Ken Barlow - Reception

Reception

For his portrayal of Ken, Roache won the Lifetime Achievement award at the British Soap Awards in 1999. In November 2010, Ken surpassed Bob Hughes (Don Hastings) from US soap opera As the World Turns to become the longest-serving soap opera actor. Roache was honoured at a Guinness World Records ceremony in New York. In 1983, Roache, Kirkbride and Briggs were named TV Personalities of the Year at the Pye Colour Television Awards, for their performances in the Ken–Deirdre–Mike love triangle storyline. Journalist Brian Viner of The Independent has suggested that Roache has not been given the accolades he has deserved as a performer because of his longevity in the role of Ken. He felt that it may be a common assumption that Roache is merely playing himself on-screen; this notion diminishes a "rather remarkable acting performance". He added, "although the bouquets tend to go to actors who repeatedly display their versatility, it is in many ways even harder to inhabit one role for five decades. That said, for sheer staying power Ken and Bill are clearly indivisible: one has lived in the same street practically all his life, the other in the same role . That we have been able to watch the evolution of that young man into the Ken Barlow we know today, no less self-righteous but with 50 years of experiences behind him, is frankly one of the wonders of British television."

Ken has a reputation for being boring. The British band Half Man Half Biscuit highlighted this point in their 2001 song "Lark Descending", comparing Ken Barlow infavourably with a member of the US underground music scene, with the lyric: "I could have been like Lou Barlow, but I'm more like Ken Barlow". Despite Ken being fictional, critic Jim Shelley writing for the Daily Mirror in 2009 labelled Ken "the most boring man you could ever meet". Roache sued for libel in 1990 when The Sun newspaper ran an article branding Ken boring and making allegations that Roache was disliked among the cast of Coronation Street. Roache said to the jury at the court case, "I felt extremely distressed. I could not believe those words had been written, that they had raked into my past. I broke out in a sweat. They were saying that I was not doing my job, that I was a joke to the storyline writers, which is not true". Roache added in regard to Ken, "If people find someone who has had 23 girlfriends and three wives boring, that's fine by me." Roache won the case and was awarded £50,000; however, he was forced to pay legal costs, which bankrupted him. Brian Viner has suggested that it is remarkable that Ken has been labelled boring in spite of the many plots he has been involved with over the years. Brian Viner said, "It is easy enough to see, despite the extraordinary number of broken relationships and personal crises in his wake, why Ken tends not to make the pulse race when he opens his mouth. After all, he usually opens it only to drink halves of bitter, or to say something sensible or worthy. For 50 years he has been the nearest thing Weatherfield, the fictional area of Greater Manchester where Coronation Street is located, has had to a social conscience."

In a Channel 4 televised poll that was broadcast in 2001, Ken Barlow was voted the third most-hated TV character of all time, coming behind Phil Mitchell from EastEnders and Mr Blobby. In a Radio Times poll of over 5,000 people in 2004, 15% chose Ken as the soap character they would most like to see retired. He came second in the poll, behind EastEnders' Den Watts (17%).

Television personality Paul O'Grady wrote the foreword to Roache's 2010 autobiography, 50 Years on the Street. In it, he hailed Ken as "one of the iconic British soap characters", an all-time great who has been integral to Coronation Street. In 2005, Grace Dent of The Guardian suggested that Coronation Street archetypes have influenced latter soap opera characters. On Ken, she stated: "another heavily plagiarised Corrie stalwart is Ken Barlow, who as 'resident intellectual' has been looking down his nose at the proletariat since 1960. Just like poor hangdog-faced Ken, brainy people in soapland (Dr Truman, Roy Cropper, Todd Grimshaw, Emmerdale's Ethan the curate) are always miserable and brooding, due to the terrible burden of their mighty intellect in the face of so many simpletons. It rarely pays to be too clever or too rich in soapland as the majority of plotlines rely upon tragic Shakespearian falls from grace which everyone laughs their socks off at."

In 2009, viewers complained to ITV as well as the media regulator Ofcom after Coronation Street broadcast scenes in which Ken made derogatory comments about Christianity. A spokesperson for the show defended the opinions expressed by Ken in the scripts, saying, "Coronation Street is a soap opera set in modern society and therefore represents views from all side of the religious spectrum". The Guardian columnist Nancy Banks-Smith spoke highly of Ken's affair with Martha Fraser in 2009, calling it "a muted ingenious storyline". Gareth McLean of the Radio Times was critical of the storyline: "When it comes to self-delusion, Ken takes the biscuit, claims the cake and wolfs down the éclair. Nursing the notion that he's been thwarted by life, he decides to leave Deirdre to sail off into the sunset – or possibly Runcorn – with Martha. All these years and Ken still doesn't realise it's not Deirdre who's the dead weight in his life, it's he himself." The BBC have said: "During his record-breaking time on the hit soap, Roache's character has led a life full of incident". Holy Soap suggested that Ken being labelled a gigolo in the local newspaper after his client, Babs, died halfway through eating her meal, was his most memorable moment. Jaci Stephen, writing for the Daily Mail, said that soap operas are mostly a "cultural wasteland", but suggested that Ken was the exception as he read broadsheet newspapers and books. In her book Soap Opera, Hobson said Ken and his brother David initially represented the younger males of society. She noted that although Ken had many relationships, "he could hardly be described as an early 'Dirty Den'", a character notable for his womanising in the soap opera, EastEnders.