Grace Dent of "The Guardian" claimed, upon the characters exit from the soap, that she would "miss Fred Elliott a lot", and that she'd "miss his blunt common sense, forever flawed by his quirk of proposing to every woman he set eyes on...his rants about the life-enhancing properties of steak and kidney pudding...his barely concealed enjoyment of a good gossip with Shelley, Betty, and Violet in the Rovers backroom...how sometimes Fred would be propping up the bar, saying an unremarkable line in a throwaway scene, but add a wobble of the head or a camp tap of the fag that somehow made it profound."