Harry Elton Harry Elton ( 5th January , 1930 - 16th May , 2004 ) was the man responsible for commissioning " Coronation Street " in the summer of 1960 and was also the driving force in the Autumn of the same year who pushed the programme through to eventual broadcast . He was born in Toronto Canada and moved with his widowed mother and sister to Detroit in 1938 following the death of his father . He attended Wayne State University where he gained ambitions to become an actor and started at RADA in London in 1951 but left after one term . Returning to Michigan he started work in the fledging television industry and was one of many Canadians recruited by Sidney Bernstein , Denis Forman and other executives when they started Granada Television in 1956 ( The company originally had a strict rule that they would employ no BBC people as they wanted their service to be markedly different to the competition and , unable to match US salaries , Canada was an obvious place to search for staff ) . At Granada he worked on series such as " Shadow Squad " , two courtroom drama series , " The Verdict Is Yours " and " In Court Today " and " Biggles " . It was with this latter series that he first encountered Tony Warren who was vociferous in his complaints over being asked to work on " Biggles " as he knew little about flying and loathed Captain W . E Johns ' original stories . He begged Elton for a chance to write about something else and preferably something he knew about , suggesting that one such subject was the North of England . In a 1992 interview for the BBC Warren recalled that from Elton ' s office you could see over the mass of terraced houses that used to cover Salford ( whose historical border started at the River Irwell , almost at the edge of Granada ' s Quay Street studios site ) and Elton , waving vaguely at the view , asked him to write about a street out there . Warren had previously sent scripts about such ideas to the BBC in Leeds but they had not returned an answer . Elton gave him twenty - four hours to come back with a script idea that would " take Britain by storm " and Warren returned with the script for a programme called " Florizel Street " . Elton was taken with the treatment and asked for a script for the second episode and a covering memo that he could take to the Granada executives . Warren did so and described his idea as : Elton remained enthusiastic but found that his bosses were less so : " I was told that it was neither funny enough on the one hand nor documentary enough on the other and therefore fell between two stools . " Two dry runs were produced but these failed to sway Granada management . Finally , Elton arranged for the episodes to be shown on monitors around the Granada building at 1 . 00pm one afternoon and staff and visitors were given questionnaires on what they saw to return . Although acclaim was not universal , enough complementary comments were given for him to take back to the management for a re - think . The responses , and the fact that the series would , of necessity , employ a large number of northern actors and production staff , therefore helping Granada to fulfill its remit from the Independent Television Authority to represent its region , persuaded the senior management to give him the green light to produce a series and such approval was given on 25th August 1960 . Although day to day production of the series was in the hands of the programme ' s first producer . Harry " Stuart " Latham , Elton remained close to the progress of the series and was instrumental in the debate over the renaming of the serial in late November / early December . No one , with the exception of Warren , liked the original title of " Florizel Street " and legend has it that a comment from a tea lady called Agnes that it sounded like a disinfectant convinced everyone else that a change was needed although H . V . Kershaw , the programme ' s first script editor recalled that Cecil Bernstein , Sidney ' s brother , ordered the change . Latham , Kershaw and Elton sat in Latham ' s office one night at 7 . 00pm with a bottle of whiskey and thrashed the issue out . Bearing in mind the construction of their fictional street would have been at the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the next , they thought that either " Jubilee Street " ( for Queen Victoria ' s 1897 Diamond Jubilee ) or " Coronation Street " ( for Edward VII ' s 1902 Coronation ) were suitable choices . The arguments for each went on into the night through an alcoholic haze when Latham insisted it be put to the vote . As Kershaw relates … Elton continued to oversee the programme for the next three years in his role of executive producer of drama at Granada ( although it would be Kershaw who would first be credited with such a role on the programme itself in 1965 ) . Elton ' s other main connection with " Coronation Street " was in allowing his latest child and youngest daughter Victoria to play the part of the baby Paul Cheveski on the rare occasions that the character was seen in 1961 . In 1963 Elton left Granada to return to Canada , certain that his success in Britain would open up doors for him in his home country . That wasn ' t to be the case and Elton had to work his way up the ladder once again , taking jobs at CBC ( who would later screen " Coronation Street " in Canada ) and for the Canadian Museum of Civilisation from which he retired in 1990 . He was briefly reunited with a surprised and delighted Tony Warren in October 1995 when he appeared on the latter ' s edition of " This Is Your Life " . Elton discovered an interest in China on a visit there in 1993 and spent his last years making trips there , at first teaching English and later as part of the Canada - China Friendship Association . It was in Lhasa , Tibet that he suffered a fatal heart attack and died in 2004 . In the 2010 drama " The Road to Coronation Street " , he was portrayed by Christian McKay .