BRITAIN'S most famous street could have been known by a completely different name had it not been for the intervention of a Granada Television tea lady. For the past 40 years millions of viewers have tuned in each week to catch up with the goings on in Coronation Street, but they could have been watching Florizel Street if the show's creator Tony Warren had got his way. He had come up with the original name because he had a portrait of Prince Florizel battling his way through the enchanted forest to get to Sleeping Beauty on his wall.

"Up until the week of our first show it was still known as Florizel Street," reveals Warren. "From the start many people involved with the show had their doubts about the title.

"But it was only when Agnes the tea lady said that Florizel sounded like a disinfectant that we came up with some alternatives."

Warren came up with two suggestions, Jubilee Street and Coronation Street. The final decision was down to three executives and, to this day, two of them maintain they voted for the former title even though a memo appeared saying the show was to be known as Coronation Street.

Getting the show to the production stage had been something of a battle for Warren. Before arriving at Granada the idea for 'Our Street' had already been rejected twice at the BBC - once by Barney Colehan and then by Olive Shapley - the producer responsible for creating Woman's Hour. When Warren told Shapley about his idea she replied, ''Oh Tony, how boring.''

But the resilient 23-year-old was not going to be put off by such setbacks.

''I was a former boy actor who had turned into Britain's youngest scriptwriter','' he recalls. ''I was under contract to Granada Television who had me adapting Captain W E Johns' Biggles books - I loathed the job.

''I remember climbing on top of a green tin filing cabinet in an executive producer's office, I told him that I wasn't coming down until he allowed me to write what I knew about, the north of England.''

That executive, Harry Elton, ordered him to get down, then gave him just 24 hours to come up with an idea that would take the country by storm.

''As Harry was Canadian I had to lay out this version of my story of a backstreet very carefully to be sure that he understood the northern nuances,'' reveals Warren.

''Then he had to sell the idea to more senior executives within the company. As luck would have it, they were in urgent need of a new series to fill a gap in the schedule, so they agreed we could make two pilot episodes of the show.''

Many people might think at this stage they were well on their way to being home and dry, this did not turn out to be the case with Florizel Street.

''It nearly never happened,'' he recalls. ''Several of the older executives were appalled by the finished pilots. They told Harry that, being a Canadian, he would not understand that this was the 'language of the music halls'. One even said that if the show was transmitted the advertisers would withdraw their advertising. With nothing else to fill the slot they gave a reluctant go-ahead, but there was a written memo sent to me demanding that I cut the role of Ena Sharples.''

To try to combat the negative response from executives, Elton came up with a novel idea so that everybody at Granada could have their say about the pilot episodes.

''We put television sets around the building and showed the pilots to everyone who worked at Granada,'' recalls Warren. ''We sent our questionnaire to everybody, from cleaners to visiting dignitaries, asking them to watch the pilots and fill in the forms. They loved Ena and those who saw the show either loved it or loathed it, there wasn't much in between.''

These passionate responses caused the executives to think again and on August 25, 1960, they took the decision to give the go-ahead to the first 16 episodes of the show.

Warren believes that the show was truly ground breaking.

He says: ''In 1960 Granada was still bringing all its leading actors up from London. Northern actors were considered to have unfashionable accents. We set out to change that.

''Many of the people we auditioned were highly experienced performers who had grown up resigned to being background actors. But a few of them were about to become the best-known faces on British television.''

l Coronation Street's 40th anniversary is on December 9

www.coronationstreet.co.u