Hope for better days. You know how the Corrie production team took a two week break so they could reimagine storylines, work out logistics, plan ahead? Do you think we'll be seeing the benefits of that any time soon? Because this week's episodes were all dreadful. Bad storylines, bad characterisation, awful plots making good people do awful things - it was a relentless stream of plain annoyance. Worst of all in my mind was Alina Pop! becoming some magic girlfriend, a perfect woman who exists entirely to seduce Tyrone. She's pretty but not bombshell attractive. She's clever but working in a second language so missing some nuances. She's got a secret talent for car maintenance, but the only sign of her work is a cute little smear of oil on her nose that makes her look like a sweet little puppy. And when she tries it on with Tyrone, it's because she loves him, and she immediately realises how wrong it was, and backs away because she's also got a strong moral compass, dammit.
Bless Ruxandra Porojnicu for doing her very best to make this impeccable human being in any way realistic. She had to very politely dismiss Seb - a man who, a year ago, she was so in love with that their continued presence in the flat together caused faultlines of sexual tension to rupture all over Weatherfield. Perhaps a year of lockdown has destroyed any hint of romance there. After spending day in, day out, watching Seb pick sesame seeds out of his teeth with the battery cover from the TV remote, Alina has decided to go elsewhere for fun.
There's a version of this story that works on paper. It's a version where we felt like Alina was incredibly desperate for somewhere to live because her only option was living on the streets, and Tyrone came out of the blue and rescued her, and she's conflated gratitude for romantic passion. It's a version where Tyrone has realised he's in his late thirties and has two kids and a live in girlfriend and it's all downhill from here and there's this pretty woman nearby who seems to like him and gives him a hint of excitement and danger. It's a version where characters collide. It's not the version that's onscreen, though, and instead we're getting two people with all the sexual charisma of a fleecy Primark bodywarmer clattering round the Street making doe eyes at one another while Fiz stops putting washing in her top loader machine for eight minutes so she can book a surprise wedding in the Greek Islands. Even though barely a fortnight ago the prospect of paying Gary £600 was enough to put Tyrone in the hospital. You know who else sprung a surprise wedding on their live in lover, Fiz? Alan Bradley, and Rita rightly told him to shove it up his hoop. Think on.
Learn your lessons. It was another week where the Baileys were prominent, so you know what that means? That's right, it's time for an important life lesson! Once again we were told that racism is bad because Grace was subjected to racial profiling from a nasty Freshco security guard. Of course, this immediately went as badly as it could possibly go, as he locked her in an office and she immediately started giving birth. While wearing jeans. Panic stricken, fully aware that she had lost a baby before and could do it again, Grace staggered to the phone and called... Ronnie. Whose number she had apparently memorised. Even though she'd known him for barely a week. Here's a hint, Grace: "999" is a lot quicker to type.
Once again, the lesson that racism is bad was fatally undermined by being exhibited to us via the medium of a nasty day player. The security guard was rotten to Grace, then, when he realised she was about to have a baby, he went to the hospital and apologised, allowing Ronnie to give him a very profound speech about how racism is bad. Then the security guard vanished, presumably off to the same place that bloke who ran the Bistro for two days and who was nasty to Ed went. Making random characters racist to our regular characters doesn't hit home as a significant event. Introducing strangers to embody negative characteristics means that the viewers can dismiss them as an "other" - they're that kind of person, they're different, they don't even have a name. I'm not advocating for Jenny Bradley to casually chuck the N-word into conversation but having actual characters within the show causing conflict would be far more interesting than Racist Of The Week. Perhaps Ken makes a casual assumption about Ed's taste in music. Perhaps Maria suggests that Grace's hair would look better if she straightened it and made it less Black. Perhaps it could go the other way, where James got together with Paul, and Paul was really really keen to let you know he wasn't in any way racist, because how could he be with a Black boyfriend, and in the process spent his entire time pointing out that he saw his boyfriend's ethnicity as an important factor in their relationship? It would make a change from New Character Is Bad Racist So We Tell Him Off And He Vanishes Forever.
GASP! So this leads us into the least surprising revelation of the week which is that Ronnie thinks he's Michael's real dad. We all guessed this from literally the first moment he appeared on the Street; the only suspense has been how long they'd drag it out. This means that after Michael spent several months thinking a child was his, only for it to turn out to be a horrible lie, he's also spent years thinking a man was his father, only for it to turn out to be a horrible lie. Seriously Toyah, buy Yasmeen's Community Centre and turn it into a psychiatric clinic, you'll make a bomb.
Ed reacted to the news in the way we'd all expected, shouting and pleading and being generally disbelieving. It was left to Aggie to plead her case though because Lorna Laidlaw was shielding the whole thing had to be carried out over FaceTime. About halfway through Friday's episode I was begging the producers to give Ed a laptop because I was sick of staring at Aggie in portrait with terrible sound. According to the timeline of the show, Aggie was sleeping with Ronnie - a married man - right up until they broke up, at which point she took up with his brother and immediately jumped into bed with him. Does any of this sound like the Aggie we've come to know and love over the past couple of years? Do you believe that Aggie would ever have gone with a man out of wedlock, never mind his brother as well, never mind so soon after her previous liaison that her bedsheets still stank of her other lover's aftershave? No, you don't. But every member of the Bailey family has to have an awful devastating secret and nobody was that fussed about her accidentally killing someone on the wards years ago so here's a new one for her. I'd have liked a plotline where Aggie organised a bake sale to raise money for Oliver's fund and got in a battle with Gail over who produced the nicest Victoria Sponge but that's just me.
Be sure to multitask. Leanne returned to work at the solicitor's this week, a couple of months after she gave it up. I am absolutely baffled as to how that place remains in business. Their admin assistant effectively stopped working there last autumn and since then they'd not only not replaced her, they'd hung around in the hope she'd change her mind. When she actually told Imran she wasn't coming back he still didn't employ a replacement and when she returned to the role he immediately let her work from home. Quick question: who the hell is answering the phones in that office?
I'm skipping past Leanne as a drugs mule because, as always with Corrie, drugs storylines are awful and stupid and unrealistic and I really don't care. Honestly I'd have enjoyed Monday's episodes a lot more if Leanne had delivered half a pound of Wine Gums.
Pay your bills. There has been an account between number 1 Coronation Street and the Kabin for decades. In all that time, Rita has faithfully delivered The Guardian to Ken Barlow, and he has dutifully paid the bill. My point is that I don't believe there is a circumstance where the Barlow-McDonald household would be £40 behind in their bills in the first place. Even if they were, it's perfectly reasonable of Brian to bring the debt up. He didn't barge into Oliver's funeral waving an invoice around - several months later, he happened to mention there were monies outstanding.
Apparently this was enough for Cathy to experience some kind of weird mental breakdown where she paid off Steve's debts then took offence because Tracy didn't like her pinboard. The net effect has been Cathy being radicalised into an internet troll on the Wethy Gazette, chucking unfounded allegations about for no apparent reason like she's a Julia Hartley-Brewer who stinks of kebab meat. It's very un-Cathy, and it's very un-Normal Human Being. I don't believe it for a second, but then again, I don't believe anything that happened this week, so perhaps Weatherfield was hit by a tornado from an alternate universe and everyone's in Bizarro World and next week all the characters will be nice to one another and act responsibly and intelligently and I'll be able to write this blog about funny haircuts and silly spelling mistakes again.
You know what's weird? A man sulking because his wife's ex-husband has picked the man he cuckolded as his best man instead of him, even though his wife is being the celebrant and is forcing him to practice saying the vows with some bloke down the road. And yet that wasn't even weird enough to make it into this week's blog. Tell me it'll get better on Twitter @merseytart.
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