My return to dating

The Coronation Street writers have produced 26 scenes to ease me out of the show for long enough for me to nip down to London to do a play for four weeks in the West End. They are long scenes – one is 13 pages – with my screwed-up, long-lost daughter, played by Claire Sweeney. I really need to get a grip on my Corrie lines, but my attention is torn between them and the play script. It’s been eight months since I last performed Rose, a one-woman show about a feisty old lady who goes from a shtetl in Ukraine to owning a hotel in Miami Beach, and this week it opens at the Ambassadors Theatre. I start on page one of the 47-page play, only to get distracted by a new Corrie script. Consequently, from about page 22, I know very little. This is the cause of major fright and much gnashing of teeth and could lead to a short evening in the theatre and a puzzled audience in the bar.

Back in London, I seem to have an actual date.