In Coronation Street, Jenny Connor (Sally Ann Matthews) gets a bad update regarding the Rovers Return.
Jenny had to come to terms a few months ago that she would have to sell the bar because she was unable to keep the accounts balanced. Following some back and forth between Newton and Ridley, the Waterfords purchased the boozer.
When the head of Waterfords arrived and said that their contracts had been terminated, Jenny and her staff received even more distressing news.
Sam Robertson’s character Adam first intervened to attempt to find a way out, but he later told the staff that there was nothing he could do.
Jenny (Charlotte Jordan) has been thinking a lot about the future in Rita’s (Barbara Knox) apartment because characters like Daisy and Sean (Antony Cotton) are being forced to find new jobs.
The next week, when Brian (Peter Gunn) discloses that the pub is for sale and that a real estate developer hopes to purchase it and convert it into apartments, she is offered another look at what life may be like without the Rovers Return entirely.
Thankfully, showrunner Iain MacLeod has declared the pub would reopen before the start of 2024, so it doesn’t seem like this plan would come to pass:
He claimed that what makes it intriguing is that everything about the reopening’s conditions is related to Stephen’s legacy. The likelihood is that someone will, at best, get the keys to the bar and turn it back on, and at worst, commit a small-time crime. “I believe it reopens on New Year’s Eve,” he stated.
It will thus reopen, but it will do so on the somewhat flimsy basis of—let’s say—a criminal conduct. Since everything is centered on this wrongdoing that they did before the end of the year, I imagine that viewers will be asking, “Okay, so the pubs are open, but what calamity will strike the person who’s permitted that to happen?”
We didn’t want it, I guess, to simply reopen and act as though nothing had occurred. We intended for it to reveal a type of hidden bomb beneath it, which we plan to detonate at a later date in the year.
That’s probably all I feel qualified to say. It won’t look drastically different either because, in addition—I don’t know about you guys—I feel that certain sets—I’m not saying they should never change, but I definitely don’t want it to become a chain pub or modernized and gastropub-ified. In the same way that I feel strangely protective of Deirdre’s wallpaper at number one, I do feel that the Rover’s decor will be slightly updated. However, overall, I quite enjoy how it now looks and feels.
It will therefore reopen with a somewhat identical appearance, but its ownership situation will be far more complicated.