It was a time when the pill was unavailable and homosexuality was illegal. As Shelagh Delaney’s sparky story of a Salford single mother and her pregnant teenage daughter returns, can it really speak to our era?

It was after her very first trip to the theatre that 19-year-old Shelagh Delaney wrote A Taste of Honey , hammered out on a borrowed typewriter after deciding she could do better than the play she had seen on a date at Manchester’s Opera House. Sixty-six years later, and 13 years after her death from breast cancer , her sparky debut is being staged half a mile away at the Royal Exchange, still a trading post for cotton during Delaney’s teenage years.

Almost nothing is left of Delaney’s soot-stained, seedy Salford. The docks of the script are now home to the BBC at Media City, with gleaming high-rises packed full of international students replacing the tumbledown terraces where a promiscuous mother, Helen, abandons her teenage daughter, Jo, in a grimy bedsit.

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Stage and screen actor best known for playing the bombastic butcher Fred Elliott in Coronation Street

John Savident, who has aged 86, was a skilled, colourful, sometimes broad but always memorable actor who played one of TV’s best loved soap opera characters – the bombastic but lovable butcher Fred Elliott in the ITV series Coronation Street – for more than a decade.

Fred, who first appeared in 1994 and became a regular two years later, was soon a favourite with viewers, thanks in part to the enjoyably imitable repetitive vocal tic that Savident invested him with: “Ashley, I say, Ashley,” he would utter when addressing his young nephew (later revealed to be his son), Ashley Peacock (Steven Arnold).

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Star player with QPR admired for his breathtaking speed whose wild exploits made him a tabloid favourite in the 1970s

It was once said of Stan Bowles that he had spent all his money on betting, booze and women, to which he responded, “Well, at least I didn’t waste it.” Bowles, who has died aged 75, was a goalscoring midfielder of breathtaking speed and touch, a down-to-earth street genius with long flowing hair – he could win a game with one move.

His golden years, in the mid-1970s, were spent at Queens Park Rangers , when a familiar sight outside the Loftus Road ground were the badges on sale bearing the legend, “Stan Bowles and his amazing dancing feet”. Another familiar sight was Bowles, in his kit, 20 minutes before kick-off, in the betting shop up the road. Soon after the match he could be spotted in one of the pubs close to the stadium.

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Guardian photographer Christopher Thomond captures performers as they welcome in year of the dragon

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Officers were called to altercation between two audience members at touring hit show at Palace Theatre

Police are investigating after a fight broke out between theatregoers during a performance of Hamilton in Manchester.

Officers were called to an altercation between two audience members on Friday night, just days after the hit musical opened at the Palace Theatre at the start of a nationwide tour.

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History shows that having a terminus helps your town prosper – which, in the case of HS2, could be bad news for Manchester

If TikTok is to be believed, all the cool kids are trainspotters these days. Luckily, economists can get in on the act, because transport connections are crucial to cities’ growth.

But not all train stations are equal. If you’re a size matters person, you want your station to be a terminus – the end of the line. Specifically, you want it to have been a terminus for a good chunk of history. Research finds that the longer a town’s station has been an “all change” kind of place – even if decades back – the larger its population and economy today. It examines railways spreading west from Brazil’s São Paulo from the mid-19th century. They often developed in fits and starts, with a line built to one town but not going on to the next for some time. Such stop-start nonsense would never happen in Britain …

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‘High-speed’ trains from Birmingham to Manchester could also impact west coast mainline service

Journeys from London to Manchester that use the new HS2 line as far as Birmingham could run slower as they continue north than existing services, and with less capacity, rail experts have warned.

And in a blow to Rishi Sunak’s plan to spend the money saved by scrapping HS2 north of Birmingham on other transport projects, the Observer has seen invoices suggesting the government will have to spend more than £1bn on work relating to the part of the line now terminated.

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Sir John Armitt says cost of project needs to curbed, but that there are ‘massive benefits’ to economy in continuing

Axing the Manchester leg of the HS2 high-speed rail line would be a “tragedy” but the government needs to “get a grip of the costs”, the country’s infrastructure chief has said.

Sir John Armitt, the chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, which is responsible for providing expert advice to the UK government, also said cancellation of the route would tell the world that the UK “runs away when it starts to see some challenges”.

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First buses to return to public control since deregulation to offer cheaper fares across integrated transport system

The first buses to be brought back into public control in England since deregulation in the 1980s will set out from depots in Bolton and Wigan on Sunday morning.

Greater Manchester will launch its Bee Network , which promises better, cheaper transport with fares capped across an integrated public transport system that combines buses and Metrolink trams.

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