Spot the difference. I have a confession: I've loved Corona-Corrie. Firstly, three episodes a week is so much better. There's room for the stories to breathe, the cliffhangers are more exciting when you have that two day wait, and it doesn't feel like a chore when you have to slog your way through a massive chunk of soap opera before you can watch some proper telly. Six episodes is three hours of drama; that's like watching The Wolf of Wall Street every single week.
Secondly, Friday's socially distant episode was the most fun I've had watching this show in ages. A one-way system in the Kabin (which Gary promptly ignored, but never mind)! Takeaways only in the cafe (incidentally, Adam got a full English to takeaway; imagine what a state that's going to be in by the time he's carried it home - there'll be beans everywhere)! Ryan being forced to disinfect the Rovers! And that was just the bits of it in the plot - more fun was watching them jump through hoops to keep everyone two metres distant. We'd already seen bits of this in previous episodes, of course, but it reached a true high point with Yasmeen collapsing in agony and Imran responding by... standing on the other side of the room and pointing. Brilliant.
Of course I have the utmost sympathy for the writers and producers who've been dealt this bum hand. Having to make any kind of drama in these circumstances must be an absolute nightmare - I assume Tim and Abi are going to have an affair quite soon because they're literally the only actors in the show who can get within snogging distance. The jump from before lockdown happening to the aftermath suddenly was a bit jarring as well - I was hoping for an explanatory scene of what had been happening in the past three months, a bit like when there was the ITV strike and they filmed a special segment with Bet and Len to get everyone up to speed. Still, I'm looking forward to spotting all the details going forward, by which I mean I am moist with anticipation for Sarah-Louise's dummy being saved from a speeding car.
Hugs cost. A Dutch Angle is when a director films a shot with the camera off from the horizontal. It's commonly used to denote a descent into craziness, that something disquieting and disturbing is going on. Suri Krishnamma used a Dutch angle to introduce Nicky meeting Daniel in his hotel room so that we'd understand things are about to get weird.
On the one hand, Daniel getting a woman to wear a cardigan and douse herself in Britney Spears' Midnight Fantasy is deeply sad and indicates he is in an extremely fragile state. On the other hand, get over yourself, man. He's a single father spending £150 an hour to indulge himself with a prostitute - admittedly this is the PG-certificate version of that scenario, but still, I'm sure there are better things he could be spending that money on. Like the rent, instead of making Ken pay it, or giving it to Claudia to pay her back for that expensive residential grief counselling course he went on for months and which seems to have been a massive waste of time. Or perhaps he could splash out (not a euphemism) on one of those Japanese body pillows and then he can continue this tragic behaviour at home without having to dump his son on a relative for the afternoon.
Nigella can sleep easy. I really enjoyed Abi's first reaction to an unsupervised shop being "let's ransack it!" Who hasn't dreamed of going wild in the aisles when you're in a store without any staff? She was in there buying the food for that night's big celebration meal: pasta, pesto and tuna. No wonder Seb took so long to come round to the idea of sharing dinner with her. It was nothing to do with his emotional torment, he just had to nip to the chemist's first to stock up on milk of magnesia. Jack gobbled it down then immediately went to his room, presumably to lie down in the dark and wait for the nausea to stop. (Incidentally, should Kevin be casually using the phrase "legged it" when referring to his amputee son?)
Ready, aim, fire. Can we just kill Laura now? I mean, that's obviously what's going to happen, isn't it? She's being incredibly inconvenient to Gary's career as a budding psychopath. She's already run off and left her daughter once, so if she suddenly vanished, nobody would be that surprised. We learned that she is violent to Kelly, so if she does get killed, we won't be too sorry to see her go. And she wore that awful brown jumpsuit so frankly she's asking for it. Her disappearance would admittedly mean that Adam and Gary's feud would ramp up to the next level, but it's recently acquired a veneer of homo-eroticism so that's okay. The only problem is, with coronavirus cancelling any location shooting, how will Gary get rid of the body? We've already had corpses hidden under the factory and Gail's house. Hopefully he's got a very large trunk in that lockup.
There's a Woman About The House. Yasmeen received an unexpected prison visitor in the form of Dame Paula Wilcox, Sitcom Icon. Paula had previously been in Corrie as Ray Langton's sister, but now she turned up as another of Geoff's victims, and what a welcome sight she was. The thing about Paula Wilcox is she's so inherently likeable you're immediately on her side; no wonder Yas promptly changed her story and told Geoff to get stuffed. With any luck she's Tim's real mum and she'll stick around in the show for a while; she can move in with Yasmeen, and then they can get Richard O'Sullivan in the third bedroom, and hilarious hi-jinks can ensue.
Emma is apparently all over social media; please give me a follow on Twitter @merseytart, Em, because you're amazing.
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