Coronation Street episode review, Thursday January 26 2012

Hello, I'm Kathryn Spencer, a new Coronation Street episode reviewer on this site, pleased to "meet" you!

Following award-winning Katherine Kelly's fairytale but somewhat unbelievable farewell - as the avenged and triumphant Becky flew first class to Barbados, swigging champagne with Mr Nice but Boring -  the Street picked up the pieces following lying Tracy's long awaited and deserved comeuppance at the altar. Unrepentant  the morning after, a furious-looking Tracy was in fine eye-swivelling form,  claiming she had framed Becky "to save my family", demanding "booze, lots of it, to render me unconconscious" from her family and charmingly telling innocent passerby Dev: "What you looking at? Want a fat lip?"

Meanwhile her hopes of making up with Steve looked unlikely following the latter's withering put down: "You are an insane, lying, deceitful manipulative cow ... I was an idiot to think you had a human heart in that ribcage of yours."  We get the message, Steve.Then he announced he was getting an annulment. Time to put that meringue wedding gown on ebBay, Tracy!

Elsewhere, a nice bit of comedy relief as Norris' amazing  keyboard playing skills were unmasked as a sham - he has an automatic machine - by a suspicious Rita. "He's good - too good," and Dennis. And a shellshocked Steve and  Ken Barlow - furious after he had been lied to by both his wife Deirdre and daughter Tracy over the latter's miscarriage  -  took solace in a shared bottle of whisky in a darkly humorous scene as  they bemoaned their mutually chequered love life. "I lost a woman I loved - more than oncesh,"  Ken slurred,  misty-eyed, comparing himself, somewhat dubiously, to King Henry VIII. "Good things enter your life and  shine like a bright star and then you do something wrong and they  fly back and you're right back to where you started." Thinking of a certain actress who lived on a barge and force fed you homemade soup in your kimono, Ken?

Meanwhile Peter and Carla's adulterous web of lies came one step closer to unravelling as sharp-suited rapist Frank clocked her meeting Peter on one of their clandestine dates.

And Jason, never the sharpest tool in the workbox, finally realised the truth about his mother Eileen  who had enjoyed a  illicit  night of passion under the family roof with fireman Paul while his Alzheimer's wife  had conveniently gone into care.  "As soon as his wife is in a home, he's straight in your  bed," he noted. "That's wrong and you know it." Eileen, clutching her bouquet from soppy Paul, looked too lust-sated to care.

A  good episode, this one, with light and dark and the emphasis on  some of the older characters, rather than the tedious teenage Hollyoaks style dramas which are never the Street's finest moments.

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