The Week In Classic Corrie

MONDAY - Episodes originally broadcast 12th and 15th July 1996

Kevin was still disgusted at the idea of Sally working for a living (I'd like to see him try to make Abi into a little woman) and came up with a sneaky ploy to keep her at home: he'd buy into the garage after all.  However, because of the state of the equipment, he told Don he'd only become a partner if he put in an extra ten grand.  Don went to the bank but, rather than getting the extra money, they demanded he repay the original loan.  He told Kevin he couldn't raise the cash and so he backed out of the partnership - but that made Kev worry he was going to lose his job altogether.  At Andy's birthday party, Maxine and Tony flirted, and she confessed she'd always fancied him.  They slept together but Maxine wanted to hide it from Fiona.  The Malletts got an unexpected delivery: a conservatory.  Gary was convinced Judy had gone mad with the catalogue but it turned out Joyce had won it.  It was still a fat load of good for people who live in a two up two down.  Audrey was still a little put out that they were going to name a manky back street after Alf, though she was slightly placated by him telling her the street would be named Alfred Roberts Place.  The residents were less amused.

TUESDAY - Episodes originally broadcast 17th and 19th July 1996

Gary made the best of the conservatory situation and decided to squeeze it in the yard.  Roy turned up and told him that it'd be damp and there'd be no sunshine, so he decided to flog it instead.  Des hinted to Derek and Mavis that he might buy it, and they panicked they'd lose all the light in their garden.  Don hit a new low, taking Nicky on at the garage as a replacement for Tony, and suggesting that he buy into the business.  Nicky was excited by the idea but Martin and Gail were horrified; Kevin told him it was a terrible business and Martin exploded at Don.  He pointed out Nicky couldn't get the money until he was 18 anyway.  With no cash coming in the receivers arrived, made Kev redundant and closed the garage.  Don got roaring drunk and ended up being kicked out of the Rovers after he took a swing at Mike.  Alec went to Jack with the idea of putting on a talent night at the pub so he could wheel out some of his old turns; Jack agreed when he realised he'd be able to break out his white suit and resurrect his singing career.  I just want to see more of the elderly woman who auditioned in Alec's flat by tearing paper dolls while tapdancing.  And there was a new arrival behind the bar: leather-clad saucepot Samantha Failsworth.

WEDNESDAY - Episodes originally broadcast 22nd and 24th July 1996

Jim got his inheritance from his mother's death, and decided to make Liz an offer to buy the house.  She refused because she didn't want him to get one over her.  She also had to worry about Steve, who'd got in a fight at the prison and ended up with a cracked rib.  Tricia went to Des for help - it turned out she was pregnant with Terry's baby and she needed to find him.  He drove her to Sheffield but all they found was his angry ex-girlfriend.  The Platts went on holiday and agreed to leave Nicky behind now he was all grown up, though Audrey still fussed as she kept an eye on him.  Mavis and Derek bought the conservatory to stop Des from getting it and Gary helped them erect it in their garden.  Sadly in the process his prize turnip was crushed.  Maxine and Tony went public with their relationship, which angered Fiona, though he begged Fi not to fire her.

THURSDAY - Episodes originally broadcast 26th and 29th July 1996

Nicky was sick of Audrey popping round and checking up on him and they ended up arguing.  He decided to make his own fortune, packing a bag and leaving number 8 forever.  Audrey and Alf were annoyed to realise he'd disappeared and they'd have to clear up after him - then they started to wonder where he'd vanished to.  Alec wheeled out his talent at the Rovers: terrible singers, a woman who tore a Yellow Pages in half, and a camp mother-daughter psychic team.  Maxine popped up to sing Shout, with Tracy Shaw demonstrating all the singing talent that powered her cover of Happenin' All Over Again to number 46 in the charts.  Tricia interrupted the night to tell Vera about the baby, but she didn't believe her, so Tricia said she'd get an abortion.  Jack found out about the baby from Tricia, and became furious that he'd have clear up after his boy again.

FRIDAY - Episodes originally broadcast 31st July and 2nd August 1996

Alf and Audrey were worried about the missing Nicky.  They called Martin and he returned from Prestatyn, furious that they waited four days before calling him.  He went searching for him across the city while Gail came back and called the police.  Don stuck his nose in and told the police Martin wasn't Nicky's real dad and they'd had a lot of family problems because he's horrible.  Gail broke down, worried she'd never see Nicky again, though personally I'd let him stay missing because he's always been hopeless.  Kevin and Andy got jobs; Kev at the same exhaust place as Tony, and Andy at Firman's, which meant he'd be working under his girlfriend Anne.  Not like that.  Vera asked around to try and find out if Terry and Tricia really had been at it.  She didn't want to lose another grandchild the way she'd lost Tommy (and Paul Clayton for that matter) but Jack didn't want to get involved because he knew they'd end up lumbered.  He offered to pay for Tricia to have an abortion but didn't tell Vera; she only found out when she went round to see Tricia and they argued, with her telling Vera she was going to have the baby.  Unfortunately, Jamie overheard them, and realised he could have a little brother on the way...

The most exciting part of this week's episodes for @merseytart was Audrey looking at a map of Weatherfield that bore absolutely no relation to how the area looks today.  He's exciting like that.

Classic Corrie is on ITV3 weekdays from 14:50 and is also on the ITV Hub.

---

---

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

Preview of tonight's Coronation Street - Mon 31 Aug

Monday August 31st

JOHNNY’S PAST IS BACK TO HAUNT HIM  Scott and a nervous Johnny discuss the crime they committed over 40 years ago.  Jenny invites Scott to stay for dinner.  Over dinner, Scott regales Jenny with tales of his and Johnny’s younger days.  Jenny’s highly amused whilst Johnny squirms.

WILL ADAM DISCOVER DANIEL’S SECRET In a panic, Daniel calls at the office and asks Adam to get himself down to the police station as his friend Nicky was involved in a fracas at the bistro and needs representation. Adam calls at the police station only to discover Nicky was released without charge,  will he find out the truth about who she really is? Nicky is touched when Daniel explains that she helps with his grief.  

TEMPERATURES RISE AT SPEED DAAL Alya’s horrified when Geoff turns up for work at Speed Daal.  Alya orders him to get out but Geoff points out that legally he has every right to be there and she’d better get used to it. When Geoff reveals that he’s applied for an alcohol licence, Alya’s furious and points out that he needs Yasmeen’s permission too.  

ELSEWHERE Having returned from their meeting, Abi thanks Peter for his support.  Debbie watches from a distance, her suspicions heightened. As Sean closes down the missing persons website, Billy spots something.  

__

Glenda Young

Author of gritty, family saga novels with Headline

Twitter: @Flaming_Nora

Facebook: GlendaYoungAuthor

Fancy writing a guest blog post for us? All details here!  

Like to receive Corrie weekly updates by email? Subscribe here

Read more Corrie news, interviews, gossip and spoilers  

Follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook

---

---

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

Coronation Street: Battle of the Ladies

Guest blog post from David ‘retrohen’ Henningham who writes fun nostalgia at www.retro-hen.com 

Would you like to write a guest blog post for us? All details here.

David would like to share one of his blogs post he wrote a while back about Coronation Street.

The blog looks at a 3-way verbal battle between Bet Lynch, Elsie Tanner, and Hilda Ogden.

You can read it all here

Glenda Young

Author of gritty, family saga novels with Headline

Twitter: @Flaming_Nora

Facebook: GlendaYoungAuthor

Fancy writing a guest blog post for us? All details here!  

Like to receive Corrie weekly updates by email? Subscribe here

Read more Corrie news, interviews, gossip and spoilers  

Follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook

---

---

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

Coronation Street Episode Review Friday 28 August 2020

Much of tonight centred around Jenny and Johnny who is sleeping in the spare room and to whom Jenny is not talking.  She heads off to Audrey's for a trim and on emerging her hair looks just the same as above, although Scott compliments her on her new look and also gives her some marital advice reckoning that Johnny is a good 'un - and that he should be given a second chance.  Once home she tries to get Johnny to talk - but getting him to open up is more difficult than most oysters.  He obviously has a secret but when he might explain it to her the beer delivery turns up (odd seeing that they are not selling much at present) - Jenny goes to see to check it off.  Scott visits the Rovers later and he chats with Jenny and Johnny.  Scott is all sweetness and light and suggests he and Johnny have a chat in the back room.

Abi has promised to attend a meeting with Peter but Deb - Kev's sister insists on cooking lunch and wants to get to know Abi.  Deb does the "are you good enough for my big brother?" and gets the answer (above) that Abi and Kev don't do complicated!  Except that Abi's phone keeps going off as Peter is obviously trying to track her down.  Abi goes for a walk and hopefully makes the meeting.

Yasmeen is recovering - the operation has gone well and it is clear to Alya that she sounds like her old self.  Geoff has his comeuppance coming.  When their paths cross later Alya spells it out for Geoff - he will have nothing and no-one left in his life (above).  This seems to weigh on Geoff's mind as when the vacuum cleaner annoys him (has he cleaned up all those red crosses yet?) he gives it a right going over.  Breaking inanimate objects rarely achieves very much!

Billy is not sleeping well as he is worrying about Todd.  Stupid vicar - do you think Todd has even given you a second thought?  Sean at least has an excuse - he is trying to get information for the absent Eileen.  Sean has been told about a website where they have information on bodies of unidentified people - whilst they are chatting (with added Dirk in the background above) a new body has been reported found in the canal.  No, of course it is not Todd - he will be living the high life somewhere having a face transplant.

Daniel is chasing the will o' the wisp - but Nicky is not taking his calls.  We see Daniel at work in the solicitors' office (Tracy is Bertie sitting).  When Adam comes in Daniel tries to get a half day, fails and is sent to the Bistro to fetch a takeaway so they can work over lunch.  Whilst waiting for pulled pork and mash (I really can't think of anything less appetising) Nicky comes in to find out why her £500 date 'Baz' is keeping her waiting.  Daniel offers to double it - before he knows how much it is and Baz tells her to get lost.  Raymundo asks them to take the argument outside as the Bistro has just been refitted!  Nicky seems most concerned about her feet (above).  Baz is not paying - he thought he had sophisticated arm candy and calls her a dirty scrubber.  For reasons which are unclear a police car comes around the corner as she threatens Baz with her high heel shoes.  Nicky tells Daniel to get lost for Bertie's sake.

Scott and Johnny are chatting.  It appears that Scott knows about Johnny's troubles in recent years.  Scott reckons that Johnny's first thoughts on seeing Scott was "How the hell did that lunatic hunt me down?."  So, something happened - but given what we know of Johnny's history he cannot have been that difficult to hunt down.  No doubt all will be revealed on Monday.  He claims (above) that he has no idea what Scott wants - but he is looking pretty worried about it all.

Tonight was clearly the first half with the second half following on next week on Monday, although earlier on in the virus period I was reviewing second half episodes. Which means at some point we have had an odd episode.  Perhaps the BGT week of 5 episodes has knocked it out of kilter so to get back on track we are having a full hour on Friday 11 September when I will be back on duty.

Written by Mark Burt and directed by Audrey Cooke.

Kosmo
@Kosmo100

---

---

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

Five Things We Learned In Corrie This Week

When is bins?  Look, make your mind up, residents of Coronation and Mawdsley Streets.  Is it brown bin day or green bin day or even blue day?  You can't just leave them all out, clogging up the ginnel and making a mess.  And what is going in those bins?  Blue seems to be rubbish, but that brown bin has a black bag next to it (which the bin men will ignore, but never mind, the foxes will have ripped it apart before they get there anyway).  So why is there only one blue bin then?  Are you recycling or not?  Where is your glass and paper going?  SO MANY QUESTIONS.

Yes, I am avoiding writing about Abi and Peter and the morphine.  Was Peter being sponsored by the word "meeting" this week?  It was in every other line of dialogue, when he wasn't doing impressions of Churchill the dog and giving Carla the runaround.  Come to a meeting, join me at a meeting, the meetings are great, the meetings definitely aren't a cult, the meetings are wonderful, all hail the meetings, MEETINGS.  And after all that I'm not even sure Abi bothered going.

It's Cherry's Jubilee.  I mean, if you name your daughter Cherry, what do you expect she'll turn out to do for a living - investment banker?  I really want to know what her rates were.  Nicky charged £150 an hour, but that was for the full cardigan and perfume experience.  Cherry's just nodding unenthusiastically while someone blathers on about their dull life; I know Jeremy Vine gets paid a lot of money to do that on Channel 5 but I imagine in real life it's a lot less lucrative.  Whatever it was, it wasn't enough for her to feign interest in Daniel wanging on about Bertie's walk to the park for an hour.  I say an hour; they didn't tell us how long the two of them had been Skyping, and I can fully believe it was three minutes and she was already nodding off.

Unfortunately this storyline took a turn in the closing minutes of Friday's episode.  Nicky had turned up in the Bistro with a client at the same time as Daniel - as Harry Hill would say, what are the chances of that happening - and he led some sort of creepy bidding war to try and get her to come round to his flat and eat his pulled pork (not a euphemism).  When the police stopped to intervene in what was a perfectly innocuous barney, Nicky sent him away, not wanting to get him involved and shouting "think of Bertie!".  Yes, it seems Nicky is that most tired of cliches, the Hooker With A Heart Of Gold, and rather than putting Daniel at a distance because he's very close to wearing her skin as a dress, she's doing it because she cares too much.  Gross.

On the plus side, we got the return of Sleazy Ray, winding up some poor chump called Baz and smirking gleefully at Daniel's desperation.  Now that's how to be a charming scumbag; take notes, Gary Windass.

Let's get ready to RHUUUMMMMBLE.  The Winters twins turned 30 this week and Paul finally got his surprise party.  After all the build up it was a bit disappointing - Gemma simply scraped the party food section of Freshco into her trolley then whacked it in some bowls.  It wasn't exactly Bianca Jagger riding into Studio 54 on a white horse, put it that way.  The gifts for the pair were, let's say, varied.  Chesney bought Gemma a toaster, and not even a four slot, a mangy two.  If my life partner bought me a household appliance for a landmark birthday that household appliance would be almost immediately wedged inside one of his bodily orifices.  Birthdays are for treats and indulgences, not restocking the kitchen.  Fortunately Paul was a lot better off.  Gemma got him a signed photo of PJ and Duncan (leading Summer to note "they look like Ant and Dec") and the twins celebrated by doing the Let's Get Ready To Rhumble dance.

Do you know when that song came out?  1994.  Meaning Gemma and Paul were barely 4 when it hit the charts.  Obviously its cultural shadow is long and significant, but I find it hard to believe that the twins were doing the full choreographed dance in nursery.  Steps, that's who Paul should've been a fan of; they hit it big in 1997, and so he'd have been the perfect age to put on The Box and video the dances and try to learn the moves.  Also, Steps are much gayer.

Meanwhile Billy presented him with a tacky bracelet, leading to a confession that he would marry Paul if they could do it in a church.  A bit surprising to hear, but welcome; that's the closest we've ever got to a decent theological discourse on Paul and Billy's relationship.  By and large the show treats Billy being a vicar as just another job, rather than dealing with any issues to do with the church or religion.  They've never dealt with how his parishioners feel about him having homosexual relations above a florist with a former jailbird, for example. For the record, the C of E does frown upon gay weddings, but it's fine with civil partnerships, though they do ask that the relationships are entirely celibate.  I am absolutely sure that Billy and Paul are in a sexless relationship, and definitely aren't rogering one another on a nightly basis and forcing Summer to put her headphones on to spare her blushes.  Apparently Billy would prefer to simply shack up with a bloke than make an honest man of him.  Or perhaps he's just keeping his options open in case the All New Todd's really hot.

Just say it.  Johnny's back, but why he's been off in a sulk remains a mystery.  I know that this show would be about eight minutes long if everyone was honest with one another but Friday's Corrie really pushed its luck.  Jenny and Johnny had a long indepth chat about what was on his mind, without him ever actually coming out with it, and then a beer delivery arrived and that was it apparently.  Then Scott, who I'd hoped we'd seen the last of, reappeared with all sort of vague statements about "what we did" and possibly threatening Johnny, but it was all euphemism and no actual facts.  "What was your first thought when you saw me again?" Scott And His Rubbish Name asked, and I think we all remember:

It was quick, do an impression of Mad-Eye Moody.  (And thanks to @corriepodcast for that gif).  Then the show ended, and the mystery rolled on into another week.  I'm not really looking forward to the show going back to six episodes but at least then I might have found out after half an hour not an entire weekend.  Please feel free to conjecture in the comments about what exactly Scott and Johnny did that he doesn't want to get out.  Personally I'm leaning towards a concert tour of the Falkland Islands doing a Hinge and Bracket tribute act but you may have other ideas.

Everybody needs a hobby.  Sean's discovered a great new forum to meet like-minded folk; it's a missing persons website, where you can scan the lists of unidentified corpses for loved ones.  According to Sean "they find bodies every single day" so at least he'll never get bored.  He claimed he was doing it to hunt for Todd, but he found that forum remarkably fast, making me think he already had it bookmarked on his phone.  Sean also talked to a mate at the homeless shelter to ask if they'd seen anyone who looked like Todd.  While he was there, he probably should've asked them about Carol, the homeless girl who helped him with food and shelter when he was on the streets and who he dropped like a stone when he got somewhere to live again.  She's probably dead in a ditch by now but Sean could've asked.  Still, at least we got confirmation this week that Todd is no longer on the run from the police, thanks to Craig breaking confidentiality again.  He's sort of a terrible policeman really.  He does his best but it takes only the tiniest bit of prodding and he immediately spills all sorts of secrets he absolutely shouldn't.  Craig told Sean and Billy all about Todd's interview and they hadn't even asked.  Perhaps he should go back to street art - the pay might not be as good, but at least he's not jeopardising the nation's security.

One of these five things was going to be about Debbie Webster, but all the author could manage was typing "YAS QUEEN" and "FIERCE" over and over, so it got dropped.  Perhaps he'll churn out something a bit more coherent next week.  Remind him over on Twitter @merseytart, would you?

---

---

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