BBC Breakfast welcomed Coronation Street stars Daniel Brocklebank and Peter Ash to the sofa after a hard-hitting ITV soap storyline on MND.
BBC Breakfast fans couldn’t get over how “posh” Coronation Street star Daniel Brocklebank – who plays Billy Mayhew – is in real life.
The actor puts on a Mancunian accent while playing the part of the vicar on the ITV cobbles, but in real life the actor hails from Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire.
Daniel attended Redroofs Theatre School before starring in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Lord of the Flies when he was just 14 years old.
Appearing on BBC Breakfast alongside hosts Sally Nugent and Jon Kay, Daniel discussed the heartbreaking motor neurone disease (MND) storyline his character has been a part of, alongside Peter Ash, who played his husband Paul Foreman on the cobbles.
Daniel got emotional as he admitted: “We were texting each other, crying as we read the scripts. It’s been, for us, obviously we’re telling this story. But as people, we’ve just lost Pete – this is the man that I’ve been working very closely with for the last six years, and we get on incredibly well.
“So to not have him at work has been strange, like missing an arm.”
But fans were more distracted by how Daniel sounds in real life, away from Weatherfield. One X user said: “Billy is so posh in real life. I wonder how hard it is to keep the accent up on #Corrie.” Someone else said: “I didn’t realise how much of an accent Daniel Brocklebank put on for Billy.”
Another commenter said: “Always baffled by how different Daniel Brocklebank sounds compared to how he sounds on Corrie.” And somebody else posted: “Daniel Brocklebank sounds so posh!”
Explaining more about the storyline’s impact, Peter explained: “The reaction has been incredible. We filmed [Paul’s death] about two months ago, my final scenes. So we kind of forgot most of the episode. Watching it again, it just moved us to bits.
“The response has been phenomenal. Every time I check my socials it’s crazy in there, the amount of comments and positive messages. It’s been overwhelming. I really thank the fans for that, I really do.”
Daniel opened up on his personal experience with MND, after his grandfather lost his life to the condition. He said: “I think diagnosis has got better. When my grandfather was diagnosed with it 23 years ago, he was only diagnosed a week before he died, so we’d been caring for somebody with these symptoms, not knowing what it was.
“In the last two decades things have got better in terms of getting a diagnosis. But what this storyline, certainly, has done […] it has really highlighted what it is like to be living with MND or to be caring for someone with MND.”
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