Carnage on Coronation Street

TV REVIEW: Coronation StreetUTV, TV3, Monday-Friday Come Dine with MeChannel 4, Monday
Coronation Street: 50 Years, 50 MomentsUTV, Tuesday Every Heart Beats True: The Jim Stynes StoryRTÉ1, Tuesday

BY ’ECK, a cold chill must have gone through the dressing rooms on the set of

Coronation Street

when someone noticed the show’s 50th birthday was coming up. In real life, marking a half-century means a bit of a knees-up, but in Weatherfield it was always going to be actor Armageddon, with a flurry of P45s coming from the sky like ticker tape.

The hysteria in Corriehas been ratcheting up all year. We've had runaway teenage lesbians, alcoholism, a fire in the knicker factory, Sally's cancer, domestic violence, suspected child abuse, kidnapping, murder and Jack's death – and that's only since the summer. At this stage no one would be surprised if a swarm of locusts swept in from nearby Rosamund Street, so a huge gas explosion in the club, followed by a tram crash-landing on people's heads, seemed almost restrained. It was very good, though, and despite the hype Monday's two-parter was chock-full of genuine suspense – mostly of the "Who's dead? Oh please don't let it be Rita" variety.

The backdrop was Molly leaving Tyrone and taking baby Jack. “You can go, but you’re not taking my baybee,” said Tyrone after some heart-rending pleading. “Jack’s not your baybee; I ’ad an affair,” said Molly, prompting unfortunate visual memories for viewers of ’er and Kevin in the local Travelodge, “for months”, she added, just to twist the knife. On Monday night she still hadn’t revealed that Kevin was the dad, so that’s a grenade ready to be thrown. “Get out, ya evil slag,” roared a broken Tyrone as Molly pushed the buggy out the door.

Meanwhile Leanne’s hen party was in full swing at the Rovers and Peter’s stag party at the club was getting to the maudlin stage. Clues about who might be getting wiped out in the fire-tram-crash combo came thick and fast. “I luf Clurr,” squeaked Ashley. (That’s him or her wiped out, then.) “Leanne saved my life,” said Peter. (Surely one of them will die.) Earlier, boring Nick had advised Rita to “Live for the day.” (Uh-oh.) There were loads of these McGuffins – it was like a game of Cluedo.

The final scene in Monday's two-parter was brilliant. As the fire raged at the end of the street and the tram derailed from the overheated tracks and headed for the Kabin – who knew it was up there at all? There are only ever buses in Corrie– Ken was roaring in the middle of the street, his floppy grey hair gleaming in the firelight, like a tragic king surveying his kingdom. The edits came quick and fast: the wall in Dev's shop falling on Molly and baby Jack, Becky racing through the streets to find Max, Rita lying on the Kabin floor, penny sweets falling from the shelves on to her prone body, and John (with his ever more ridiculous plot lines) emerging from his house having bludgeoned his crazed stalker, Charlotte, with a lump hammer but copping that the mayhem might just give him a way to hide the crime.

It was Corrie's big week, with daily episodes. On Tuesday and Wednesday there was more drama, more hysteria (Gail's screeches broke the sound barrier), miscellaneous acts of heroism and even some convincing post- traumatic stress syndrome in a moving scene featuring just-returned-from-Afghanistan Gary Windass. It was all leading to Thursday's episode: an hour of live TV drama and a technical achievement for the Corrieteam.

It revealed as many extraordinary performances (Leanne, Sally) as manic over-the-top ones (Steve, Dev – why oh why couldn’t a steel beam have fallen on Dev?). You wouldn’t have guessed the ambitious experiment was live unless you knew: no fluffed lines, no glitches. The first episodes in 1960 were live, but with their stagy indoor sets they were far removed from the multiple locations and simultaneous storylines that featured on Thursday. Some of the bit parts were hopeless, including the most unlikely-looking doctor, who diagnosed Peter with what sounded like a cardiac tapenade – a hearty new olive dip, perhaps? And what a tear-jerker. There was a birth (you’d think Fiz was pushing out a whole tram carriage the racket she was making) and a marriage (Leanne and Peter’s deathbed nuptuals – not a dry eye in the house. Just as he said ’til death do us part he, well, departed). There were two more deaths. The beam did for Ashley (poor Clare, though she did get some quality scenes out of it) and, uncharacteristically, there wasn’t a squeak out of him.

Meanwhile, trapped in the rubble of Dev’s shop, a dying Molly just couldn’t keep her trap shut and told Sally, who was there holding her hand, that Kevin is Jack’s dad. It’s fair to say that didn’t go down well – but dropping a dying woman’s hand and legging it is a bit mean.

Meanwhile, despite several “but what about Rita?” shouts at the TV, at the end of the live episode she was still on the floor in the Kabin, her legendary russet bouffant now ominously dusty and surrounded by an assortment of boiled sweets.

CHANNEL 4'S Come Dine with Mehas become as stale as a day-old croissant: you know a series is reaching the end of its best-before date when it starts doing celebrity versions. At least this week's Coronation Streetspecial (strange to hear the jingle on Channel 4) featured celebrities that viewers might recognise – that's if they're Corriefans. It helped answer the question of what old soap stars do; for those whose services were dispensed with this week as a result of Corriegeddon, it was a horror show. The four competing dinner-party hosts were Bet Lynch (Julie Goodyear), Reg Holdsworth (Ken Morley), Des Barnes (Philip Middlemiss) and Kelly Crabtree (Tupele Dorgu) – names, apart from Goodyear, that aren't familiar. Boy, did they try hard, and how not like their lovable screen selves they seemed. (Except for Dorgu, who played a mouthy machinist until six months ago. But she was only acting dim and gobby – on Come Dine with Meshe was genuinely horrified by the dinosaurs she was dining with.)

As the Bettabuy supermarket manager, Ken Morley was hilarious and is a regular in greatest-Corrie-moments compilations, but here he farted, belched and dribbled, and when it came to Goodyear's turn to host the dinner she had a toy-boy butler dressed only in a leopard-print thong – run up, perhaps, from one of her cast-offs. She, meanwhile, wore a studded dog collar and whipped her guests. Even Dave Lamb's usually hilarious voiceover – one part Carry Onmovies to two parts pleased-with-itself Twitterish irony – couldn't save the day, and he sort of gave up in the end.

AS IT WASan anniversary week, a trip down memory lane was always on the cards, and Coronation Street: 50 Years, 50 Momentsshowed that it has always been a fan of the natural-disaster method of cast-pruning. In November 1969, in what was supposed to be the first episode in colour, the plot called for a day out in the Lakes, and all the cast were put on a bus that crashed, killing off a couple of characters. But someone forgot the colour film, and the dramatic scenes were shown in black and white.

So the next episode, set in a hospital with the cast in some rather fetching candlewick dressing gowns, was in colour. The compilation was a reminder of the gripping plots that really did grab newspaper headlines in the UK, such as Deirdre’s trial for killing Samir, which was mentioned in parliament, Catherine Cusack’s turn as the nanny from hell and Bet Lynch’s exit when, chandelier earrings wobbling, head-to-toe in leopard print, she headed off to the sunshine – to Tenereffeey. Those were the days.

Survival tactics Story of a sportsman’s fight against cancer is brimming with life force

Documentaries are often billed as intimate, but they rarely get as inside their subject, or indeed as up close and personal, as Every Heart Beats True: The Jim Stynes Story. Stynes is not well known here – certainly not outside GAA circles – but Stynes is a sporting celebrity in Australia, where his success in AFL and his phenomenal charity work with young people have earned him official honours, fame and huge popularity.

When the footballer called a press conference in June last year to announce his cancer diagnosis it was covered live across news channels in his adopted home. He was given nine months to live, and this film followed him through gruelling tests and treatments. But it was his remarkable attitude and his fighting approach to his illness that leaped off the screen. His achingly sad wife, Sam, spoke about his combination of “white-coat treatments and alternative ones” – and some were from the far fringes of alternative therapy. We saw him giving himself coffee enemas and drinking his own urine.

He’s still alive, though. At the end of the film, looking a little frail and with an understanding that he just might not beat this, Stynes quoted the Dalai Lama. “ ‘If you really want to understand life, you have to begin with death,’ and I just think there is such great wisdom in it. If you can let go of that fear in life, then you can do anything and live out the life you were born to live.” Powerful stuff.