Corrie uses train crash terror to get back on track

There was a time when the height of excitement down Coronation Street was when Ena Sharples burped after too big a gulp of milk stout – now there are exploding nightclubs and derailed trains (not to mention bodies) lying all over the cobbles.

Proof, if proof were needed, that soap and real life are sometimes hard to separate comes in the fact that Manchester commuters with half an eye on the television ended up ringing up the Metrolink travel advice line to see if the service was still operating after the terrible crash.

Peter Barlow’s stag night certainly raised the bar – if you can mention bars in the presence of a now-dead but then-recovering alcoholic – because when someone says the night went down a bomb in future, they better be talking literally.

And he took wedding drama to a new level as well, marrying with his final breath before dying from a massive heart attack as Leanne silently calculated how much she’d get on the widow’s pension.At the same time, Molly was using her final moments to come clean to Sally who was inexplicably allowed through the cordon to hold the hand of her husband’s dying ex-lover.

And boy did Molly have a lot to get off her chest – pity for her that it wasn’t the steel girder that was pinning her to the floor. Hopefully too Sally cannot lift that girder because if she does, Kevin will be getting it in the head.

There was more going on in one hour on the Street than you’d get in the average lifetime – not least with a hen party where the hen wanted to marry her ex-husband more than her next husband, and a stag party where the stag was being pursued by Carla the cougar.

Then there was John, the most unlikely serial killer on the face of God’s green earth, who had taken a hammer to the only woman in soapland who was a bigger psychopath than his good self; unfortunately for him, he didn’t realise it would have taken a stake through the heart and a clove of garlic to see her off.

But while he thought he’d killed again, he was also becoming a father – and as with Peter’s wedding in ICU, there didn’t appear to be any problem with having half the cast in what is supposed to be a germ-free clinical room.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.