The lights are growing dim for poor Alma Sedgewick (as was) of Coronation Street, elegantly wasting away with cancer, and sales of tissues are bound to rise on the night she expires. Reportedly, actor Amanda Barrie was not best pleased by this plot development. It seems that Barrie - an astonishingly youthful 65 - wanted to ride off into the sunset with her dull boyfriend when she retired from the series, but Granada bosses insisted on a more harrowing farewell.
It's an unpleasant end for one of the Street's more realistic and likeable characters. Not a comic figure like Vera or the much-missed Mavis, or a drama queen like Sally or Gail, Alma is a no-nonsense, loyal friend. Though Alma is sometimes let down by her emotional responses, the actor still sensitively manages to suggest depths of secret pain and loss in the character. Perhaps it was this subtle air of hidden regret that prompted Coronation Street's writers to come up with the terminal illness story.
What really qualifies Amanda Barrie for "cult heroism" is her pre-soap life as a star of Carry On films in the 1960s. She was a saucy minx in Carry on Cabby in 1963, and the following year played the title role on Carry On Cleo, which used the sets from the Taylor-Burton epic. A typical exchange: Cleopatra: "So you are the great Caesar." Caesar (Kenneth Williams): "You recognised me." Cleopatra: "I have seen your bust." Caesar: "I wish I could say the same!"
Amanda Barrie was born Shirley Broadbent in Ashton-Under-Lyne, Lancashire, in 1935. She had a fiercely-ambitious stage mother, and was appearing before the public in talent shows from the age of three. Her grandfather, Ernest Broadbent, was a huge influence; he was a former railwayman who invested his golden handshake in northern theatres.
"He dragged me off a train once and introduced me to Buster Keaton because he thought I ought to meet him," says Barrie. "So it goes back a long way." Work in the north of England was scarce, and she moved to London in her teens. In the 1950s and 1960s, she appeared in dozens of West End shows, often as a dancer. She worked in television a lot, supporting Morecambe and Wise, Jimmy Edwards and other comics.
Because she could act well, she was invariably promoted from being one of the backing dancers to performing in sketches.
She joined Coronation Street as a regular in 1988, although she'd first appeared in the show a few years earlier to run screen husband Jim Sedgewick's cafΘ. Things got a bit nasty in 1992 when Alma married the appalling Mike Baldwin, but after a few years they split up (we always knew she was too good for him).
Now we'll be watching her die, but no amount of "distressed" make-up (or lack of it) can rob Amanda Barrie of those fine cheekbones and glorious eyes. Carry on as long as you can, Cleo, chuck - and may your last words be: "Ooooooh, Matron.
For more on Amanda Barrie see: www.corrie.net and www.coronationstreet.co.uk