Anthony McVay Simpson (8 July 1936 – 1 March 2016),[1] publishing under pen name Tony Warren, was an English television screenwriter and actor, best known for creating the ITV soap opera Coronation Street.

In his memoirs, Over the Airwaves, Children's Hour producer Trevor Hill explains how Warren was an excitable young teenager at rehearsals, so much so that on one occasion Violet Carson warned "If that boy doesn't shut up, I'll smack his bottom!"

During a later unexpected transmission break from London while performing at the Leeds studio, Carson played and sang to the children a dialect song called "Bowtons Yard" in which the storyteller speaks about his neighbours.

Shapley recalled: At about Crewe, after a long period of silence, Tony suddenly woke me up saying, "Olive, I've got this wonderful idea for a television series.

I can see a little back street in Salford, with a pub at one end and a shop at the other, and all the lives of the people there, just ordinary things and ..." I looked at him blearily and said "Oh.

He was played by David Dawson in the BBC drama The Road to Coronation Street in September that year.

[6] In the 1990s he wrote a series of critically acclaimed novels: The Lights of Manchester (1991), Foot of the Rainbow (1993), Behind Closed Doors (1995) and Full Steam Ahead (1998).

[9] Warren was openly gay from his early years of Coronation Street, at a time when homosexual acts were illegal.