'I was Born Gobby'

SPOILERS BELOW!

Well, I missed out blogging last week – I think, because Corrie had started to depress me. This week it’s been going all guns blazing, with five nightly episodes set during the same, dark and dangerous night.

It’s all been a bit fraught, really.

Emily stuck to her sweet sherry in the Rovers, even when offered something stronger, during Tracey and Rob’s engagement party. Earlier in the day she’d taken a rather large consignment of Tina’s clothing in bin bags for her charitable causes. Tina was having a big clear out, but Emily didn’t think there was anything strange about that. Young ones don’t make clothing last, do they? They don’t hang onto anything.

Norris was agog with goings on. He knew that all the furore in the backroom at the Rovers was to do with Peter telling Carla – at last – about his ongoing affair with Tina, and how he’d almost – very nearly! – ran away to Portsmouth with her that very day. Carla went bananas – tooting her foghorn like crazy - and Norris was relating every single word he could pick up to the others in the bar.

Best moment in the whole recent slew of episodes: Peter – quivering, equivocating, simmering in his own alcoholic sweat – and being told that he’s a jellyfish. What an insult!

Everyone’s been having an overly-dramatic time. Even if they’re not being pushed off rooftops or having their skulls smashed in by handy crowbars. Even if they’re not slipping out of their own party to drive a vanful of stolen goods halfway across Manchester. It’s just one of those weeks when everyone’s sub-plot comes to a head and gets twined into a noisome fugue with all the other strands. So, while Tina overbalances on the edge of a rooftop (it was the weight of her gigantic earrings that swung it, I think) across the road there’s another long storyline reaching its climax as Anna decides to come clean to Owen about what she was forced to do with his sleazy boss. That scene went about as well as could be expected, with Owen turning in a performance rather like William Shatner’s in ‘Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock’ when he finds out what the Klingons have been up to.

It’s one of those hectic, bloodthirsty, ratings-hungry weeks on Corrie when they try to be Eastenders – a bit like the week with the crashing tram in 2010 – when you’re not quite sure who’s going to survive the special episodes unscathed. I must say, it isn’t my favourite kind of ‘event televsion’. It’s all infidelity and murder and sneaking around. I’m more on the side of the characters who seem to be the heart of the Street, to me – Norris, Emily, Mary and Kirk. They’re the kind of old fashioned characters, who’d never dream of running about with deadly weapons or stolen consignments of hairdryers or checking into mucky hotels for dubious purposes…

All the same, I can’t help feeling for Tina. Her sense that time was running out. She had nowhere to go. It was a singularly cruel ending for a character, I think. And it was compounded by her strange resurrection on Wednesday night. There was a touch of ‘Fatal Attraction’ in some of those moments: the way she rose up from the cobbles in order to give another monologue – ‘I was born gobby, me’ – it was almost uncanny.

There are two more nights of this stuff left.