Five Things We Learned In Corrie This Week

Kelly's going on a Summer holiday.  It's quite some feat that in a show featuring an actual vicar Summer is by far the most saintly resident of Weatherfield.  She drifts round the Street on a cloud of piety, mending broken vases here, disapproving of raucous behaviour there, and this week, taking in waif and stray Kelly even though she humiliated one of Summer's best friends literally a few days ago.  Personally I would consider it a betrayal of the sisterhood to immediately offer an olive branch to Kelly while Asha is getting harassed and tormented on a daily basis but that's why I'm a miserable middle aged man and not a glowing example of humanity like Summer.  Even Billy looked a bit cowed by her purity, and let me remind you, he has God on his speed dial.  Unless this all a brilliant subterfuge by Summer and once she's got Kelly in the flat she's going to poison all her meals and put her hand in a bowl of water while she sleeps so she wets the bed. 

Cover your tracks.  Of course the reason Kelly was on her own in the first place was because Gary once again decided to interfere in her life.  I get it, Gary, you've been handing over enormous amounts of cash for Oakhill's fees and Laura's been spending them on herself; that must really annoy you.  But the only sensible thing to do is to write it off and back away.  What you definitely don't do is invite the ex-wife of the man you murdered round to your lock up, make veiled threats, and hint that you'd been chatting to Rick last week even though he's actually buried in the Delamere Forest.  How has Gary managed to go a whole year without being discovered as a killer when he is so terrible at it?  He spends all his time running around chatting to people who are related to Rick, or who worked for him, or his old clients.  If he's not careful, Weatherfield Police will take him into questioning; not for the murder of course, because they're absolutely useless, but someone will finally notice that this man in his thirties is spending an awful lot of his time loitering round a schoolgirl for no apparent reason. 

Evelyn is not a fan of smut.  Evelyn dismissed the venerable Carry On series of sex comedies as "boring", though in fairness she did it while pouring scorn on one of Geoff's tired innuendos so it may be that she simply wanted to kick him where it hurt.  Dismissing the Carry On films seems rather ungrateful, because if they didn't have the rights to them, ITV3 would have nothing to show on Bank Holidays.  I wonder what possible reason Maureen Lipman could have for laying into the Carry On franchise?

Oh yeah.  That.

The Barlows are here to stay.  Daniel's back!  And so, unfortunately, is that beard, though at least he's had it trimmed.  It's still patchy and unnecessary though, the kind of facial hair fourteen year olds grow so they'll get served in off licences.  Thankfully the new Daniel seems to be less of an emotional wreck than the one who left so hopefully we'll have no more tearful sessions in front of the laptop staring at Sinead's videos for a while.  He returned in time to watch Ken back out of the deal to sell number one to Tracy, a staggeringly selfish act even by Ken's standards.  Poor Trace has already put up her pictures and made plans to redecorate and now he's here stamping all over it.  What are they meant to do now, return to the flat above the cab office?  Good luck with that.  Liz has been living there on her own for a month now; I bet it's like a Turkish brothel in there, all animal print and wafting silk and the scent of lubricant hanging in the air.

The Curse of Number Six strikes again.  In its thirty years on the show, number six has had only a handful of owners, and a surprisingly large proportion of them have met nasty ends.  Des Barnes cracked his skull open in the front room, Charlie Stubbs got a statuette in the face, Tommy Harris was murdered by his daughter, who then committed suicide in the front room by eating a lot of sugar (she was a diabetic; her guilt-ridden sobbing over a bag of Silver Spoon was perhaps the most unintentionally hilarious death in the history of the show).  And now there's another horrible act of physical violence to add to the list as Yasmeen finally snapped and rammed a wine bottle into Geoff's throat.  I'm torn over the climax to Friday's episode.  On the one hand, it's about time Geoff got his comeuppance, and making it as grisly and painful as possible seems fair.  The shame of it was that he didn't fall into the chicken coop and end up being eaten by the hens.

On the other hand, this is a horrible way to end the storyline.  Seeing an intelligent, confident woman like Yasmeen get broken down and crushed over the past few months has been heartbreaking.  The happiest possible ending would have been for her to flee the house, perhaps running out to Cathy or Sally, and spilling everything that had happened.  An escape.  The producers have continually justified this storyline as a kind of Public Information Film, an "it could happen to you" sort of thing; wouldn't it have been a better, more hopeful message to have her rediscover her own inner strength and resolve?  Instead we've got another murder, and another woman in the Street getting locked up, and another campaign to have her released.  Maybe she should ask Moira in the medical centre for some advice on how to avoid prison, as Louiza Patikas had almost this exact storyline as Helen on The Archers.  It's all gone melodramatic and nowhere near as interesting.  I want the old Yasmeen back, fun and sparky and clever.

See?  Isn't that so much nicer?

Following on from Maria's idea to have a flashmob at her wedding, the author would like it to be known that if he ever attends an event and a bunch of strangers suddenly burst into Good Morning Starshine and start dancing in the aisles, he will walk out and never come back.  Convince me I'm wrong on Twitter @merseytart.

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