Robert's Drug Problem

Last night Chesney was stabbed in the shoulder by an out of control drug dealer with a wine bottle.  It was staggeringly unrealistic.  I don't just mean Chesney managing to get a deep tissue wound from a bit of a bump; I don't just mean the way the Bistro emptied in about thirteen seconds (including all the kitchen staff, apparently); I don't just mean Michelle immediately turning into a sniveling hysterical wreck, despite the fact that she could probably wrestle a marauding thug to the ground with one hand and not spill her Babycham.  I don't even mean Daniel saying Back To The Future III was the best of the trilogy, even though no-one with any sense - and certainly not someone with the intellect of Daniel - would ever think that.

My main problem with this storyline was that it was based on a narrative untruth.  Apparently Robert was, at one point in his life, a rampant coke head, and I refuse to believe this is even slightly true.

Robert Preston is the most boring character in Coronation Street and remember, this is a cast that includes Ken Barlow.  I do not believe that Robert has ever done anything as interesting as snort some blow.  I don't believe Robert has done anything as interesting as leaving the immersion on overnight.

Boring can be fine.  He used to be boring in a perfectly acceptable way.  Robert first came into the show as a teenage carpet fitter who fell in love with Tracy Barlow.  This was v3 Tracy, so that wasn't quite as hard to believe as it would be in 2017 (although she was already a kidney thief at that point).  The pair married in 1996, with Tracy wearing a charity shop dress and Doc Martens, because that was what everyone was wearing in 1996.  Even the boys.  Robert, for his part, wore a dull but respectable suit that reflected his personality.  The two of them then moved to London and vanished for years, only returning to Weatherfield for the odd party.  He was nice and reliable and perfectly acceptable as a beau for Miss Barlow.

Finally Tracy - having morphed into her final form, a demon Gorgon intent on wreaking havoc across the cosmos - left Robert and moved back to t'North.  They got a divorce, and he quietly disappeared into Tracy's past, one of those bits of her history that never got mentioned - like the time she ran away to visit Susan Barlow in Newcastle, or the time she murdered her boyfriend in cold blood and then, somehow, got away with it.

Robert made a return for Deirdre's funeral, and he'd had a morph of his own.  Instead of being the ordinary, perfectly pleasant looking young man we'd last seen in 2002, Robert Preston had turned into a "hunk".  Suddenly he was six foot something, dark and brooding and ready to make the ladies swoon.  In theory, anyway.  The truth is that Robert is missing that indefinable spark that makes him actually sexy.  He's undeniably good looking - he looks like an Action Man carved out of granite - but he's not got that oomph.  Peter Barlow and Gary Windass have that oomph, despite being, respectively, a slightly chubby fifty-something and a ginger with a broken nose.  They're sexy.  Robert is just... handsome.  Handsome but dull.

Still, Tracy seemed keen to start all over again with him, despite not showing even the slightest inkling to rekindle their romance in the thirteen years since she dumped him.  They were soon getting hot and heavy on that uncomfortable looking sofa in Ken's back room, and then Robert was moving in with her, abandoning his wife Sarah Harding Joni for a bit of Barlow.  It seemed that since living with Tracy he'd retrained as a highly talented professional chef, despite, as Tracy recalled, not being able to boil an egg when they were together.

Yes, in the 13 years between his two appearances, Robert had discovered a deep and abiding love of food that caused him to carve out an entirely new career.  And what do you know, just as Robert became unemployed from his last job, Leanne and Nick were looking for a new chef for the Bistro.  What are the chances of that happening?

But of course, that wasn't all he was doing in those 13 years.  We now learn that he spent much of that time out of his head on scag.  Remember, we've seen Robert as a young man (when he looked like Julian Kay) and we've seen Robert in middle age (when he looked like Tristan Gemmill).  You can draw a straight line from nice but dull carpet fitter Robert to nice but dull chef Robert.  Apparently, that's all wrong, and for some reason he went mad in his thirties.  This would admittedly explain why he married human lump of wood Sarah Harding, but really?  Try and picture a thirty-something Robert off his nut on Colombian marching powder, bouncing off the walls of a club and speaking nineteen to the dozen.  You can't, can you?

That's because Robert is just so boring.  He's bland.  He's white bread.  I could imagine Robert, perhaps, at one point, having too many pints of Carling (definitely Carling) and vomiting outside a kebab shop, but it would have to be a special occasion.  And the next morning he'd have had a roaring hangover and sworn never to do that again and he'd actually never do it again.  I can't imagine Robert having the hedonistic wild side that would let him abandon his thoughts and emotions to the influence of psychoactive substances.

Rich the drug dealer threatened to tell Michelle about "Catherine" in last night's show; presumably this is some poor moll he got high with who died - I'm imagining something like camp classic Desperate Lives, where Helen Hunt tries drugs for the first time and then immediately throws herself out of a window.  A girlfriend who died in tragic circumstances; another contrived attempt to make Robert something resembling an interesting character.  He'll have to have packed a lot more into those thirteen years away from the Street than a bit of a drug habit to make me even sit up in my chair.  I look forward to future storylines about his time as the bassist in Metallica, his Formula 1 wins, and his year as the sexual plaything of Sharon Stone.  And then I'll shrug and wait for a more interesting character to turn up.

By @merseytart

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The Kids Aren't Alright

Here's a fact for you: there are thousands of children being brought up in Greater Manchester today.  They're playing, learning, having fun, eating dinner.  Almost all of these children are perfectly normal and very few of them are evil personified.

This may surprise you, because you're a Coronation Street viewer, and so you might be used to children from that area being the spawn of Satan.  Just in the last few episodes, we've learnt that Amy is a lying manipulative witch and Max is an ADHD-riddled tornado of devastation.  Any child who is on the Street beyond their toddling years will almost inevitably turn out to be marked with the sign of the devil and you'd be better off retreating before they eat your face.

It used to be so much simpler.  Children in Corrie were spoken of, but rarely seen.  The first baby born in the street was Paul Cheveski, son of Linda and Ivan and grandson of Elsie Tanner.  The pregnancy was considered so unimportant that she gave birth offscreen and just turned up with a baby a few episodes later.  The birth of Peter and Susan Barlow was a bit more important, with Valerie actually going into labour pains on television, but once they were brought into the world they were occasionally mentioned in passing and that was it.  When Val died and Ken sent them off up to Scotland (ready to come back after twenty years without so much as a Scottish accent) they weren't missed.

The next baby born was Tracy Lynette Langton, and here we have both the first important Street baby and the first unalloyed child of darkness.  It was that long since anyone had got pregnant in Weatherfield, the birth of Tracy was treated as a festive event, and Deirdre was permanently surrounded by a cluster of well-wishing old biddies.  You'd think this would create a loving atmosphere for the young infant, but it actually worked more like the witch's coven in Rosemary's Baby, and before you knew it Tracy was getting hopped up on ecstasy and stealing kidneys off innocent Moroccan waiters.  It was the start of a life of unbridled evil, which culminated in her trying to sell her baby, murdering Charlie, and worst of all, putting up that awful swirly wallpaper in the living room of number six which is still there, dammit.  (I mean COME ON OWEN; you've got nothing else to do now - even slapping a coat of magnolia over the top would be a relief.)

Anyway.  Relatively speaking, Tracy was a late starter in the testicle-shrinkingly horrible stakes, waiting until she was a teenager (and on her third head) before really turning pestilent.  The other children took up her gauntlet gladly.  First the McDonald twins interpreted "youthful high jinks" as "robbing plant machinery and ramming it into Alf Roberts' shop", then Steve became a smack dealer and a jailbird.  It's hard to remember, looking at the roly-poly ball of blancmange who stands behind the bar picking fluff out his belly button, but Steve was once a dangerous rebel who caused untold agony for his parents.

Across the road, Sarah-Louise Platt was barely in a training bra before she was knocked up.  This was a new variant on the "causing agony for the grown ups" scale, but unlike Steve's forays into criminality which were momentary headaches for Liz and Jim, having a baby meant at least eighteen years of pain for Sarah-Lou and Gail.  It just got worse as Bethany grew up, and she revealed herself to be really annoying.  Meanwhile, Sarah-Louise parlayed her eternal victimhood into repeatedly getting kidnapped, trapped in car crashes and generally finding an excuse to squeal and cry whenever possible.  Her stepfather turned out to be a serial killer, but in a baffling misjudgement, he tried to kill Gail's mother instead of her daughter; that would have got him just a slap on the wrist and possibly a fruit basket as thanks.

You'd think that uber-Mummy Sally Webster would bring up a couple of perfect children, but once Rosie and Sophie got past their fish finger guzzling childhood days, they both found their own unique ways to give their parents nightmares.  Rosie rebelled against her sanctimummy by becoming a Goth; spending her days meditating on the agony of human existence and nodding along to Fields of the Nephilim was guaranteed to irritate Sally Webster, who had her heart set on bringing up a tiny Bonnie Langford.  Later, Rosie left school and took a major career change by becoming a slut - sorry, I mean, "a model".  She carried on applying eighteen tonnes of make up, only instead of it being whiteface and black lipstick, now it was Kim Kardashian Radiation Burn Effect Bronzer (Industrial Strength) and false fingernails that made her look like a Primark Freddie Krueger.  Meanwhile, Sophie also rebelled by first becoming a Christian, then a lesbian; her three girlfriends have all been deeply unsuitable for one reason or another (too young; too old; too annoying) and her religious beliefs have lead to levels of sanctimonious preaching even Emily Bishop thinks are excessive.

Sometimes a change of scene activates a Street child's hidden levels of horror; Tracy, Amber and Todd were a bit annoying before they left, but they returned from That London as tools of Beelzebub.  Meanwhile, Nicky Tilsley was a sweet, ineffectual little boy until he went to Canada; he returned a steroid-fuelled sex maniac, before transmogrifying into his latest incarnation, a bitter uncharismatic man who somehow also looks older than his grandmother.

Mention of Nicky, of course, leads us to that ne plus ultra of Weatherfield's worst children, David "Damien" Platt.  Looking back over his CV it's easy to wonder where it all went wrong; personally I blame the death of Barney the Rabbit, which sent David into a spiral of cruelty, violence, a spell in Borstal and marriage to a pole dancer.  He's thrown his mum down stairs, tried to kill his brother in a car crash, and fed drugs to his niece; he hijacked his sister's wedding day by attempting suicide and gave his nan a heart attack.  Gail's thrown him out more times than a loaf of mouldy bread.  He's calmed down a little in recent years, perhaps a result of becoming step-father to Max.  None the less, I can't be the only one who uttered a prayer for salvation when Kylie announced she was pregnant.  There was no need for them to have a DNA test to find out who Lily's father was - the wolves baying at the moon as she was born should have been a clear indication that this was the spawn of David.  His insistence on her being Christened seemed to be a deliberate taunt to God; I was surprised the church didn't burn down when they tried to take Lily over the threshold.  I note that confirmed child of Christ Sophie Webster hasn't volunteered to babysit her, probably because she's afraid she'll end up skewered by a lightning rod like Patrick Troughton in The Omen II.

Lily is one of four infants on the Street right now, along with Jake Windass, Ruby Dobbs and Hope Stape.  Of the four of them, Lily's parents are ASBO magnets, Ruby's mother is a convicted psychopath, Hope's father is a dead serial killer and Jake's birth mother got clobbered to death a hundred yards from his cot; basically, what I'm saying is that the signs are not good for them growing up to be productive members of society.

Meanwhile, just above them at school, Max is demolishing most of the set as he tries to vent his badly acted hyperactivity.  Asha and Aadi haven't yet revealed their twisted dark halves, but as they're twins, it's a given that they possess evil psychic powers; it can't be long before they're stood holding hands at the end of the Street asking little Liam Connor to play with them "forever and ever and ever".  There might still be hope for Amy; her interest in Albert Tatlock's war past certainly bodes well, as does her love of Eccles, and she is cousin to Simon Barlow, a.k.a the most adorable child ever to walk the cobbles and the exception that proves the rule.  Simon is sweetly cheeky, appallingly cute, and prone to filling his eyes with big tears of sorrow that manage to pierce the heart of even the most cynical viewer.  I suppose we should enjoy it while it lasts; give it a couple of years and he'll be joy-riding Carla's BMW into Maxine's bench and snorting cocaine off a prostitute's breasts before school.  The alternative is that he's just a normal little boy, and that sort of behaviour gets you beaten up at Weatherfield High.

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The Peter Principle

They tried to make him go to rehab, he said... well, actually he said, "yeah, fair enough."  Peter Barlow's currently locked up in a sanitarium somewhere, licking the back of the wallpaper in the hope that the ancient paste has fermented and trying not to listen to the big yellow rhinoceros in his ear.  I like to imagine he's at a sort of budget Priory; no A-listers like Pete and Kate and Amy, just a few people from Desperate Scousewives and perhaps a random 1970s DJ hiding away from Yewtree. And Rosie Webster, of course, continuing her plummet into media tart by building up a story for the ninth volume of her autobiography: 2013-2014: The Year Of Living Bralessly.

Poor Peter.  Alcoholism is a terrible affliction of course - I speak as someone who is currently nursing a bottle of Stella Artois like my long lost child - and after his dreadful life, who can blame him for turning to the vodka now and then?  Born in 1965, he found himself thrust into Weatherfield at its most grim and kitchen-sinky.  Albert Finney could've turned up at any minute, complaining about t'factory before knocking up Rita Tushingham; Coronation Street was battered two up two downs filled with doughy matrons and ne'er do wells.  Admittedly, the Barlows were perhaps the best family on the street.  Ken was - hard though it is to believe here in 2014 - a thrusting, focused, exciting young man, while mam Valerie was a young hairdresser with the spirit to set up her own salon in the front parlour.

That same salon was soon moved out for the bassinets; Peter came as a twin, as a disproportionate number of soap babies do, though for ease of casting it was non-identical.  For their early life, Susan and Peter lived pretty much the same life as every other child on the Street.  They were seen and not heard, they got fed a lot of fish fingers, and they were periodically threatened with death (a coal falling out of the hearth nearly put paid to the twins in the Sixties).

By the turn of the decade, Peter was safely in his class at Bessie Street, no doubt surreptitiously drinking the caretaker's floor cleaner when he thought no-one was looking.  Surely nothing could go wrong?  Actually yes; a mooted move to Jamaica - home of Red Stripe Beer - was spoilt when Valerie Barlow electrocuted herself in the maisonette and then set fire to their home.  This traumatising incident will have no doubt deeply affected the Barlow twins, making them scared for the safety of their only remaining parent and wanting to stay close.  Ken immediately stuck them on a train northwards and they went off to Scotland for twenty years.  Apparently he "couldn't cope" with the twins on his own, presumably because it got in the way of him diddling Joanna Lumley.

Peter did make a brief reappearance in the mid-70s, though he looked different now.  Peter has been played by more actors than Hamlet; there's actually a rota going around all the men of the United Kingdom to take a turn - my opportunity to look shifty in a ginnel is pencilled in for June 2031.  In the forty-nine years of his existence, Peter had been played by such luminaries as Christopher Dormer, Linus Roache, Kirsty Soames' Dad, Sir Alec Guinness, Hartley Hare, and five koala bears standing on each other's shoulders under a raincoat.  Linus actually returned in 2010 as a different Barlow; producers were careful to keep him well away from Chris Gascoyne, in case the Blinovitch Limitation Effect shorted out the universe.

Not much was heard from the twins for the rest of the Seventies; they'd occasionally turn up to stop Ken from getting his end away with another lady, and selfishly whine that being brought up in Scotland by a couple of pensioners while their Dad worked his way through Greater Manchester's spinsters had stopped being fun, but they didn't make a permanent return until the Eighties.  Susan had got engaged to her often absent father's mortal enemy, Mike Baldwin, in a development that psychologists have described as "creepy."  The only way it could have got more Oedipal was if she'd popped her eyeballs out on the honeymoon.

Peter showed up at the wedding, probably because he heard there would be free champagne.  By now he had a fiancé, Jessica, a well-meaning drip, and a career in the Navy.  Peter the Sailor Man barked at Ken with a new found strength - it's unknown if spinach was involved - and persuaded him to attend Susan's wedding by careful use of emotional blackmail.  Then he was off again, riding the high seas, until he came back a different man at the turn of the Millennium (this being Peter, he was quite literally a different man).

This time Peter was here to stay, drawn to this little cobbled street that had nothing but horrible memories for him.  By this time Jessica had run off with another man, and Peter had departed the Navy; whether this was related to the abolition of the rum ration, I can't say.  He was soon causing havoc by revealing that Susan had given birth to a Baldwin, all those years ago; when Mike found out, Susan crashed her car and died, proving that no Barlow should ever be allowed to drive.  Another big wodge of self-loathing was added to Peter's Guilt Bank, and his trips to the Rovers became more frequent.

It was fate that he should end up with a pub landlady; Shelley's appeal was probably optics-based, if Peter was completely honest, because it wasn't long before he was getting Twist from Spaced up the duff behind her back.  Oh, the agony!  Two women, one with his baby, one with a pub of her own; he finally did the only sensible thing and married them both.  There was a brief, infinitely tiny moment when it actually worked, but he didn't really have the quick wit to enable him to maintain two relationships at once.  That sort of juggling requires lightning fast reflexes and a clever mind; Peter had to write Shelley on the back of his hand to stop him from calling her by the wrong name.  It all exploded in the Rovers - as things often do - and Peter skulked off to Portsmouth.  There was a brief return in 2007, for Tracy's trial; given that the two of them barely knew each other growing up, it was a kind moment of sort-of brotherly love.  Either that or, like everyone else in the country, he just wanted to make sure the ghastly creature was locked up forever.

He made a more permanent return a year later with his curly haired cherub of a son, Simon; his mum had succumbed to ovarian cancer and left him alone in the world.  Peter accepted the additional responsibility with his usual grace; knocking back a hip flash of Bell's before storming into the nativity and weeing up against the cardboard donkey.  This caused Ken to do a lot of grimacing and hissing "Peter!" through clenched teeth, though frankly when it came to parenting advice, he was about as authoritative as Fred West.  Things came to a head when Peter swallowed an off licence, then set the flat on fire; nobody was really bothered about him, but since this disaster nearly killed Simon and his pet rabbit, the family intervened and he began his long struggle against the booze.

No-one in the Street seems to find it a bad idea that Peter can regularly be found having an orange juice in the Rovers, even though it is a place that is known to serve alcohol.  Similarly, everyone seemed to think it was an absolutely marvellous idea for him to open a wine bar underneath the viaduct, even though that was another place that was known to serve alcohol.  The driving force behind this potential Vesuvius was new fiancé Leanne Battersby, possibly the only person in Weatherfield with a worse track record for addiction than him.  The ex-hooker arsonist and the drunken bookie; it was a match made in heaven.

Nothing in soap land runs smooth, and their stag/hen night was interrupted by an exploding restaurant and a runaway tram.  By this point Leanne was getting extra shifts in the bar with her ex, Nick, though to be honest most of the shifts seemed to end with her skirt left under a table.  Both Leanne's lovers were almost incinerated in the conflagration, but in the end the only person who died was poor guileless Ashley, proving that script editors have a really sick sense of humour.  Leanne married Peter when she thought he was about to die; his subsequent recovery was met with a lot of worried side eyes, but eventually he'd recovered enough to demand a divorce at the altar (it all made sense at the time).

The two reconciled, and everything looked rosy, until Carla Connor staggered into view, hammered on red wine.  She had a drink problem, and Peter graciously went to her aid.  It helped that the person needing an intervention was a saucy brunette in stilettos; one wonders if he'd have been quite so charitable if it had been, say, Sylvia.  The two bonded over pints of fizzy water - though Carla must have gone to a different AA group, one which didn't preach abstinence, but instead said that she looked fabulous with a glass of red, so you go girl.  Carla saw Peter as her hero; Peter saw Carla as a human version of Smirnoff, and they eventually gave in to temptation.  That was the end of his marriage to Leanne, leaving only the question of Simon's custody; following the fine Barlow tradition, Peter thrust his son in Leanne's direction with a shrug, saying, "well, I'd be rubbish, wouldn't I?"

After a hiatus in the USA together, Carla and Peter returned more sober and more in love than before.    The fates, however, were conspiring to push him back on the booze.  First his business failed, because apparently Weatherfield is the only place in Britain where the recession had a negative effect on  bookies; Carla immediately promoted him to her deputy in the factory despite his lack of experience.  (Given that his predecessors in this role were Michelle and Maria, is it any wonder that company is constantly on the brink of bankruptcy?)  Meanwhile, resident sauce pot Tina McIntyre was sending seductive glances in his direction; what Tina (the daughter of an often-absent father with a crippling substance abuse problem) saw in Peter (an often-absent father with a crippling substance abuse problem) is another Greek tragedy waiting happen.

As before, Peter couldn't simply stop a wedding when it appeared on his horizon; I'm not really sure where he got this idea that weddings are like tsunamis, and that the only thing you can do when you're involved in one is to strap yourself to a piece of furniture and hope you don't drown.  Despite ensnaring the witty, sexy Carla, he still felt the need to feel up Tina by a plate of mini kievs.  The net result has been six months of the two most desirable women on the street begging for sexual intercourse with a porky beardo who's pushing fifty.  The stress of having it away with both women at the same time lead Peter back to the booze in a strange pub, probably because he wanted to go somewhere he could boast very loudly.

What will happen to Peter when he finally emerges from rehab?  Will he have decided which woman to go for?  Will he finally decide to be the decent father he never had himself?  Will he have an entirely unexplained tan, almost as if Chris Gascoyne has in reality been on holiday in the Maldives all this time?  Who knows.  Even if he's not much longer for the show, we needn't worry; Peter Barlow is like Doctor Who.  He'll always come back, probably with a completely different head.  Plus his trusty companion: Jack Daniels.

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Long Haired Losers From Liverpool

I don't know if you noticed, but Liverpool beat Manchester United 3-0 yesterday.  Even if you don't like football, you'll know that this is kind of a big deal.  Liverpool and Manchester have a bitter, bitter rivalry, one that makes Alexis and Krystal look like conjoined twins.

Liverpool has the history and the excitement; it's got architectural delights on every street, and showbiz glamour through its decades of producing top entertainers like, erm, Jimmy Tarbuck and Cilla.  Manchester, meanwhile, is bigger and has more money; its skyline can't compete with the Liver Building and two cathedrals, but it's got a tram system and a Harvey Nicks and the BBC.  It's a bit more 21st Century than its near neighbour, a bit more forward thinking and less likely to coast on past glories (seriously Liverpool, the Beatles split up forty odd years ago; let it be).

Manchester also has Corrie, which gives it the perfect opportunity to get one over its Scouse rivals.  It mainly does this by ensuring that anyone with a Liverpudlian accent is, at least, a bit dodgy, and at worse an out and out thug.  Right now Pat Phelan is providing the show's dark underbelly, sexually harassing Anna and blackmailing Gary and Owen.  He's bent as a nine bob note, with years of financial impropriety and questionable deals behind him.  Owen should never have palled up with him, not least because their first meeting resulted in a motorbike being held hostage; that might have given a normal person a hint they were dealing with a crook.  That and Phelan's got a Scouse accent so thick you could sit on it and row across the Mersey.

Go right back through Corrie's past, and you get a parade of Liverpudlians who are a little bit wey, a little bit woo.  Think of Kenneth Cope as Jed Stone, a former borstal resident who had a string of nefarious schemes under his belt, convoluted plots that would net him a nice tidy profit without him having to do an honest day's work.  He was finally locked up for robbing blankets, which is exactly the kind of petty, low-level dodginess Scousers on the Street seem to get up to.

They're never Machiavellian geniuses, lording it over the lives of residents with their evil brilliance.  They're just a bit grubby and criminal.  Jed's replacement as Scouse schemer was Eddie Yeats, who arrived on the Street fresh out of Walton nick.  He spent the rest of his time on the show handling stolen goods, being sent back to prison, and puffing on Woodbines while he picked his feet at Hilda's dining table.

That's not to say that Scouse characters are charmless; even Phelan has a bit of a twinkle about him.  Michael Starke, who played Jerry Morton and who will forever be Sinbad from Brookside, managed to keep his terrible character and awful family afloat pretty much on charm alone.  He seemed like he was going to turn the tide of naughty characters from Liverpool - he had his own business, his own home, a deeply unlikeable set of children covering a bizarre range of ages.  But what's this, in a news report written about Starke's casting?  Jerry, in his 40s, is described as a hard-working man who dotes on his family and has no qualms on dodging the taxman.  Yep, even before he'd arrived, we were told he was crooked.  Of course, we already knew that, because he was born in the L postcode.  Also, he was Sinbad.

The one Scouse character who's managed to keep his nose clean is Lloyd or, as he's better known, Craig Charles.  This is mainly because what Craig Charles is doing can't really be described as "acting"; he's basically just playing himself.  I love Craig, but Lloyd isn't really a stretch for his talents.  Seriously, I keep expecting Lloyd to start reminiscing about his performance poetry days, or to call Steve a smeghead.  He's just a naturally charming, funny man, and his double act with Steve is one of the greatest in the show's history.  It's a real-life double act too, which makes me wonder if some of the writers take a shortcut when they write the scripts, e.g.

INT.  TAXI OFFICE

(Just film Craig Charles and Simon Gregson having a chat for five minutes.  We'll stick the best bits in the show.)

Lloyd's been a bit of a love rat, but that's pretty much the worst thing you can say about him.  He is a taxi driver though, a profession which is not exactly renowned for its high moral standards.  I bet he's not above taking a roundabout route so he can add a few more quid to the meter. 

Still, I suppose it's good that we finally have a Scouser who isn't a criminal, a tax dodger or a bankrupt on the show.  And with Les Dennis soon to join, that'll mean there's two! 

What's that?  He's playing a burglar?

Never mind.

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Devil Woman

What is wrong with Carla Connor?  I'm being serious.  It seems that whenever she gets a boyfriend or husband, he immediately turns out to be mad, a sexual pervert, or a mad sexual pervert.  Even when they seemed quite nice before.  Is it her lipstick?  Is it filled with psychotropic drugs, like Poison Ivy? 

I admit, I'm heterosexually challenged.  But from where I'm sitting Carla seems like a hell of a catch.  She's gorgeous.  She's funny.  She's clever.  She's got her own factory and a fondness for necking red wine.  Where is the downside?  Frankly, I'd be tempted to have a quick bunk up with her, and my entire gamut of sexually experience with "the ladies" is a snog with tongues as a 19th birthday experiment with one of my girl friends.  (I wasn't converted).

First, she's married to Paul, and he spends his spare afternoons romping with hookers in the Weatherfield Travelodge.  He ended up ramming a prostitute into the back of his car and then smashing it into the side of a truck in Salford Quays.  Then she fell for Liam, who instead married a Girl's World doll that had somehow gained sentience, also known as Maria.  He ended up being mown down by a car arranged by her next husband, Mad-Eye Moody himself, Tony Gordon, because apparently being in love with Carla drives you insane.  After he was blown up, she picked herself up, dusted herself down, and got engaged to a psychopath who turned out to be a rapist on the side.  Frank was so awful his own mother killed him.  Plus there was Trevor the Binman who, in line with our "one kiss from Carla and you go mad" theme, subsequently hooked up with Janice Battersby.

And now there's Peter Barlow, who's appealing enough if you like doughy tattoo'd former alcoholics with a string of failed marriages and having Ken for a father-in-law, but who was married to Carla for less than an hour before he was snogging Tina on top of the vol au vents at the reception.  Next to the voluptuous, fascinating Carla, Tina looks like someone's stapled a pair of Lizzie Duke earrings to a chew toy, and only a fool would pay her even the slightest bit of attention.  Yet there Peter is, kicking Simon's Lego to one side so he can diddle her on the living room rug. 

There's a difference between the classic Street "wronged woman", a la Elsie Tanner, and Carla.  Elsie picked the bad fellas in the first place because she wanted a bit of company and love.  She had more in common with Eileen than the feisty sexual tornado that is la Connor.  Carla just seems to pick perfectly affable, decent chaps, then sends them careening over the cliff edge of sanity and into the fragrant garden of loony.  When the marriage to Peter finally fails - as of course it will, possibly over Tina's bloodied corpse - I can't imagine which affable hero Carla will turn into a psychopath next.  Little Max?  Tom Hanks?  Pope Francis?  Surely no man is safe.

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Stella Cartography

Oh, Stella.  How did it all go so wrong?  On paper you should have been perfect.  A ballsy, brassy character with a secret connection to one of the Street's stalwarts.  A well-known actress taking the role.  A feisty landlady who could run the Rovers and win our hearts.

It didn't end up that way, and when Michelle Collins finally departs the Street in 2014, she'll be unmourned.  In fact, there will probably be a queue of viewers outside the gates willing to drive her anywhere she wants to go, so long as it's a long way from Weatherfield.

Why was Stella such a failure?  I reckon there are a few factors that came into play that meant the viewers were sceptical even before she set foot on the cobbles.

The first we heard of Michelle Collins' potential involvement in the Street was when she had a dinner with the show's then new producer, Phil Collinson.  The tabloids leapt to a conclusion: Michelle was being scoped out as a new star of Corrie.  "They're just friends!" the press office said.  "They've worked together before, and they were just having a chat."  Michelle had previously appeared in Sea of Souls and Doctor Who, both of which were produced by Phil.  In fact, in Doctor Who, she played a loyal wife who refused to believe her husband was a villain even as he killed her workmates; it ended with an enormous fireball.  No typecasting there.

It meant that when Michelle finally turned up on the Street, it had a slight tang of nepotism about it.  She hadn't got the job because she was the best for the role - she got it because she and Phil were great showbiz pals.  The feeling that she had been parachuted in only got worse when it was revealed she was the new landlady of the Rovers.  Since Annie Walker died, there's been a certain feeling that you have to earn ownership of the pub.  It's the heart of the show, and as such, the landlord or lady should be a character we already care about.  Bet.  Jack and Vera.  Fred Elliot.  Liz and Steve.  Families who are being rewarded for their years of loyal service by getting one of the prime jobs on British television.

Stella waltzed in, first as manageress, then as owner of the Rovers, and we knew nothing about her.  It felt wrong, somehow, watching Ken and Deirdre order pints off this complete stranger.  The effortless way in which Liz McDonald has returned and reasserted her dominance demonstrates how tough it is behind that bar. 

There's also the Cindy Factor.  Even if you'd never seen an episode of EastEnders, you were aware of Cindy Beale: she was a superbitch on a scale Tracy Barlow can only aspire to.  From modest beginnings as a girl on a hat stall in the market, Cindy got pregnant by her brother in law, was threatened with a shotgun by Ian Beale, returned and gave birth to twins, slept with her other brother in law, hired a hitman to kill her husband, fled to Italy with two of her three kids (one got left behind by accident), and finally died in childbirth behind bars.  She was two-faced, conniving, and wicked, and a joy to watch.  She made her mark.

Bringing an actor who was so well known for one role on a rival soap into Corrie was going to be different - just look at how badly Michael "Sinbad" Starke fared when he moved into number six.  Worse, whether it was the intention of the scriptwriters, or the determination of Michelle Collins to be not-Cindy, Stella was made soft as an eiderdown.  She didn't have a wicked, bitchy side to her; she was caring, huggable, empathetic.  Or as it's also know, dull.

Corrie is built on strong women and Stella was just a drip.  She was forever popping up to provide a cup of tea and a sympathetic ear; the back room of the Rovers became a drop in centre for the emotionally traumatised.  Wander in for a quiet pint because you'd had a bad day at work and next thing you knew Stella had whipped you behind the bar for a cup of Tetley and a hand holding session.  Again, the landlady of the Rovers should be involved in everyone's lives - she sees them every day and hears all the gossip.  Watching characters we'd known for years open up to this stranger felt wrong though.  She didn't fit.

The introduction of Sue Johnston as her mum, Gloria, felt like an even more desperate attempt to get us to like Stella: "Look!" the show seemed to say.  "Her mum is Sheila Grant!  Or, if you're a bit younger, Barbara Royle!  She's a legend of British television, and she produced Stella!  Admit it, you like her a bit more now."  And it might have worked, if they ever gave Gloria something decent to do.  Sue Johnston's considerable acting talents were wasted, and it was no surprise that she decided to leave before Michelle Collins had even announced her departure. 

The net result was a character we didn't care about who never went away.  If you're behind the bar at the Rovers, you get far more scenes than any other actor; even if your only line is "two ninety eight, ta", you have to be there.  It felt like Stella was always around, and so antipathy turned into hatred.  Overexposed characters can come back from the brink.  Michelle was the Most Fragrant Empress of the Universe for a while; every appearance made you want to vomit up your own kidney. A combination of quieter storylines and, admittedly, Kym Marsh Ryder Marsh Lomas Marsh disappearing on maternity leave for six months, managed to redeem her, and now she's back to being a perfectly acceptable character. 

Could Stella have been redeemed too?  Possibly.  She was still Leanne's mum, and we all love Leanne; Eva is amusingly dizzy and self-centred (hopefully she's staying when the other Prices leave), and her disastrous relationship with Karl could have been interesting.  The idea of her being saddled with a loser, loving him despite his massive flaws, could have been compelling; instead, he had an affair with Sunita (who was in the middle of being the most hateful character in the Street - what did Shobna Gulati do to the writers to make them hate her so much?  Did she not send them a Christmas card?).  Stella chucked Karl out and we had weeks of her wailing and feeling sorry for herself.  She had no gumption, no core of steel; if she'd shown a bit of backbone then we might have liked her more, but all she did was weep in the back room and offer sympathetic hugs to Dev.

By the time the Rovers was burnt to the ground with her in it, most viewers were praying that she'd get caught up in the conflagration.  That would have been the perfect point for Stella to quietly exit, stage left, flogging the pub back to the McDonalds and vanishing.  That didn't happen; we got a load of hand-wringing and talk about financial hardship before Gloria revealed she had a few grand in the back of a drawer and did Stella want it?  Looking back at those lengthy discussions about overdrafts and paying Owen, it's hard not to feel a little bitter; it was a massive waste of time, because the minute Stuart Blackburn took over as producer he exiled the Prices to the outer darkness.  Stella's barely been onscreen for months, and she isn't missed.
 

There's still a little while left on Michelle Collins' contract.  Time enough to make us regret her departure, if the writers really try; after all, once she goes, Leanne won't be left with any relatives who aren't Platts.  Now that she's free of the Rovers there's time to make Stella fun and interesting before she bows out.  Alternatively, someone could lock her in the cellar at the Bistro for six months; I suspect that many of the viewers won't be bothered either way.


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Ginger Nuts

Last night's Corrie ended on a bombshell: Faye's bullying of Simon had resulted in a report to the police.  It seemed that the young Miss Windass was going to be getting a visit from the fuzz in the near future.  Across the nation, viewers turned to their loved ones and said, "Good."

How did it all go so wrong for the Windass family?  They are, by quite some margin, the most tedious family in the Street at the moment.  They haven't reached the levels of boredom induced by the Mortons (a.k.a the Family of Sinbad) but your heart sinks when you see their names appear on the EPG.  Gary and Izzy have more problems with baby Jake.  Katie is upset.  Anna has an argument with Faye.

It could have been radically different.  The Windasses were introduced as the new "family from hell", a 21st century version of the Battersbys.  They had a comedy surname and everything.  They started by ordering a kitchen from Joe McIntyre and then refusing to pay for it; Tina and David's perfectly reasonable response was to set it on fire.  Next thing you knew, the Windasses were moving into Gerry's old home, though how they managed to move up from their scabby estate to a well appointed modern three bedroom house (with luxury shed) was never satisfactorily explained.
 

Perhaps they used their criminal connections; because the Windasses that moved into Coronation Street in 2008 were part of one of Weatherfield's most notorious families.  Graeme visibly blanched when he heard their name, and he'd just come out of a young offenders institution.  The clearest sign of this dodgy past was Uncle Len, who was every Gallagher rolled up into one sheepskin jacketed package.  He didn't so much walk down the cobbles as swagger, his legs so far apart you'd think he was doing an impression of Viz's Buster Gonad.  Uncle Len was bent as a nine bob note, and didn't care who knew it.  He was cocky and violent, and was suspiciously similar to his nephew Gary, which made all the viewers give Anna side eyed looks.  Oh aye, we thought.  There's a big revelation to come out over the Christmas table in 2010.

We were, after all, baffled by what little chirpy Anna saw in Eddie.  His long ginger hair dangling pathetically round a hangdog face, a fag dripping from his fingertips, a crutch welded to one arm just in case the Social were watching.  Steve Hulson brought every part of his considerable comic arsenal into Eddie Windass, making believable as the kind of man you end up sitting next to on the bus, the man who moans about his lot while stinking of Rothmans and Poundland aftershave.  Eddie was a loser, the biggest loser the Street had seen in a very long time, and a considerable part of Anna's life was devoted to mopping up after him.

Gary Windass, meanwhile, was wandering around the Street with his hands down the front of his trackie bottoms, leaning on the garden walls and lasciviously staring at Tina's legs.  The textbook definition of "a bit of rough", he was soon diddling Rosie Webster as a way of passing his afternoon, robbing copper from Joe's lock up, and generally showing David up for the spoilt little bad boy he really was.  While David's devilish plans ran to "sending some forged birthday cards", Gary was smacking blokes in the jaw and gobbing into the gutter.  No wonder Tina was intrigued by his hot ginger ways.

But almost immediately after arriving, all the corners were knocked off the Windass family.  Eddie was introduced as a benefits cheat of long standing; it was strongly implied that his disability allowance had been granted on account of his crippling allergy to work.  A couple of months on the Street though and Anna was badgering him to get a job at Streetcars, while she was installed behind the counter at Roy's Rolls.  Anna, it turned out, was the only one of the Windasses with a conscience; you got the feeling that she'd spent many a night fretting in front of a gameshow, wondering where her men were and scoffing bakewell slices to ease the pain.  She revealed this heartfelt side in a teary soliloquy to Gail Platt outside a prison, where she begged her not to dob in her Gary for his latest  crimes.

While Anna and Eddie were going straight, Len was just going.  He was at their house so often in the early days he may as well have taken the spare bedroom; suddenly he vanished, presumably to the same place that Jerry Morton's scary haunted father went to.  Overnight, everyone just stopped mentioning him, and Gary - who'd looked up to him as a better role model than the decrepit Eddie - simply accepted his disappearance with a shrug.

Gary was changing as well.  After David conned him into robbing Audrey's house, as part of their interminable feud, he was banged up for six months.  He came out a little more subdued and then, after a chat with Gail's gay dad Ted (who also subsequently vanished into the Len-hole; perhaps we should start an investigation?), Gary decided to join the Army.  Our teenage thug was suddenly a member of Her Majesty's Forces - quite a turnaround.  This probably had nothing to do with the fact that Mikey North got attacked by a drunken idiot who had problems differentiating between "stuff that happens on ITV" and "real life".  After that, you could understand if Mikey asked the writers to make him a bit less confrontational and a bit nicer.  On the plus side, it gave him a broken nose which added to his scally charm.

The writers perhaps went too far.  The Gary that returned was shell-shocked, yes, but he'd lost some of his bile and spite and become a bit... bland.  The old Gary wouldn't have bothered romancing Izzy - he'd have dropped his trousers and said "Do you want a go on it or what?"  Now he was coquettishly loitering around her, devoted to her, locking her up in her own home to protect her.  Ok, that last one isn't exactly the actions of a modern day Romeo, but at least he cared.

In the meantime, Anna was coping with empty nest syndrome by adopting.  Eddie wasn't exactly overkeen on the idea; he seemed to go along with it just because it would annoy Steve and Becky, who were trying for the same thing.  Of course, the McDonalds were rejected as parents, while the Windasses were seen as perfect fostering material; in unrelated news, Weatherfield Social Services received a massive "must do better" from the Audit Commission.  They were given Faye, a troubled young girl with a devilish streak.

Faye is actually a miraculous character; she's had a lifetime in care and children's homes, has a waster of a father in Tim, a smack-addicted mother, and a decade of psychological trauma and fear of abandonment.  We should all want to care for her and understand her pain, but for some reason, all we want to do is drop her in the canal.  Poor Ellie Leach is doing a fine job with a character that is, and always will be, deeply unlikeable.  In fact, it's possible that Grace was only invented so that Faye would look better in contrast.

Eddie seemed to have a similar reaction to the viewers, and after a few months of putting up with Faye, he wandered off to Germany.  It was a distinctly low-key exit, and didn't really make any sense.  He deserved better; perhaps they could bring back Auf Wiedersehn Pet to catalogue his antics on the worksites in Frankfurt?  Gary, in particular, greeted the destruction of his parents' twenty year relationship with little more than a "meh", suggesting that perhaps he still has a bit of shrapnel wedged in his skull somewhere.

Newly single Anna was now free to hook up with Owen Armstrong, because after Eddie a borderline psychopath seemed like a great catch.  Owen showed his devotion by buying the house with her in it, which seems like a bit of a feudal way to romance a lady to me, a bit Droit de seigneur.  It actually worked out remarkably well as Gary was busy squiring Owen's daughter Izzy; the resultant foursome was a bit crypto-incestuous, but let's face it, we've seen worse on the Street.

Izzy and Gary decided that the perfect way to enhance their love would be a child; unfortunately Izzy's disability meant that she was unlikely to carry a baby to term.  "Hey!" said Gary, in a moment of inspiration, "Why don't we ask that girl I spent almost a year trying to seduce out from under her boyfriend if she'll lend us her womb?"

"I'd be happy to," Tina replied.  "I've completely forgiven you and your family for contributing to my father's bankruptcy and subsequent mental collapse.  My uterus is yours to play with."

So began a year long odyssey of tedium and gynaecological meddling that destroyed any remaining shred of fondness we might have had for the Windass/Armstrong clan.  Even Katy literally giving birth in a manger couldn't bring a ray of sunshine to watching Izzy wail and Owen lose his rag for no apparent reason.  Gary became so sensitive and caring, Dr Miriam Stoppard asked him to fill in for her when she took a holiday from her problem page; the ballsy young thug who'd roger you in the ginnel and not even drop his chips was a very distant memory.  When Tina finally gave birth, it was a far greater cause for national joy than the birth of HRH Prince George: finally! we thought.  This storyline is over!

In the meantime, Katy had an illicit bunk up with Ryan Connor; it was hard to have any sympathy with her because Chesney is basically a sentient glove puppet, and has spent a decade on the Street being loveable and chirpy.  Anyone who makes his plasticine face go all crumbly and upset is naturally evil, and the audience wishes a pox upon their house.  It's similar to the current Faye vs Simon Barlow storyline; Simon is quite clearly the most adorable child in the north west, so we have no sympathy for anyone who makes him blub.  Couldn't they have picked on someone less personable?  I mean, Amy Barlow was right there.

Add in the gormless waste of space that is Tim, and number six is just a big hole of tedium at the moment.  There's no spark to any of them, and all their storylines seem to go on forever.  Perhaps the house is cursed - it's where Tracy Barlow murdered Charlie, after all, and she was replaced by the repulsive Family of Sinbad with their baffling familial relationships and horrible hair.  Remember in the Sixties when number 7 collapsed, and it was replaced by a park bench for twenty years?  Maybe the producers should consider that as a potential future storyline for the Windass house.  Preferably while they're all inside*.

*Except for lovely Gary.  His character may be dull as ditchwater now, but he's still a Hot Ginger.  He can stay.

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