State of the Street - December 2017

I was away most of November and there was too much to catch up on so we'll have to skip up to December.

Phelan is aiming all guns at Anna, determined to bring her down and using Seb to do it. He's expert at double talk, convincing Seb of what he thinks he remembers, kind of like that snake in Jungle Book hissing around his ears! Anna didn't get bail so she's locked up for now but when she hears about Gary's "death", she fights back. I should say, Gary's "alleged" death because I never did think he would be confirmed as dead. Why? Two words. Miracle. Christmas. Tis the season and all that. I half expected him to show up unharmed at the holidays but we didn't even have to wait that long. It was maybe two days and he was back as if nothing had happened. Oh, you were worried? I fail to understand why he didn't guess that all of his stuff got blown up leading his family to think he was dead. Ok, his phone was destroyed but surely he could have found a phone that worked somewhere.

Doesn't matter. David found out about Nicola and the baby while he was gone and tried to keep it secret out of respect for Sarah's grief but when Gary came back he tore him a new one. Gary promised to tell Sarah the truth but David just couldn't wait. Now I didn't think that David told her who the woman was but on Christmas Day, Sarah was drunk and screamed at Eileen across the road about Nicola and Gary and that Nicola wasn't in Australia after all. Continuity error? Very possibly.  I reckon Gary would have chickened out anyway. Sarah was rightly pissed and threw Gary out. I wonder if that's the final flop in a relationship that's been non stop flip flop, on again off again! I don't blame her and she shouldn't take him back ever but it's a soap.

And Anna? She ended up losing Kevin over the scandal and ran away from a  hospital visit. She didn't get very far, and the escape alone is likely going to have her banged up even if she's proven innocent of the original Seb charges. While she was hiding out, she assaulted Eileen at the builder's yard with a bolt cutter, thinking she was Phelan coming up the stairs. That's going to be another thing that will keep her behind bars.  I'm sure we're on the slope downward to Phelan's comeuppance but I'm still not sure how it's going to come about. Anna must be involved with it somehow because she's due for payback for what Phelan did to her. Whether it will be a fight to the death is anyone's guess. Maybe Eileen and/or Nicola will be part of it, too, so that Phelan ends up with nothing, no wife, no daughter, no granddaughter. All of his self-illusion can come crashing down.


Mary struggled with her worries about baby George and why it seemed to her people weren't investigating deep enough into why the baby kept getting ill. When Jude and Angie decided to return to South Africa, however, Mary's friends rallied round to help prevent it. Tracy stole the passports and Norris went all superhero on them! I'm not quite sure what he thought his protest would do but it was nice of him anyway.

They finally discovered that the child is allergic to the kind of sugars found in fruit. Jude and Angie have a lot of sucking up to do even if Mary is inclined to look the other way since they're going to stay in Weatherfield for now. I'm not even going to get huffy at Jude for his attitude towards Mary for giving him up as a baby. Let's face it, it's a lot to get your head around. The circumstances came from rape and the baby was taken from her and he didn't seem to register that but I don't really think that would be out of the ordinary for someone to react like that at first. They'd come around eventually and it looks like Jude is starting to think in the right direction. If Angie hadn't been so preoccupied, struggling with her post natal depression and thinking Mary was trying to hurt her baby, she'd probably have told Jude a thing or two to sort him out!


Robert has had an operation to determine the severity of the testicular cancer and his hair has gone completely silver. I never thought of him as dying his hair but yes, if he did, then a spell in prison with no access to it would result in a grey head of hair. It still doesn't make him any more interesting. He's so much in denial that he does what he always does, gambles at the casino and puts his business in jeopardy. That was the intent of the cancer storyline I think, rather than a story about him struggling to recover. Lop one of them off and do a test and it's all clear. This is about financial woes.

This time, Michelle is a business partner and it'll be all about her, too. Not that she needed any excuses for that. What does she do to help? Stage a robbery and scam the insurance company. Good Grief. Steve found out about the financial problems, though, and I think he wants to get involved which is going to put a bump in the newly paved road of his and Tracy's reunion. Don't get me started on that. I don't agree with it and it feels forced. Why does everyone have to be part of a relationship?

Aidan and Alya's business struggles to get off the ground. Not really interested, sorry. The end result was 1. Aidan getting Carla to back him to buy the factory off Johnny and 2. dealing with the company they've got an order for, a company whose  owners are nasty pieces of work, sexist and racist to start with and every other kind of "ist" you probably care to mention. Still not really interested in this one though it is good to see Carla back.

Johnny wants to retire to Spain on the insurance money from the factory. Here's another plot hole/continuity error. I thought Aidan's was the name on the partnership papers. Is Carla still a majority partner? Doesn't she have a say in the matter? Or did she sign over/sell her share to Johnny when she left town? Anyway, Carla's back, she's decided to back Aidan and she's got a secret.Turns out she's dealing with kidney failure and only Roy knows. If she needs a relative for a transplant, I've got a bad feeling. You don't have to get a transplant from a dead person, a donor has a healthy kidney removed and can live with one quite well but what if that's what happens? One of Carla's family is identified as the donor and dies? It would have to be either her brother Rob or Aidan or Kate. Johnny's MS would preclude him as a family donor and the only other blood relative, little Liam, is too young, I would think.


Luke has decided that 12 months of Andy's mail piling up is time to investigate rather than just send it all back saying "Not at this address". They believe Andy left town after he left Steph so there was no reason to believe he was ever coming back. Andy's old mate says Andy never got to Bristol and for some reason Luke thinks Pat Phelan was the next one to ask even though the two of them were barely nodding acquaintances to most of the Street.  Is it because Phelan was the landlord? He lied and said he's been in touch with Andy who may be in Birmingham. Is this going somewhere? Will Luke find the bodies in the pond?

Billy turned himself in over attacking Peter, gave police a chance to connect his fingerprints to an old robbery and burned out car. Turns out he was a bad lad back in the day. Also, he was responsible for the car crash that killed Susan Barlow or he thinks he was. He was in the car when it crashed and didn't insist on them calling for help so he's the designated guilty party in his mind. It's even worse, and quite a huge coincidence that he ends up living in the same street as the orphaned boy, Adam, but that's a soap for you.

Then we were in for weeks of Billy looking dreadful, feeling guilty and shamed and teetering on the fence of whether to tell Adam the truth or not. It was never a matter of if Billy would confess to one of the Barlows, it was a matter of when and Christmas seemed as good a time as any! For his honesty, Billy spent the night in the boot of Peter's cab and when Peter let him out, he lost his balance and went over a cliff! He survived, just, and the Barlows have closed ranks. Billy doesnt tell that Peter was the one more or less responsible for his injury and they won't tell he was more or less responsible for Susan's death. But it looks like Adam might be the loose cannon there.

Todd didn't know any of the car stuff but things were getting out of hand and he knew that Billy told Peter of his original involvement and we're told that Todd decided to take Summer away somewhere to get away from all the aggro. In reality, the actor has been fired and has left the show abruptly so this is a hasty rewrite. I hope they bring Summer back, though, at some point.


Rana and Kate are in a full blown affair even though Rana is now legally married to Zeedan and protests that she loves him as well as Kate. She knows what the scandal will do to her family and how they'll react towards her and she's scared stiff. I'm surprised because throwing traditions to the wind in the past never seemed to bother her. I'm not all that interested in this storyline either because, while this sort of thing happens and straight women discover they're attracted to women, I never bought Rana as one of those women. Then again, I've never really been overly interested in Rana at all and that's probably the main reason this storyline lets me down.

Chesney is going to be marrying Sinead in the new year and he's being busy trying to undermine her tentative friendship with Daniel by setting up Daniel to look bad in her eyes. Daniel has decided to do the same thing in return and prove that he's the one Sinead really loves. Tracy is helping Chesney for reasons only known to her and Adam is goading Daniel on. Feels like school yard shenanigans to me. 

Christmas and the subsequent holiday season on the Street really felt lacking in my opinion. In the old days, the pub was the centre of celebrations both on Christmas Day after happy and unhappy families coped with the holiday and on New Year's Eve. This year, we barely saw anyone in the pub on the 25th and aside from a pre-party scene in the pub on New Year's Eve, the rest of the celebrations were in the Bistro with only a bare handful of characters rather than a packed Rovers full of old friends. I wrote more about it here.

Hope you all have a wonderful 2018!


Tvor (Twitter @tvordlj)