Five Things We Learned In Corrie This Week

The living should respect the dead.  Before she died, Sinead left a comprehensive list of what she wanted at her funeral with Billy.  She said it was so Daniel wouldn't be bothered but I think it's far more likely she'd spent her childhood going to awful tacky Tinker funerals and wanted to avoid her send-off going down the same route.  Her mum, auntie and Doreen Corkhill all had different ideas though as they immediately set to filling the ceremony with flowers (no flowers is literally the first point on the list) and hiring a horse and carriage for her coffin.  I dread to think how they've interpreted "I want my favourite song to be played"; since Sinead hasn't actually written the song down I have this awful feeling they'll get it very wrong and she'll be lowered into the ground to the Fast Food Rockers.  The Tinkers also went ahead and ordered a two thousand pound headstone which was unbelievably garish:

Ken quite rightly pulled one of his patented pained faces when he saw the state of that.  It's not so much "dignified memorial" more "Vegas buffet centrepiece".  This wasn't even its final form, as Kirk produced an artist's impression of the finished item:

I take it all back.  That's so tacky it's brilliant.  I'll pay for that myself.

Of course, Daniel could've stopped all this if he wasn't hiking the Pennine Way just outside Manchester.  What, that's meant to be Scotland?  Really?

It's High Security in name only.  Having accused David of stabbing him, Josh lay in his hospital bed, drowning in his pure evilness.  He's gone right over the edge, hasn't he?  Back when he was blinded you could almost feel sorry for him, but now he's practically twiddling his moustache and kicking orphans.  As a prisoner at Her Majesty's Pleasure Josh was kept under guard at all times, though the guard must've been Jeanette Krankie or something, because anyone could wander in that hospital room.  First Nicky Tilsley turned up, with his absolutely brilliant and foolproof plan which was say "I'm definitely a lawyer, honest" and then hope he could con Josh into changing his statement.  Nicky mate, just because you've grown a beard, it doesn't make you clever all of a sudden.

Then Billy turned up to try and put the fear of God into Josh, though as usual with Billy, he was a bit too nice about it.  You can't get a Church of England vicar to lay down the fire and brimstone, they're far too woolly.  You need a red-faced Catholic priest screaming about purgatory or perhaps one of those mad American evangelists.

Finally Paul swanned past the prison warder through his incredibly wily plan of putting on a shirt and holding a mop.  Master of disguise, that man.

Paul got through to Josh's compassionate side via the old favourite, brute violence and threats of intimidation. We'll skip past the bit where he said how disgusting Josh was for "taking advantage of someone who can't fight back" while he physically abused a man who was too sick to move and instead concentrate on the fact that they've finally remembered Paul and David were cellmates.  It worked, and Josh told the authorities that his actual assailant were Tez and Abe.  (Incidentally, Tez's real name, as mentioned at the court hearing, is Terry Collier; I hope Abe's real name is Bob Ferris).

Don't get involved in a love pentagon.  So Adam is going out with Sarah-Lou, who used to go out with Gary, who is going out with Maria, who used to go out with Ali.  That's already way too complicated, even before you add in that Maria and Adam used to have a thing, and that nobody seems to actually want to be in their current relationship and spends all their time casting longing looks at the person they just split up with.  It means they're all getting involved in each other's lives and shoving their nose in where it's not wanted - there's Adam up there, spying on Maria and Ali; he then ran off and grassed them up to Gary, who rushed over to spy on them himself:

This is without even including Toyah, who's been going full Deanna Troi with Ali and doing deeply caring faces at him on a regular basis.  I quite like them being pals, but have a man and woman ever been friends in this show without it slipping into infidelity?

(You may have noticed that I've subtly edited that photo.  Toyah has demonstrated her long-established eco-credentials for months by always presenting a reusable mug at Roy's so that she doesn't harm the environment.  However, this week she got her drink in a disposable cup, which I'm sure has nothing to do with a well-known coffee chain with premises in Weatherfield introducing their festive look and wanting to get it onscreen in the nation's favourite soap.  As they've not paid us for a product placement, I've used my impeccable Photoshop skills to flawlessly add a replacement).

The upshot of these shenanigans is all the handsome young men of the Street casting brooding glances at one another across the road, which normally I'd be in favour of, but it's all been going on for far too long to be homoerotic and interesting.  It doesn't help that when they get in a room together the men tend to drop their voice into a gravelly whisper that's difficult to understand; I had to put on the subtitles for Ali and Gary's confrontation in Friday's episode because their threatening tones sounded like two tectonic plates rumbling at one another for ten minutes.

Frankly I'm deeply bored of Gary being a baddie.  It's really unconvincing; when he opened the back of a van and revealed he had a trussed up pharmacist in there I actually laughed.  They tried to make Gary a scally thug when he first came into the show, and it didn't take then - Mikey North is far too nice and charming to pull it off.  He was far more convincing larking about with Maria in the Rovers than he was waving a baseball bat at a cowering victim.

See?  Isn't that much better?  Although I will say children should never be allowed in pubs.  Dogs, yes, but I don't want your mewling brats intruding on my alcoholism.  The Rovers has remained blessedly child-free over the years and I don't want it turning into a Wacky Warehouse.

Michelle remains the worst.  The Exalted Queen of the Universe returned to the Street after weeks of sunning herself in Spain.  No really: when is she leaving?  She swanned back into the hotel, insulted her boss, then took umbrage when he asked her to put out some chairs for an upcoming event; Michelle naturally tried to palm this menial task off on underlings, but was told there were none available.  I think it's telling that Michelle didn't consider a hand on her thigh a good enough reason to leave her job, but asking her to do manual labour was a step too far.  She's been in this job for three months and in that time she's pulled sickies and gone on extended holidays - what a loss to the organisation she'll be.  Still, Harvey Weinstein Ray decided to give her twenty grand to keep her mouth shut.

This meant she couldn't warn Alya - who is, lest we forget, currently dating Michelle's son - that she was about to get involved with a sexual predator.  It seems Michelle's price for selling out the sisterhood is £20,000.  She conspicuously failed to mention the pay-off to Robert when she told him about the non-disclosure agreement, presumably because as far as she's concerned that's her money and she's entitled to it and it's none of his business, like when she got a load of cash off Steve long after their divorce or when she faked a robbery to defraud the insurance company and suffered no consequences whatsoever.  Robert was too distracted with the many complex strands that come from getting a woman who isn't your live-in lover pregnant as he grassed up Amy for being friends with Tyler.

A quick moment of applause for Vicky, who looked incredibly glam in her brief appearance.  Pregnancy seems to suit her.  (Robert mentioned at one point that she's only six months gone; can you believe that?  She seems to have been pregnant since the dawn of the Cretaceous Period.  I'm pretty sure Robert still had dark hair when all this started.)

It's the happiest day of your life.  I gritted my teeth in the run up to Shona and David's wedding, as her blithe insistence that it would definitely go ahead meant that under Soap Opera Irony Laws it was doomed to fail.  Happily, David did make it to the church Bistro on time and got married in a pair of sweatpants while Diana Ross sang an incredibly camp song about homosexuality; I'd say this was disrespectful, but his last wedding was a double affair with Graham Proctor Garden Doctor marrying a checkout girl so she could get a visa so it's all relative.  It was everything you'd want from a Corrie wedding: funny, touching, a little bit odd.  Even my cynical brain went "awwww" when the junior members of the clan came out in their little lemon outfits:

And it was full of killer lines, like them noticing Gail's good at organising weddings "because she's had a lot of experience" or Audrey and Rita getting smashed on Prosecco and perving over Gary.  OK, the guest list was a little understaffed (Paul saved David's bacon and didn't even get an invite?  Sally was invited, but Kevin wasn't?) and making Bethany work behind the bar was just cruel - they couldn't have called in Ryan or Faye? - but it was all rather lovely.  By the time Shona and David snogged into the credits, I was smiling happily.  I didn't cry, obviously, because I am dead inside, but it was still very sweet.  The only dark cloud is knowing that Shona is going to vanish very soon.  I hope they don't write her out but instead have her simply disappear, like when the actress who played Claire got pregnant and they explained her absence as her working nights for nine months.  Julia Goulding is a charming, talented actress, who lights up the screen with every appearance and has wonderful chemistry with Jack P Shepherd and Helen Worth, and I don't want her to be sent off in a cloud of poison.  Let's have a bit of happiness for once.

It is the policy of Five Things not to mention the ongoing Geoff-Yasmeen storyline, partly because it is quite horrible, partly because I am not allowed to use the C-word on this blog.  Please send any complaints to @merseytart via Twitter.

---

---

All original work on Coronation Street Blog is covered by a Creative Commons License