Helen Worth on track to break Coronation Street appearance record

Helen Worth is set to break Bill Roache's record number of 'Coronation Street' appearances.

The 73-year-old actress has made 4,453 appearances as Gail Platt on the soap since 1974 and her new £250,000 contract is likely to see her eventually overtake the 92-year-old veteran's previously "untouchable" milestone of 4,773 episodes because her beloved character appears more frequently than Ken Barlow.

A source told The Sun newspaper: “'Coronation Street' has some of the longest-serving stars across all of TV but Bill’s record was always thought to be untouchable. Helen’s deal means she’s within touching distance. It’s her involvement in so many big storylines that gives her such an appearance rate.”

Before landing the role of Gail, Helen had appeared 'in episodes of 'Z-Cars' and 'Doctor Who' but the only other role she has played since starting on the soap is that of Molly Silknose in the 1981 animation film 'Peter-No-Tail'.

Helen is the show's second longest-serving continuous cast member behind Bill - who has played Ken since the very first episode aired on 9 December 1960 - and her character holds the record for the most marriages on the show, having been married a total of six times.

In 1979, Gail Potter married Brian Tilsley (Christopher Quinten) and had Nick (Ben Price) and Sarah Louise (Tina O'Brien) with him; the pair divorced in 1987, and remarried the following year but he died in 1989 after being stabbed outside a nightclub and later went on to have son David (Jack P. Shepherd) Martin Platt (Sean Wilson).

That marriage ended in divorce in 2001 when she discovered Martin had been having an affair with nurse Rebecca Hopkins (Jill Halfpenny) and she went on to marry serial killer Richard Hillman (Brian Capron), who died when he drove the family into the canal after killing two residents on the Street in 2003.

Gail married Joe McIntyre (Reece Dinsdale) in 2010 but he died in a boating accident later that same year whilst trying to fake his own death in an attempt to claim insurance money, and she married Michael Rodwell (Les Dennis) in 2015, only for him to suffer a fatal heart attack a year later.

Gail's other notable storylines over the years include finding out that daughter Sarah was pregnant at the age of 13 in 1999, and dealing with letters that were supposedly being sent to her by her late husband Richard, when it turned out they were in fact being sent by her son David.