For the love of God, vaccinate your kids. I am writing this barely three miles from the people in quarantine for coronavirus so perhaps I'm a bit oversensitive right now but everyone on the Street seemed very casual about infecting one another with measles. The minute they discovered there was an infectious disease on the loose everyone should've been locked in a room somewhere to wait for it all to blow over. Beth went straight home from Bertie's sick bed to her unvaccinated partner, so presumably Kirk is at death's door right now, while Audrey went round to see Maria when she heard she was ill and she's an elderly and vulnerable woman. Close the doors and windows and sit in front of the telly until you're disease free.
Sadly this meant Maria lost her baby; she graciously told Gary he didn't have to stay with her any more now there wasn't a child. You've got it the wrong way round Maria - now you're not tied to him, run away as fast as you can. Over the course of your relationship Gary has constantly lied to you and put you in danger. I know you've just moved into that posh Victoria Court flat but come on girl, you can do so much better.
The set designers are just taking the mickey now. Look at the office in Underworld. LOOK AT IT. That's not a backstreet knicker factory, that's a trendy Hoxton design agency, and it should be filled with people with tiny beards and Brompton bikes talking about synergy. It's especially jarring when you see out through the doors and the regular miserable old industrial space is out there. Let's take a look at it from the other angle, shall we?
They've got ARMCHAIRS in there! Is there even any space for sewing machines any more? I wonder how the factory girls feel about Nicky and Sarah-Lou larking about in their lavishly appointed colour co-ordinated space while they're sitting on plastic stools next to a kettle in their break area. Remember when Mike Baldwin used to run the factory out of a corner cube painted the colour of a decommissioned battleship? He had enough space for a desk and a filing cabinet with a bottle of Scotch in it and that was it. I think the production designers may have let their imagination run away with them, or perhaps they got their programmes mixed up and thought this set was destined for Hollyoaks.
Elsewhere on the Street they finally replaced Chesney's front door - which was installed in the 1970s and last repainted by Bert Tilsley - but, in a move designed to specifically annoy me, they replaced it with something even worse. When I wrote last week that I hoped the fire would give them the excuse to install a new entrance, I was envisaging something in PVC with a multiple locking system, not a saloon door pulled out of a skip. Still, I suppose Ches and Gemma have more important things to worry about, like their faces being altered to make them look beautiful.
I know Gemma has body image problems following the birth of the quads but it's really hard to be that bothered about it. Everyone gets airbrushed these days - some Hollywood actors in magazines are just a blurry white blob with a pair of blue dots where the eyes should be. If Freshco were paying me sixty grand I'd let them Photoshop me to look like one of the Ood.
Like mother, like daughter. Tracy Barlow turned 43 last week and so now she needs reading glasses. I was pleased to see that she'd chosen frames with enormous lenses as an homage to Deirdre's legendary 80s sexy specs. The Hunt women have a style they know works. Tracy needed them because she was planning on attending Ken and Claudia's Book Group, and she was working her way through The Notebook. I wouldn't have put Ken down as a Nicholas Sparks reader. I bet he's really rude and patronising about it and the rest of the group sit around looking uncomfortable because they actually quite enjoyed it but they don't want to admit it now Weatherfield's version of Mark Lawson has called it low-brow nonsense.
It was Endangered Animal Day at Bessie Street School. I am so glad I grew up in an era where you didn't dress up for school. My mum would've had a heart attack if she'd had to spend her week sewing together Beau Brummel pantaloons for Regency Day. I'd have been Harry Potter for World Book Day every year - just in my school uniform and glasses with a zig zag Sharpie'd on my forehead. The parents of Coronation Street are far more accommodating though, with a measles-ridden Maria still managing to find time to put together a penguin suit for Liam.
Elsewhere Ruby was a lion and Hope was a crocodile. They should really have dressed Hope as something more malevolent and evil, like a honey badger; something entirely lacking common decency. Or not let her dress up at all, as punishment for flooding the school toilets, but apparently her actions never have any consequences. And they wonder why she's a nightmare.
Poor Joseph got the short straw and was dressed as a plastic bag. Bless him. Fortunately Billy and Paul arrived to save the day:
They said it was an orangutan costume but to me it looks more like one of Elsie Tanner's old fur-trimmed overcoats. I bet they fished that out the back of the wardrobe department and it still smells of Estee Lauder and brandy.
The modern slavery storyline is back. You thought Alina Pop had it bad, holed up in the back of a salon and forced to do French tips all day? That's nothing compared to Katie McGlynn, whose character died three months ago and yet she's still kept in a cupboard at ITV Studios so they can wheel her out for video messages and hallucinations. If you looked very closely at her surprise reappearance in Friday's episode her blinks spelled out Contact Amnesty International in morse code.
It wasn't really Sinead of course, but Bethany wearing Sinead's dressing gown after she got caught in the fastest rainstorm ever to hit the Street. One minute it was sunshine, the next a monsoon had struck Weatherfield. Perhaps it was the Gods expressing their displeasure at Bethany's continued dogged pursuit of a grieving widower with a small and very sick baby. Even Sarah-Lou was forced to ask her fiance Adam if he thought her daughter was getting too close to his uncle who is actually younger than him. The relationships on this Street are very confusing.
The author has discovered a new drinking game: take a shot every time it looks like Tim, Sally or Abi are going to break character and start giggling. It's tremendous fun, though it did mean @merseytart was absolutely hammered by nine o'clock on Friday.
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