Owen Armstrong Returns to Coronation Street After 11 Years

Owen Armstrong is coming back to Coronation Street. Ian Puleston-Davies, 67, will reprise the builder almost 11 years after the character left Weatherfield, and the soap has been clear about the mood he returns in. He is still angry, and he blames Gary Windass.

Filming starts next week. The episodes are due on screen in January. Owen will move in with his daughter Izzy and his grandson Jake. Producer Kate Brooks said she was "thrilled" to have Puleston-Davies back, that Owen "wreaks havoc on the street", and that his relationship with Gary is "severely put to the test".

Puleston-Davies, from Flint in Flintshire, has been in the business for more than 40 years. "I can't wait to pick up where I left off 10 years ago," he said. "It's brilliant to be back and to get stuck into a cracking storyline. Owen's back and he's still angry."

Why he left, and what he has done since

Owen departed after his building firm collapsed and his relationship with Anna Windass broke down. He had been the blunt father on the street: protective of Izzy, suspicious of Gary, and rarely short of a verdict. The new story picks up that suspicion rather than retiring it. Moving in with Izzy puts him under the same roof as the family history he left behind, and it puts Gary in his sightline from the first episode.

Since leaving the cobbles, Puleston-Davies has worked in Pennyworth, Tin Star and After The Flood, on screen and on stage. A soap return after a decade is a different job from a guest arc in a drama. Coronation Street shoots at a volume that asks an actor to live in the character again, not visit it. Brooks's line about havoc is the promise to viewers who remember the rows. The January transmission date gives the show the Christmas break before he walks back onto the street.

A street that keeps calling people back

Long-running soaps renew themselves by returning characters the audience already has a view about. Owen does not need a new introduction. Viewers know the voice, the overalls and the grievance. The risk for the writers is that a comeback trades on memory and then has nowhere to go. Brooks has pointed the story at Gary, which is the one relationship that can still produce a plot rather than a reunion scene.

British television this autumn is already crowded with returns and exits. Shaun Wright-Phillips left Strictly on Sunday, the fourth celebrity out, with Halloween week and the show's first triple dance-off still to come on Saturday. Cheryl is back in the battle rounds of The Voice. Owen's January start means the cobbles get their own new year story once the ballroom has done Blackpool and musicals week.

If you want the Strictly table as it stands before Saturday's haunted ballroom, that piece is the place to start. Owen Armstrong will not be dancing. He will be on the street, and he has already said he has not calmed down.