Universities have long sought out those with a public profile as their chancellors – former politicians, business leaders, sports folk, even familiar faces from television – but Leeds Trinity is certainly unusual, if not unique, in appointing at its head someone whose face remains imprinted on the public consciousness as a character from Coronation Street, the nation’s best-loved soap.
“I haven’t been in Corrie for 21 years,” laughs Deborah McAndrew. “But I still get recognised everywhere I go as Angie [Freeman, design student and, for the uninitiated, briefly the on-screen romantic partner of “poor” Curly Watts and the business partner of “nasty” Mike Baldwin].” The soap is, she says, “grafted into my life in such a way that I can’t separate it out”.
And neither could the red tops when she was named this spring by Leeds Trinity University – once a Catholic teacher training college, and still proudly guided by a Catholic ethos – as its second chancellor, in succession to another local Leeds girl, Gabby Logan.