News the Baileys will be soap’s first black family prompts surprise it has taken so long

Coronation Street is introducing its first black family, in a move showrunners have described as overdue.

While the show has previously featured individual black characters, the Baileys will be the first black family to join the soap all together in its 59-year history.

The show will explore themes of racism and homophobia in sport with the family, made up of Edison, the father, Aggie, the mother, and their sons, James and Michael. James, a 19-year-old footballer, will come out as gay in an upcoming storyline.

Asked why the show had taken so long to introduce its first black family, the producer Iain MacLeod said: “Short answer: I don’t really know. In the past, new families come in one at a time. I find that a harder way to do it, which is why they all turn up and you get the dynamic. Manchester has a large proportion of black residents so it did feel sort of overdue we did this and represented modern Manchester a bit more accurately.”

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The announcement was met with bafflement by some in the industry. The actor and comedian Sir Lenny Henry simply tweeted “wow” in response, while the theatre director Matthew Xia said he was stunned it had taken nearly six decades for the show to become more representative of multicultural Manchester.

Xia said: “It blows my mind that our longest-running soap, set in the heart of one of our most cosmopolitan cities, has only just introduced the idea of ‘the black family’ to its viewers. I found Manchester to be a beautifully radical place, truly diverse with strong connections between its various communities. How have the producers managed to get away with this for almost 60 years?”

Edison, played by Trevor Michael Georges, arrives on the soap after taking over the builder’s yard from the Grimshaws alongside his 27-year-old son, Michael, played by the CBeebies House presenter Ryan Russell. James will be played by the 28-year-old musical theatre actor Nathan Graham.

MacLeod said: “We wanted to look at a modern story about a young, gay man. It won’t be your normal coming out story where we see James wrestling with his sexuality. We were quite keen that he knows who he is but has some apprehensiveness about telling his parents, [and] has a lot of apprehensiveness about his teammates potentially finding out.”