Five Things We Learned In Corrie This Week

Aprons are so 2019.  With the Street filled with glamorous, fashion forward ladies, who knew it would be the gents who would take their looks to avant garde heights and establish a new trend?  Johnny has gone with a simple black, because black goes with everything; it gives him a look of understated elegance, and is also reminiscent of legendary 1980s trend setter Jack Duckworth.  Meanwhile in the Bistro, the boys are going with the half apron - casual, but confident:

Although obviously not as casual as that bloke with all the tattoos, who has taken the apron trend to its logical conclusion and not bothered wearing anything else:

King of the Aprons, though, is David, who has acquired a sort of luxurious version of those art smocks four year olds wear at play school:

Look at all those pockets!  Room for all your barbery tools and a packet of extra strong as well.  Though personally I'd be worried about keeping cutthroat razors that close to my more personal equipment.  The only problem with it is it's a little bit Sweeney Todd, which probably isn't the best image for a barber shop.  I'm just saying, if Roy suddenly puts a new variety of pies on the menu, DS MacKinnon should probably dust that apron for gristle.

Michelle is the new Karren Brady.  Corrie is rightly famous for its humour, and while Maureen Lipman sternly scolding customers via the garage PA system provided a few giggles, the biggest laugh came from the fragrant Ms Connor as she declared in all seriousness that the Bistro benefited from her "financial nous".  In her head, Michelle is Christine Lagarde, an accounting whiz with the a mind like a steel trap, and certainly far more important than Robert, who only cooks the food.  It's true she has saved the Bistro from ruin twice through her brilliant financial schemes of (1) faking a robbery and claiming on the insurance and (2) making puppy eyes at her ex-husband so he coughed up a load of money because he felt sorry for her.  Why, with business brains like that, she'll be running PriceWaterhouseCooper within weeks!  Robert recognised he couldn't battle with that sort of genius and gave her the keys to the Bistro.  She promptly noticed that a restaurant that can't serve food has a rather large hole in its business model and asked him to help her out; when he refused, she became outraged that he would let her down in her hour of need, because Michelle is the Glowing Centre Of The Multiverse, and we are all just tiny asteroids trapped in its orbit.  (By the way, 'Chelle, how's that wedding planning business of yours going?)

Act FAST if you recognise the signs.  I was away last week so I didn't write a Five Things (long weekend in the Lake District, lovely, thanks for asking) but I did catch up on Corrie afterwards.  However, I must've missed one, because I didn't see the episode where Gail suffered a terrible stroke and lost two thirds of her intelligence overnight.  For some reason the writers have turned Ms Potter-Tilsley-Platt-Hillman-Platt-McIntyre-LesDennis into a barely sentient ball of mush.  I'm not sure why; yes, she's been pretty bad at picking husbands of late, but that doesn't mean she's not the full canteen of cutlery.  She clattered around the barber's in Monday's episode, stroking an iPad like it was a kitten and holding a broom like she'd never seen one before in her life.  At one point she sat on the sofa brushing Cerberus with David's barbering tools like the Lennie in an am dram Of Mice and Men.  

Gail deserves better than this.  She's been a stalwart of the show for forty years.  Watch Classic Corrie on ITV3 and you'll see she's clever, funny, resourceful; she's running her own business, dealing with a domineering Ivy, juggling her family with work.  She's great.  More of that Gail, please, rather than this dullard being bullied by her children.

You don't always get what you want.  Sometimes I realise that the Corrie I want to watch is not necessarily the Corrie everyone else wants to watch.  The show spent this week setting up suspects for the upcoming roof collapse, leading to a lot of dramatic skulking in shadows and surreptitious overhearing of important facts.  It was drama, it was tension, and all I could think was, "never mind that, tell me more about Mary's one woman show!!!"  I don't want a week of people being dragged out of rubble.  I want Wednesday's double episode to be a single camera focused on Mary as she wows us all with tales from her fantastic life in front of a packed crowd at the Manchester Opera House.  I want a lengthy monologue about her mother and scandalous tales from her camper van adventures.  Now that's entertainment.

There's no escape from Brexit.  I tuned into Corrie to escape this kind of thing, Sarah-Lou.  Don't go shoving awful reminders of real life into my telly.  I wonder if the producers have planned for a No Deal and have filmed emergency scenes accordingly?  Something like those incredibly naturalistic moments they do on EastEnders now and then, when they hastily film a couple of Cockneys going "Gorblimey, can you believe Prince has died, luvaduck?" and wedge it into the start of the show.  After all, it's going to be a bit galling if we're all fighting in a giant thunderdome outside Dudley for the last remaining toilet roll in the United Kingdom and everyone on the show is happily skipping to Dev's for aubergines and knocking back prescription medicines with gay abandon.

If you've got wibbly-wobbly fingers like David and Sarah-Lou, please don't send pictures of them to @merseytart on Twitter, because he might reply with a picture of his double jointed elbow and you'll end up feeling quite ill.

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