Starters - TV Dinners

Betty's Hotpot

Just how soon after her Coronation Street debut in 1969 Betty Williams (formerly Turpin) started churning out Lancashire's home dish is lost in the mists of time. But it's certainly long enough for real-life piemaker Holland's of Accrington to market a short-lived version of soapland's most famous recipe in the mid-1990s.

Although the fictional hotpot has mostly performed the role of sustenance to tradesman frequenting the Rover's Return, it has occasionally contributed a more dramatic role as a source of conflict between Betty and her employers. In 1992, licensees Alec and Bet Gilroy were forced to close the kitchen after a failed hygiene inspection which left Betty redundant, only to return again after consumer pressure forced a kitchen refurb. Three years later, Betty stormed out after finding that Jack and Vera Duckworth were the Rover's new licensees, forcing Vera to start making her own hotpots. In a bizarre life-imitating-art scenario Vera's hotpot appeared on the menu of the Old Grapes, a Manchester pub part-owned by Liz Dawn (aka Vera Duckworth).

There was further crisis over the future of the Corrie hotpot in 2003 when butcher and Rover's licensee Fred Elliott (himself famed for his Cumberland ring) tried to claim it as his own, in the hope that he could make a few bob selling it in his butcher's concession at Freshco. But Betty got one over on Fred by giving him a bogus version. Oh, the fun at Weatherfield. The hotpot is still the staple of pub menus around the country, sometimes with a twist, such as the corned beef hotpot at the Raven in Poulshot, Wiltshire, or the ginger and lemon variation on the standard lamb theme at the aptly-named Lancaster Arms in Pandy, Monmouthshire.

By the way, Betty Turpin's maiden name was Preston, seat of Lancashire's local government. Spooky, eh?