Sarah Harding • Coronation Street Discussion

August 3, 20159 yr

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/soaps/s3/coron...~pkjgzci1bJssma

Sarah Harding has finally fired back at criticism surrounding her Coronation Street role.

The former Girls Aloud star is currently appearing as guest character Joni Preston on the ITV soap, but her performance in the part has been panned by some critics and fans on Twitter.

Harding appeared on ITV's This Morning today (August 3) and broke her silence over the reaction, insisting that she won't let the experience bring her down.

She commented: "I try not to pay any attention to that. If you're going in as a known face, you're always going to get flak. If anything, I turn all that into a positive energy. It just makes me more determined.

"I enjoyed it - it's off my bucket list now. I've done films before, but I've never done soaps before. I was only ever asked to do four episodes and I had the time to do it while I was waiting for my track to be finished.

"I thought, 'Why not? It's my favourite soap'. It made me happy anyway, never mind what anyone else thought! Everyone's going to have an opinion at the end of the day."

Reflecting on where things might have gone wrong, Harding continued: "The character was quite an uptight character anyway and they didn't want me to do a northern accent, so I suppose I come across as me.

"I suppose that can be quite confusing, as opposed to coming on as a character who's unknown. You can't please everyone but I had a laugh doing it. Everyone was so lovely to me and I enjoyed my time there and now I'm moving on."

Harding is currently promoting her debut solo single 'Threads' but insisted that she won't be turning her back on acting for good.

Asked whether she has been put off, she replied: "Not at all. It's actually a lot harder doing soaps, I did realise that. It was a big learning curve, because it is such a big turnaround - you don't get very long to learn your scripts.

"With films you do get a lot of time, you get a lot of read-throughs with the whole cast. It takes a lot longer to do a film, it takes three months... I think we'll stick to films!"