Five (Six) Things We Learned In Corrie This Week

Hide your flaws.  After a monumental disaster at the hairdressers, Cathy had to resort to wearing a woolly hat to go outside.  It was simply too humiliating for her to be seen with a bouffant of such nightmarish proportions.  What was she concealing, I hear you ask?  Well, I have a picture below, but I warn you, it's quite horrific.

Oh dear God.  I'm surprised she didn't simply shave the whole lot off so she wouldn't have to endure this cataclysm any further.

Be prepared.  "Hey everybody, gather round!  I've got absolutely bulletproof evidence here on my phone that Gary Windass is a terrible person.  No, of course I don't need to check it first, I'm incredibly confident that it'll be solid.  Come on, get closer to my phone, all you friends and family members.  Even you, unknown extra lady who apparently has a deep interest in Gary being stitched up.  Closer!  These photos will be dynamite, I just know it!  I definitely don't need to have a quick glance over them, and this certainly won't be humiliating!"

*thirty seconds later*

"Bugger."

Music makes the people come together (yeah).  Edison nipped round to Ken's to apologise for the noise at his party the night before (except the party was on Friday, and he was giving his apology on what was explicitly a Monday, so...) (yes I know I need to let these time slips go).  He was surprised to find Ken was a big fan of vinyl, which seems strange, given that Ken is eighty years old and was therefore rocking out to 45s before Ed was even born.  (There was a tiny moment where Ken mentioned his collection dated back nearly forty years; presumably all his records before that went up in smoke when Val burned down the maisonettes).  They agreed to swap records, and while I can imagine Ed appreciating Schubert and Bach, it's hard to picture Ken Barlow skanking to Toots & The Maytals.

Leanne had a wild past.  It's hard to remember now she's a chirpy mother of two with a steady job, but Leanne Battersby used to be an absolute nightmare of a teenager.  She shared her experiences with Max, explaining that she wasn't always a pillar of the community, and actually she was noisy and rebellious as a child, just like him.  "What happened?" he asked, and Leanne explained that she matured and moved on.  She studiously forgot to mention that the maturity didn't happen until she was in her thirties, after the drug addiction, the prostitution, the arson, and the attempt to swindle a man with Alzheimer's out of his money.  (Incidentally, why was Max wearing his school uniform round the house when he'd been suspended?)

You give a little love and it all comes back to you.  Wethy High was gripped with Bugsy Malone fever, as Huw from EastEnders tried to mould the students into tiny musical theatre stars.  This was despite Evelyn declaring she'd ban all school shows, a perspective any parent who's sat through a three hour production of Fiddler on the Roof performed by unenthusiastic teens in fake beards can no doubt sympathise with.  I love Bugsy Malone - it was my favourite film when I was a child - and I totally understand Amy's disappointment at getting the part of Blousy Brown.  Blousy's rubbish, an absolute nothing of a character, who doesn't even get a very good song.  Tallulah gets all the good lines - and as Amy pointed out, she's gloriously slutty - and My Name Is Tallulah is great fun, even if the squeaky woman singing it in the film sounds absolutely nothing like Jodie Foster's husky voice.  Sadly, Asha didn't get the part either, with it instead going to Pastel Blue Ollerenshaw; I sincerely hope she turns up in the show, though I'm sure no actress could possibly live up to a name like that.

Of course the real tragedy is that due to the age-specific limitations of the casting there's no place in the production for Dev.  His performance of We Could've Been Anything That We Wanted To Be was wonderfully insane, even by Dev's standards, and I'd have happily watched him working his way through the Paul Williams songbook for the rest of the show.  His disTINCtive pronunciation creates a new rhythm and style that is certainly different.

I'm so tired.  I normally do this blog on a Saturday morning, but I'm late this week.  There are a couple of reasons for this - I was away for much of the week, and yesterday I was watching ANITA HARRIS! hamming up a storm in Cabaret at the theatre - but one of the main reasons was I couldn't really bring myself to watch Friday's episode until this morning.  It was all so miserable.  The joy of Corrie is the lightness, the comedy, the ordinariness of everyday life, and last week was just so depressing.  It was all way more Walford than Weatherfield.  We had people getting beaten up, we had paedophilia, we had young girls smearing bleaching agents on their faces, we had out of control teens selling drugs, we had children writing life is a rollercoaster and then you die on their artwork.  Even the "comedy" storyline of Gemma's quads was given a dark spin with the news that one baby wasn't developing.  (And this week we didn't get anything about the young mum dying of terminal cancer or the drug-addicted doctor). For me, the ITV Player should never have these kinds of parental warnings before Coronation Street:

Distressing scenes?  Violence?  No thank you.  It's becoming increasingly hard for me to care about this show as unpleasant people wander around being nasty to one another.  Can't we have storylines about Mary getting an amusingly shaped carrot and showing the neighbours, or Sally trying to redecorate her living room over Tim's objections, or Liz experimenting with new flavours for her vape, or anything that doesn't involve breaking the law and/or someone's nose?  Three hours a week of this show is getting exhausting.

That was a bit of a downer to end on, wasn't it?  Sorry about that.  Send cute puppy videos, explicit DMs, and happy thoughts to me via Twitter @merseytart.

Edited two hours later after I realised I'd left a sixth thing in here; I'd meant to get rid of that Leanne Battersby bit.  Ah well.

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