The light is dim in this crowded Toronto diner, the voices loud and steady. A bartender fiddles with the bass on the stereo while six of us, our ages spanning five decades, cozy up in the corner booth and play with the condensation on our glasses of gin and Creemore and cranberry ginger ale. We have come to discuss Coronation Street — its stellar writing, its dry humour, its brisk pacing and relatable cast. But the conversation keeps turning back to Tony Gordon.

As Corrie’s current baddy, Tony in many ways serves as a tidy distillation of the scope of the series, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this December. He owns the local lingerie factory, Underworld, but he has distinctly working-class roots. While he makes lots of enemies, often by intimidating the elderly, his bed is seldom cold. He marries Carla (in one of the eighty-six weddings performed over the show’s history). He delivers Maria’s baby (one of thirty-seven births). And he orders a hit on Liam (one of 118 deaths), the father of Maria’s baby, who’d had an affair with Carla, even though Carla is the ex-wife of Liam’s brother, Paul (also dead). Then Tony and Maria start dating (despite the fact that she once tried to run him over with her car). And then, finally — only days before our conversation at the restaurant — Tony tells the police what he’s done.

“This doesn’t happen very often,” admits Mary, fifty-four, a Coronation Street fan since 1982. “The meat of the show is the people in their little houses with their little lives. They’ve lost their jobs, or something’s wrong at home. It’s usually not a serial killer. But Tony’s still an interesting character.”

“He’s a mastermind of deception,” says Ben, who first watched the show thirty years ago with his grandmother, when he was just six, and has been a devoted viewer since 2004. “I’m not quite sure how he made Maria forget she suspected him of murdering Liam, but it kept me watching.”

“I was pulling for Tony to get away with it,” says Laura, thirty-two, who has been tuning in for four years.

“He tried to make amends,” explains Mary. “You almost want to believe that he could be redeemed by loving Maria and that baby.”

“Watching him with Maria and her son, I began to feel like he really has changed,” adds Laura, “that there is some kind of struggle there. That he isn’t purely evil.”

“You think you have Tony figured out, and then something happens to challenge that,” says James, forty-five, an intermittent viewer since the 1970s. “He’s also deepened the characters around him.”

“Even Maria is less boring now,” agrees Petra, James’s fifteen-year-old daughter, who has watched the show with her father for the past three years. “She isn’t just the pretty girl anymore. And she’s not just an addition to her husband.”

The conversation carries on into the night, long after the drinks have been drained and the music has been cranked up. The discussion’s intensity, which mirrors those playing out in living rooms and bars across Canada, raises an essential question about Coronation Street. Now the longest-running scripted television program, the series documents the working-class residents of Weatherfield, a town modelled after a Manchester suburb, whose lives unfold in a very specific location, coloured with the cadences of unpolished British speech. It would be difficult to name a show more quintessentially British. So why do 1.3 million Canadians tune in every night?

Coronation Street was nearly called Florizel Street, but a cleaning lady named Agnes at Granada Television contended that “Florizel” sounded like a disinfectant. The show almost didn’t make it to air, but Canadian producer Harry Elton persuaded skeptical network executives to gamble on the blue-collar drama. (Apparently, Elton — who would later return home to host Cross Country Checkup — knew Corrie had tremendous potential after Agnes was transfixed by the pilot.) Within three months of its premiere in late 1960, the show secured first place in the ratings, pulling in a 75 percent audience share. By the middle of the decade, it had reached a high of 21.3 million viewers — just three million fewer than those who tuned in to learn of JFK’s assassination, and a full million more than those who watched Winston Churchill’s funeral.

The show was a proven revenue generator, and for executives at CBC it must have been easy to imagine that it would find a similarly receptive audience here. When Coronation Street debuted on Toronto’s CBLT in July 1966, English-speaking Canada operated within a distinctly Anglo tradition: we still sang “God Save the Queen,” we had just a year earlier retired the Union Jack, and our Constitution could only be changed by an act of British parliament.