors had to be careful not to show the tops of the houses.

 ''To celebrate 60 years of Coronation Street on television, we're going through the programme's entire history a year at a time. The full version of this article can be found here. Check back on 4th March for 1969!''