Coronation Street Weekly Update, March 7th 2011

Hello again update readers. I’ll start with an apology. I’m sorry if the update this week isn’t of its best but I can only work the material that I’ve been given and frankly Corrie’s been a bit rubbish this week. Hopefully it’s only a temporary slump and the stories will improve in the near future.

Find out more about the Coronation Street Weekly Updates and why they’ve been written for th’internet since 1995 at http://www.corrieweeklyupdates.btinternet.co.uk/

Over at Underworld, the deal with fishy Frank is almost done. All that remains is for him to see a sample of the product that Julie has run up and the final price to be agreed. Carla of course entrusts this task to Maria with her extensive knowledge of the rag trade! (To be fair this story has come about because of a hasty rewrite after Kym Marsh, who plays Michelle Connor, took early maternity leave, though even with Michelle it would have been a pretty poor and needlessly sensational story). Carla gives Maria the afternoon off so that she can pimp herself up with clothes and make up and what have you ready to conduct in depth contract negotiations round at Frank’s flat. See, it’s just rubbish, makes no real sense and is incredibly demeaning, and today is International Women’s Day too! To cut an awful story short, Frank tries it on, pushes too far and Maria flees the flat crying attempted rape.

The following day at the factory, Maria is very quiet, while everyone else is over the moon that their jobs are safe after Frank has rung to accept the contract. When he eventually arrives looking like butter wouldn’t melt, he gets Maria alone and after she accuses him of attempted rape, apologises for ‘misreading the signals’. This despite the fact one of the signals was ‘I’m not interested, I have a boyfriend’. Maria eventually comes clean to Carla who is very supportive and wants to bring in the police but with no evidence, his word against hers, they decide not to. Carla confronts Frank who says that he thought that Maria had tarted herself up for him and he felt flattered by the attention. Exactly what Carla planned of course and so she’s left feeling somewhat guilty about things.

David is a young man in complete and utter love/lust and Audrey convinces Gail that they should be more accepting of David’s fiancée and they’re even planning on opening a tin of salmon for her but Gail’s face takes a bit of a downturn when David announces that the wedding will be in three weeks’ time. Things get even worse when his betrothed turns up and it transpires that Candy is just a stage name and David’s intended is actually Becky’s sister, Kylie. She announces that she’s going to train as a beauty therapist and work in David’s salon but her gold digging gets a bit of a setback when she finds out that David has overstated his position somewhat and that Audrey still owns the salon. But for how much longer?

After Mrs Hargreaves dies under a dryer, Audrey, Claudia, Rita Emily and Marc’s thoughts turn to their own mortality and the state of their wills. Marc makes a point about inheritance tax thresholds and Audrey decides that she should hand over the salon to David now to avoid saddling her family with a heavy tax burden. If that’s the case, then the salon must have been an absolute gold mine over the past 12 years as Alf left her in a financial mess when he died, with just the salon and the house to her name.

Things have finally started happening with the Tina, Graeme, Xin story but that’s not necessarily a good thing. Xin is apparently Tina’s best friend in the whole world after they met working at the pound shop. As such a close friend you’d have thought she’d have been there to offer support when Tina’s dad died but she just seems to have been parachuted into the role in a very contrived way. Still unable to find a job as a psychiatric nurse, Xin is facing deportation. Quick to grasp the chance of a bit of easy cash, Kylie offers her fiancé’s hand in marriage for £2000. Xin tells Tina who undercuts Kylie and offers Graeme’s hand for nothing. She could at least have asked him first and he only agrees to it after some pressure from Tina. She really does seem to have completely taken his spark away.

It’s Norris’s 71st birthday, which coincides with the planned reopening of the newsagent’s. Mary had tried to book Bill Oddie to perform the ceremony but they said he wasn’t available and offered her Keith Chegwin instead. Given that Rita almost died in there, she is understandably a bit worried about the occasion but Mary and Norris are so excited that they ride roughshod over her feelings. At the grand reopening, the sheets are pulled back to reveal not The Kabin, but Norris’s News! He is over the moon at the surprise that Mary has arranged for him but Rita is mortified. It takes Emily to point out to Norris that after losing everything in the tram crash, The Kabin is Rita’s remaining link to the past.

Elsewhere: Gary has set himself up in business as ‘a man with a van’ but unfortunately the van is Chesney’s and he won’t let him borrow it; Becky was being wound up by Tracy and a bad day was made worse when Kylie made her reappearance; Janice moves in with Julie; and Sian returns from holiday, having had a great time bonding with her mother. So much so that she now seems uninterested in Sophie.

And that’s it for this week.

This week’s writers were: Jayne Hollinson, Carmel Morgan, John Kerr, Chris Fewtrell and Julie Jones.