Five Things We Learned In Corrie This Week

Breaking up is hard to do.  Poor Phill.  Poor, poor Phill.  Look at his crumbly face there, filled with pain and agony, filled with hurt.  Phill was a relative rarity on the Street these days - a purely good person.  He wasn't a gangster or a criminal.  He wasn't harbouring a horrible secret that could destroy the lives of the residents.  The worst he ever did was think about maybe, possibly, writing a book.  He was so nice I managed to overlook the fact that he can't spell Phil.  And now he's abandoned and sobbing into a microphone.  He doesn't deserve any of this.  He deserves better.

Losing Phill from the Street means we're going to lose Mimi too, just as she reached her apex of brilliance by duetting with Evelyn in a drunken performance of I Know Him So Well.  (She made a rookie mistake in agreeing to be Barbara Dickson - Elaine Paige is singing on her own for about the first minute and a half, you're totally overshadowed).  This came shortly after she sexually harassed Ronnie at the hen do, trying to shove a lemon wedge in his mouth and cooing over his pecs, and much as I like him with Debbie, imagine that coupling.  

Let's also take a moment to be thankful that Fiz and Phill realised what a dump the Chariot Square Hotel is and held their wedding in a venue that wasn't tainted by rape or sexual harassment or prostitution.  Admittedly the guest list was still annoyingly sparse.  Cilla's osteoporosis was "playing up", while Chesney had "the lurgey", but Gemma still attended without Joseph or any of the quads.  You'd have thought they'd want to see their auntie get married.  There was no sign of Roy, her surrogate father figure, and spouses seemed to be pointedly uninvited - no Gary with Maria, no Tim with Sally, and no Kirk with Beth, even though Fiz and Kirk have a history going back literally decades.  Meanwhile poor Phill had only one guest, his drippy best man who kept turning up and saying inappropriate things at exactly the wrong moment.  And now I'm feeling sorry for Phill all over again.

Camilla is quite astonishingly thick.  Phill's ex turned up to declare she still loved him, encouraged by a series of e-mails she'd received which, it turned out, were actually sent by Hope.  That's Hope, an eleven year old girl.  I've managed to get hold of one of these e-mails and frankly I'm judging Camilla pretty hard right now:

Dear Camilla I think you are really pretty and nice and I want to marry you all over again.  I am sorry I divorced you I didnt mean it and I think Fiz is a big old poopy head.  I want to be with you so we can cuddle and kiss and do all that stuff but no tongues because that is gross.  Lots of love Phill x x x 

No wonder Camilla was so easily taken in.

Incidentally, what was Hope's punishment for almost destroying her mother's chances of happiness?  A slight telling off and then she got to go to the wedding and lark about at the reception.  At some point Tyrone and Fiz might decide to do some actual parenting and all their problems will be solved because Hope will drop down dead with shock.

Fill those vacant roles however you can.  Alya and Yasmeen took one day off and Speed Daal immediately went into crisis mode.  It was havoc all round, and while you could blame Stu's secret drinking, personally I'm more likely to put the fault on the fact that it's a restaurant where nobody seems to want to do any cooking.  Is Zeedan the chef, or is Stu?  Either way, I'm pretty sure they shouldn't be wandering among tables dropping off orders.

No wonder Asha and Nina had to wait so long for their veggie pakoras.  Perhaps they should've called in whoever was in the kitchen when the Baileys and the McDonalds were visiting.

I would very much like to know who owns those arms, Corrie, and if he could perhaps work shirtless, all the better.

Elsewhere on the Street Kevin took on Aaron as a mechanic after a couple of minutes of chat over a vintage car.  I didn't know he had a vacancy, and even if he did, I can't help thinking there are much better ways of filling it than waiting for some random youth to turn up on your doorstep.  Perhaps an ad in the paper or a card in the Job Centre?  It was also a surprise to see Aaron getting permanent employment in the show.  Firstly, because he isn't exactly brimming with personality; so far he's existed to mainly get Summer all worked up, and God knows she doesn't need much provocation in that department.  Secondly, he's got a holiday booked for a couple of weeks time.  Do you think he's told Kev yet?  "Thanks for the job mate; now I'm off to Barcelona."

Money corrupts.  How much money has Audrey even got left these days?  Alf's been dead for twenty odd years and I'm pretty sure she's lost everything at least twice.  There's Grasmere Drive, of course, and the barber shop, but she's no Dev with a business empire at her fingertips.  It'll be a nice little bonus when she dies but the way the Platt children were fighting over it you'd have thought she was Christina Onassis.  David in particular seemed to be mad keen to extract every penny from her still warm corpse.  Once again, we are reminded that all three of Gail's kids are awful.  We also learned that Sarah-Lou has never invited Audrey round to her flat at Red Bank.  Don't feel bad Aud, they'd lived there a year before even the viewers at home were allowed a peek.

Let's take a moment to once again feel sorry for Gail.  She's trying to do her best for Audrey and getting it thrown back in her face, getting lumped in with the two boys who actually robbed Audrey blind.  They gloss over it now, but Gail was a neglected child, a lead weight round her party girl mum's neck, and this closeness is a relatively recent development.  She's owed a bit of respect from her mother.  Plus, the minute Stephen turns up, Gail is completely ignored, even though, and I can't say this enough, Stephen is incredibly dull.  Really it should be Gail determined to get all the cash she can get as compensation for decades of neglect.  Take Audrey's money and buy yourself a beach house in Phuket and never look back.

Do it yourself.  My absolute favourite plotline at the moment is, somewhat unbelievably, the hole in the roof of number 1.  It has the combination of low stakes, conflict and humour that is the reason I tune into Corrie in the first place.  I absolutely want to see Steve and Ed grumbling at one another, and Aggie telling Ed to "smile and wave back [at Steve] - you know he's not very bright,", and Tracy being bitchy.  This is catnip to me.  I especially liked the moment where Jacob refused to go up the ladder and Steve spat "To think you used to be a gangster!"  That nasty version of Jacob is basically from a parallel universe now.

Number 1 is covered in scaffolding and I hope it stays there for years.  I want it to be a long-term irritation for everyone on the Street, one of those pesky things that winds up the neighbours enough for a little complaining, the kind of thing that makes Sally all riled up.  We've not heard what Ken thinks about it yet, for starters.  There's still time for this storyline to be ruined - the scaffolding could become home to some drug dealers or the roof could explode or something - but in the meantime I'm enjoying the nonsense.

This week's blog is sponsored by Zombezi, which is apparently the only television show anyone watches in Weatherfield.  Contact me via Twitter @merseytart, Tyrone, and I'll show you how to retune your telly so you can pick up BBC One.

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