The soap star revealed that he was terrified of damaging his beloved motors on crumbling roads, as pothole-related breakdowns reached a five-year high last year.
5
5
5
Nigel, who played Lewis Archer on the beloved ITV programme between 2009 and 2019, told Good Morning Britain that he had been forced to find his collection of vintage vehicles a new home.
He said: “The thing is enough people are shouting about this now, everybody has a road that they know is lethal.
“And what happens is you avoid potholes because you get to know where they are, and you head into oncoming traffic which can be really dangerous.
“Sometimes you’re left with going onto the pothole because there is nothing else you can do, and the whole car just shudders.”
Nigel’s Coronation Street story
Nigel first joined the residents of Coronation Street in 2009 as the charming escort Lewis Archer.
Throughout his run he acted as an on-again, off-again love interest to Audrey Roberts, played by Sue Nicholls.
At the climax of his first stint on the show, he left Audrey broken-hearted after stealing thousands from Peter Barlow’s betting shop and leaving the country.
Lewis would return in 2012 and rekindled his relationship with Audrey, as well as paying back the money he took.
However, it wouldn’t be long before he entered into a bitter feud with Floria Price and Gail Platt, the latter of whom he scammed out of £40,000 before vanishing once more.
A final run from 2017-19 saw him enact another con against Gail and try for a third time to make things work with Audrey, only to end up in prison.
His story would end in tragedy when he died of a heart attack while preparing to ask Audrey to marry him and was discovered with the ring in his hand, having finally cleaned up his act.
As a result, he has had to put his 1970 Jaguar E-Type up for sale as the low-slung sportster can’t cope with the state of Britain’s roads.
He added: “It’s a real shame, it’s going up for auction on Sunday.
“The E-Type is very low, so you feel every bump.”
The car will be sold by Classic Car Auctions at the Birmingham NEC on March 24.
It is expected to fetch as much as £70,000.
As for Nigel, he explained that he has swapped the Jag for a motorbike as it’s the only way he’s “guaranteed to get from A to B”.
This means he actually hasn’t driven a car regularly “in years”.
He went on: “You still have to be really careful [around potholes], but I don’t have any distractions, I’m just concentrating on the road.
“But the amount of drivers and cyclists who are not concentrating is quite something.”
It comes as the latest RAC figures saw pothole-related breakdowns reach near-record levels in 2023.
The organisation was called out 29,377 times – an increase of more than a third on the previous year.
Meanwhile, a new report has claimed that roads are reaching “breaking point” as the pothole repair backlog spiked to £16.3 billion worth of damage.
5
5