He's Sensitive to Atmospheres

It was all about anxiety in Corrie tonight, whether it was Tyrone confessing to Kevin about the cupboard full of neglected paperwork at the garage, or kazoo-voiced Karla attending her stepfather’s funeral in an outfit complete with a silver crucifix hanging upside down, like something out of The Exorcist.

Everyone was facing up to their fears, it seemed. Poor Gail was terrified  in her own home by an intruder who looked like a careworn version of Les Dennis, one-time host of Family Fortunes. Actually, the intruder seemed even more anxious than Gail did (‘Take anything you want! Don’t murder us!’) Perhaps he thought Gail might corner him and force him into another of her horrible marriages.

Kylie came to the rescue, pounding down the stairs half-dressed as Uma Thurman (apparently for a Quentin Tarantino-themed erotic fantasy game she and David were rashly planning) and she chased Les Dennis down the street. Fizz failed to get the licence number of Les Dennis’s van, and this is the kind of thing that gives me anxiety – being called upon to be able to focus on a moving licence plate and memorize it. Fizz was hopeless at it, too.

Later on in the Rovers she was giving Tyrone a stiff talking to about letting the paperwork slide, and really, both she and Kevin were both a bit short with the dumpy tyke, I thought. After all, wasn’t it Kevin who had an affair with Tyrone’s wife Molly (who later got crushed under the tram crash) and who took away the son Tyrone thought was his own? Some of these people have short memories, it seems, and that’s a bit anxiety-inducing, too.

It was Tim – Sally’s new beau - who was described as being ‘sensitive to atmospheres’ as they came to share an alcove in the Rovers with Tyone and Fizz. Sally was wittering on about making spring rolls for tea and what a faff on her special oriental platter can be.

I don’t need to hear anymore about Tina and Peter and their stolen afternoons of awkward conversations and clammy sex and sprayed-on sweat in Manchester hotels or about Karla believing she’d be a bad mother and looking at old photo albums with her mardy sister. We were meant to be feeling the pathos as she dithered over a termination, but I was distracted by her overly-vivid description of her mother’s smelly house coat. ‘Underneath my expensive clothes and gobbiness, I’m just as common as she was.’