Similarly, Lucille's intended marriage was called off when Bill Kenwright, cast as her fiancé, also left the series. Nevertheless, sales were encouraging enough for her to leave the Street briefly to tilt for pop stardom, most conspicuously when miming to Please Let It Happen to Me, a Meek composition, in Live It Up (1963), a B-movie starring David Hemmings about a beat group's rise to qualified renown.Įven when she returned to Coronation Street the following year, Moss was required to sing in - and win - a local talent contest, beating an entry by Annie Walker, landlady of the Rovers Return, with whom Lucille had billeted herself after Harry Hewitt was retired to Ireland. Under the aegis of record producer Joe Meek, a single, Hobbies, was released in June 1963, but though catchy and delivered in Moss's assured soprano, it missed the charts.

Moss was projected fleetingly as a pop singer on the back of her Coronation Street celebrity. But Ena Sharples, the Street's hairnetted battleaxe, developed a soft spot for Lucille, as shown in occasional encounters between the cheeky young miss and the jovial voice-of-experience. In a late 1961 episode, for example, she incurred parental wrath by having Eddie, the name of a local rock'n'roller, tattooed on her forearm. The daughter of widower Harry Hewitt in the Street, Lucille was portrayed as a wayward lass. Before being approached by Warren to join the soap, she also appeared in two BBC television plays, June Evening and Magnolia. By the age of 12, Jennifer was being heard regularly on the BBC Light Programme's Children's Hour - which was how she came to the attention of Tony Warren, then an actor and later the originator of Coronation Street.

Town Red by Jennifer Moss