Five Things We Learned In Corrie This Week

The kids aren't alright.  This week we got a glimpse into the heady world of our nation's youth, and dear God it was dull.  All those well-scrubbed teens wandering around obsessing over the tiniest infractions and having the most boring party outside of one of Gail's wedding receptions.  Oh no!  Pastel-Blue Ollerenshaw has invited the rest of the musical theatre kids!  It'll be like the last days of Sodom! The writers did their best to try and hint at debauchery - teens snogging in the Bailey's yard!  Playlists! A single can of cider! - but it wasn't exactly Skins, was it?  Even when the police arrived it was a gentle pat on the head and everyone was sent on their way.  When teenagers have used a double bed but the only evidence of their trespass is a missing Tommy Orpington picture I don't think we have a need to alert social services.

The exception, of course, is poor Asha's striptease ending up all over WhatsApp.  A few months ago, Asha refused to even wear a t-shirt because she had such a low body image, and now she's taking her top off for a boy she barely knows; that therapist she's always visiting may have slightly overstepped the mark.  It would've been nice to see a few months of Asha just being an ordinary teenage girl again, rather than lurching into another plotline torn from the NSPCC's annual report, but I suppose Tanisha Gorey's such a great young actress they wanted to use her as much as possible.  I hope everyone involved gets a visit from the authorities for disseminating child pornography, particularly Corey, because he's clearly a forty-six year old man masquerading as a schoolboy to groom young girls and should be locked up.  It made me very glad that the internet and digital cameras didn't exist when I was young.  I'd hate for evidence of my wild teenage years to be spread all over the school, and by "wild teenage years", I mean I once had a glass of Taboo round my friend Sanjay's house and then I had to go home and have a lie down.  Such a rebel.

Three heads are better than one.  Speaking of the Alahan children, Aadi's not only back, he's got an entirely new face!  This is the third one he's had in his fourteen or fifteen years on earth (though he was born in 2006, he actually celebrated his tenth birthday in 2015, and went to high school the year after).  It's not quite Peter Barlow levels of head changing - more people have played Peter Barlow than Hamlet - but it's always fun when this sort of thing happens.  Personally I was hoping that when Aadi regenerated he'd become a woman, but the fans can be very conservative about this sort of thing, so maybe they're saving that for when Joseph changes in about 2025.  It wasn't really a surprise that there was a new actor - the old Aadi has been in about four episodes over the past couple of years, and has had fewer lines than Rover.  The new Aadi is a bit shorter than the old one but he seems to be a bit more devilish, robbing a bottle of vodka from the shop and then necking the whole thing at the party.  Unsurprisingly, he ended up vomiting over much of the Street, which must've been an interesting first day on set for Adam Hussain.  "Here's your dad, here's your sister, now bend over the sink making retching noises would you love?"   Hopefully Aadi will get some actual plotlines now, though as with Asha above, I'd like them to be nice ones about him doing his exams or learning the oboe or something, rather than, I don't know, getting Summer pregnant or stealing the shop van and crashing it off a viaduct.

Curses!  Foiled again!  Once again, can we take a moment to look at the astonishing facilities that Stillwaters has at its disposal, with a full fencing kit including electronic scoring?  Now the Tokyo Olympics have been cancelled they could hold the fencing events there instead.  I've no idea why Ken volunteered to fight Charles - leaving aside the fact that his opponent was apparently a champion in the Seventies, Ken is a man in his eighties whose only exercise in the past twenty years has been ruffling the bedsheets of various well-upholstered middle-aged ladies.  The duel to the death was therefore a bit of a damp squib.  I was hoping it would end up like the battle in Die Another Day, with Ken and Charles running all over the building slashing paintings and scaring old ladies, and Claudia being the Madonna character and standing at the side making penis jokes, but instead Ken got his backside whupped pretty quickly.

The distraction did mean Norris finally got his hands on the fabled Stillwaters Rule Book.  Even though it turned out Charles had made half of them up, that was still an impressive tome, running to a couple of hundred pages; I wonder if only the first few pages were actual rules, and the rest was Ken's novel, which Charles kept at hand whenever he wanted a laugh. 

Please only leave five star reviews.  I really like Jenny turning the Rovers into an Air B&B; it's a logical way to use up those empty rooms at the pub, now there's only a couple living there, and it introduces new characters and new situations for drama and comedy.  The newest guest was a man called Scott (what a stupid name) who turned up and immediately got Liz and Sean frothing at the gusset.  Let's just say it was lucky Liz was wearing a trouser suit.  He also proved a hit with Jenny and Eileen, though I'm not sure why, because he seems to be carved out of the same block of wood as Robert - a vaguely handsome white man with a nice haircut.  Still, when his contemporaries are Brian and Roy Cropper I suppose Liz has to settle for what she can get.  The only person who didn't like him was Johnny, who took one look and immediately turned into an Eagle Eye Action Man:

I wish I knew how to make gifs from the ITV Hub because Johnny hanging out in the hall with his eyes pingponging about was absolutely hilarious.  He tried to drag Jenny Bradley off to France to escape Scott, but he failed, so we're left debating what their nefarious link is.  Maybe he's another secret love child.  Maybe he's a former lover.  Maybe he's the doctor who knows that Johnny doesn't really have MS, what with him not having exhibited any symptoms whatsoever for about four years.  I don't think his brilliant scheme of simply going into a different room every time Scott wanders by will last long.  I hope not anyway; if they drag it out too long we could run out of episodes before we find out and we'll never know.

Aloe vera is effective for handcuff burns.  Arthur reckoned he discovered how to overcome wrist chafing after four days up a tree to protest the second runway at Manchester Airport, but I can't be the only one who suspected he'd learned it in far less salubrious circumstances.  Long weekend in Berlin was it, Art?  Evelyn seemed to be taken with his rebellious side, which was more than Imran was with Toyah's radical politics.  I think they're trying to go for an odd-couple thing with Imran and Toyah - he's a buttoned up solicitor!  She's a hippy leftie!  When they got together it was moider! - but Imran has quite consistently rebelled against convention ever since he arrived so it's hard to get on board with.  He slept with both Toyah and her sister at the same time, for heaven's sake.  It doesn't look like Toyah will have any time for protesting as she used her family connections to get a job in the sales office at Underworld.  There are now more people working in telesales in that factory than in the call centre at an ambulance-chasing solicitor; one day they'll have to actually fulfil all these orders, and then they'll regret making the break area bigger than the bit of the factory with the actual sewing machines in it.

If someone sends you naked webcam videos of the author on the internet, please let him know via Twitter @merseytart.  Oh, and they're definitely not him.  Honest.

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