The King of Soap Operas

David Kester is undoubtedly one of the hardest-working directors in British television and his speciality, over more than 25 years of work, has become the soaps — Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Hollyoaks, and EastEnders. A parade of soapy characters trips off his lips, and it is clear that he has not just the utmost respect for the shows, but a sincere affection for the actors who bring the stories to life.

The Pinner-raised Kester attended one of London’s hothouse academic schools, Haberdashers’ Aske’s. Old boys include the comedian David Baddiel — older than Kester — and actors Sacha Baron Cohen and Matt Lucas, both younger. “I remember sneaking into David Baddiel’s sixth-form review,” Kester says. “I must have been in my first year, and I can remember really clearly how funny he was. I’m not at all surprised he went on to do what he did.”

But Kester’s contemporaries were not showbiz types at all. “My year was almost 99 per cent solid going into law or accountancy or the professions. I had one friend who actually went on to do what I do — he’s a director in Israel — but I was unusual; I always knew what I wanted to do.”

Perhaps, Kester says, he drew inspiration from helping his father. “My dad trained as a chemical engineer, but when he was made redundant he turned to making wedding videos. And I used to help him. The equipment was really heavy in those days, he used to carry this massive shoulder pack.”

Unfortunately his father also “used to miss some very important moments. But maybe that’s where I got the idea of live television, shooting out of sequence and then assembling material into telling 
a story.”

Kester’s father came with a ready-made dramatic story of his own. Paris-born, he was a Hidden Child during the Holocaust, whose parents did not survive. But he had an older brother who stayed in France, meaning that Kester has a raft of Parisian cousins.

Kester’s father was smuggled out of France, and came to London because there were distant relatives in Edgware who had no children of their own, and who adopted him.

Kester’s mother had a more conventional story. “She came from Mill Hill and worked as an occupational therapist,” he says.

Besides the wedding videos, what really sparked Kester’s interest was being taken, as a child, to a live performance of Crackerjack, the children’s TV programme, at the Shepherd’s Bush theatre in West London.

“I was really seduced by the cameras and the lights — I fell in love. I was in the odd school play, but I never wanted to be a performer. I like to think I’m a good enough director to know I’d be a pretty poor actor, but I liked the idea of making it happen on stage or TV.”

In school holidays, Kester worked as a runner — for which read shlepper — including for Channel 4, filming the Tour de France. And after A levels, he worked initially for a facilities company in the West End, transferring pop promos onto videotape.

“But I realised it wasn’t really what I had my heart set on.”

Instead, after a year, he went to Central London Polytechnic — these days known as Westminster University — to read media studies, and then began deluging everyone he could in the TV industry with application letters.

“For every 100 letters I wrote, I got 99 rejections. But then there was an ad in the Guardian for a researcher job with Granada TV in Manchester,” he says.

Kester had never been to Manchester before but one step inside Granada’s Quay Street building rendered him awestruck. “It was an incredible place. Famous people were walking past, it was a proper big TV centre. You’d walk past a dock with sets of TV programmes in each studio, and I recognised every programme. I thought, this is incredible, I’ve got to work here.”

He got the job, working on a children’s programme called Cool Cube, and then was accepted on Granada’s elite directors’ training course as a studio director. That marked the beginning of his career — though he didn’t start on soaps until much later.

He worked on numerous entertainment shows, from Stars In Their Eyes to You’ve Been Framed, and for more than a year, This Morning with Richard and Judy, produced in Liverpool.

“That was amazing when it started because there were no other shows like it, so you’d get real Hollywood A-listers flying up to this little airport,” he says. “But there were often disasters, mainly to do with guests not showing up — sometimes because of the weather — and suddenly we’d have to change the running order. It’s live, it’s being watched by three million people — and what do you do? It has to be seamless to the viewer. Loads of things would go wrong, but that’s part of the fun of it. It’s really gladiatorial television, because you want to see how people deal with challenges.”

But after years on the entertainment side, Kester hankered after working on drama — he wanted the opportunity to be more creative. It is, he says, very difficult to move between genres in TV, but as one of the youngest directors at Granada, he had a good track record and hoped he might be given a chance.

It was 1999 and Simon Shaps was then director of programmes. Kester recalls: “He said, what can we do to make you stay? You’re not having a pay rise. And I said, let me work on Coronation Street.”

Though he was more of an EastEnders fan, Kester was keen to work on the Street. “It was a slightly hallowed show, a national institution.” Such shows, he says, have their own voice. “It’s a bit like being the conductor of the LSO. What a director brings is getting performances from actors, helping them to tell the story.”

And he began to bring his own voice to the soap. At the end of 1999, he directed the millennium episode, in which Rita Fairclough stands on the famous cobbles and sings On the Street Where You Live; and he has been responsible for many stand-out set pieces since then, including the funeral of Hayley Cropper and the armed siege of the Underworld knicker factory, or the seminal scene in EastEnders in which Little Mo is sexually attacked by a neighbour, Graham.

Kester has established good relationships with many of the actors on the soaps, and is keen to praise them for their performances in what, for some, is a deeply labour-intensive industry. Around the same time as he began with Coronation Street, he went freelance, and has built up a sterling reputation as the go-to director in soapland.

There is scarcely a big storyline in any of the soaps on which he has not worked. At the time we met he had been heavily involved in Coronation Street’s tragic ending for Aidan Connor, an apparently successful businessman who commits suicide. In parallel to Aidan’s death, another character, David Platt, is dealing with the horror of being a rape victim, and he is evidently considering suicide himself — but changes his mind.

This, for Kester, is “campaigning TV. Male suicide is a massive issue, and we worked very closely with the Samaritans and a charity that works with potential suicides, called CALM.”

In the aftermath of Aidan’s suicide, the actress Helen Worth, who plays Gail Rodwell, has an extraordinary soliloquy, almost Shakespearian in tone, in which she reflects on life on the Street.

“That was a very Corrie thing to do — and it was something you could only get away with on a show like that, where there is a collective memory for the actors, the characters and the audience,” says Kester.

Most recently he has worked on scenes with Coronation Street’s best villain for years, Pat Phelan, played by Connor McIntyre. McIntyre won Villain of the Year at the 2018 British Soap Awards, and there is the slightly surreal sense that almost all Kester’s shows are competing against each other.

Kester and I try — but fail — to discern Jewish characters in the soaps. We can only come up with two, EastEnders’ Dr Legg, played by Leonard Fenton, who is making a return to the show, and social worker Nicola Rubenstein, biological daughter of the evil Phelan in Coronation Street. Maureen Lipman is returning to Coronation Street, but not as a Jewish character.

But Kester has a different take. Though he says there are not many Jews working in British TV — unlike the American industry — he is sure of one thing, and that is the Jewish flavour infusing Coronation Street. He says: “Tony Warren, who created it, said he was heavily influenced by Jewish humour, the matriarchal societies he came across in Manchester, and the sense of community.” 