Our Girl's Angela Lonsdale on her shared Corrie past with co-star Michelle Keegan

A BIT of cobbles bonding made Our Girl a piece of cake for ex-Corrie star Angela Lonsdale.

Angela plays fellow former Weatherfield favourite Michelle Keegan’s mum in the latest series of BBC One’s military drama.

Michelle has taken over the lead role from Lacey Turner, who has returned to EastEnders. The series will follow her new character Corporal Georgie Lane on a humanitarian mission in Kenya.

Although Michelle and Angela, who spent years as copper Emma Taylor, weren’t in Coronation Street at the same time, old pals and a shared past came into play in Our Girl.

“We have so many mutual friends,” says Angela, 50. “Ryan Thomas, who has just left Corrie, messaged Michelle telling her she’d love me as I was ‘one of us’ and then messaged me saying I was to look after Michelle.

“Because we know so many of the same people, like Samia Ghadie and Simon Gregson, we just hit it off straight away. We became really close.

“This is so different to anything Michelle has done before and she’s going to smash it.”

From the warmth in Angela’s voice it’s obvious there was a real connection between the pair.

“She made my job easy,” insists Angela. “I told her she was so easy to love. We improvised quite a bit.

“On one of our first scenes we went shopping and when we gave each other a hug I said, ‘mumma loves babba’ because it felt a mother/daughter kind of nickname.

“Now we use that when we text or tweet each other.”

The Corrie connection came into play again when “great mate” Suranne Jones asked Angela to join her in Scott & Bailey recently.

And she admits that although she left the soap back in 2003, the show is so powerful she still gets spotted, especially now she’s moved back to Cheshire from London.

“I see my pals all the time now as I literally live about five minutes away from them all,” said Angela, who used to be married to EastEnder Perry Fenwick.

“It’s like I’ve never been away and is like going back in time where nothing’s changed.

“Since moving back north I’m gobsmacked at how much I’m recognised. You can disappear more in London, where I suppose EastEnders is the thing, but here Corrie is such an institution.

“I go to the butchers and everyone wants to talk about it. I find it a bit bizarre that everyone remembers me after all this time. It’s very nice, though.”

One sadness from Angela’s Weatherfield days is that her mum Yvonne didn’t get to savour her daughter’s success. Yvonne was struck down by early-onset Alzheimer’s when she was just 55 and it soon took a terrible toll.

“She had the aggressive form and she was gone within five years,” says Angela, who did her acting training at the RSAMD in Glasgow at the same time as David Tennant.

“It was a very distressing time.

“It coincided with me being in Corrie and she was very, very poorly. She didn’t know that I was in the show and that was so sad.

“She knew that’s what I always wanted to do and it was incredibly upsetting that she didn’t know that it had happened.

“I’m more at peace with it now although I’ll never get over it. You just learn to live with it.” Angela was happy, though, to hear of The Sunday Post’s support for Alzheimer’s Scotland and the highly successful Memory Walks.

“I know about those and it’s great what’s being done,” she says.

“It’s something that will always be close to my heart.

“People are much more aware of the illness now. They know it isn’t something that just happens to really old grandparents.

“I went on This Morning with Ruth and Eamonn to talk about it. Ruth lost her father to Alzheimer’s so we knew what it was like.

“I did a charity ball which they came to along with a lot of my celebrity friends and it raised £30,000. I try and involve myself as much as I can.”

Our Girl, BBC One, Wednesday, 9pm.

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