One of Coronation Street’s longest-serving stars has revealed they were almost killed off two decades ago, and the writers had confirmed it with him at the time. Jack P. Shepherd, 37, who plays hairdresser David Platt in the long-running ITV soap, is currently celebrating 25 years on the cobbles. He first arrived in Weatherfield as the wayward son of Gail Platt (Helen Worth) in 2000, aged just 12 years old. However, speaking on Saturday night, September 20, as part of An Audience with Coronation Street live show at the Lowry Theatre in Salford, he revealed his tenure was actually quite short, as he was set to be killed off around 2003.

On stage with host Sharon Marshall and his cast mates Patti Clare (who plays Mary Taylor), Jane Danson (Leanne Battersby), Jimmi Harkishin (Dev Alahan) and William Roache (Ken Barlow) at the Lowry Theatre in Salford The Celebrity Big Brother winner shared details of his proposed exit.

“They were going to kill me off because I’d done bad things, and it’s like anything, each character goes through bad scenarios and if they keep doing bad things, they have to get rid of them, don’t they? The soap gods get you.

“I found out at a writer’s meeting that they’d just killed me off. They’d just decided to,” he said.

Explaining “they’d worked out David’s exit storyline and were going to kill him off during his teenage years he revealed he was revived thanks to one of the soap’s most famous serial killers.

“What changed their minds was that I did a scene where I blamed Gail about Richard Hillman, and I think the scene was typically written where David would lash out at his mum and storm upstairs, slam the door, like a typical teenage soap scene,” he said.

“I played it a little differently, and I was just very matter-of-fact and was a bit more sincere with what he actually believed and thought.

“And that’s when they went, ‘Oh, maybe he’s alright, and maybe there is a way back for his character. Maybe this lad’s quite good and we’ll try and keep hold of him.'”

Throughout his quarter of a century on Corrie, Jack’s character has been put through the wringer. He has spent time in young offenders, watched his wife die in his arms and been raped by a man he believed to be his friend, amongst other hard-hitting storylines.

Thankfully, Jack’s real life is much calmer than his on-screen alter ego. In July, he married his fiancée, Hanni Treweek, in a romantic ceremony just over a year after he proposed during a safari trip in Tanzania, Africa.