The big, in all senses of the word, story of the week in Coronation Street has been Dobber. Dobber - quaintly called Dobber Dobson in the credits - is Toyah's new, indeed first, boyfriend. Poor Toyah Battersby: first she hero-worships Spider, becomes a vegetarian and turns into an ecowarrior. Feeling inadequate, she tries to prove she's not thick by taking lessons from boring ex-teacher Ken Barlow. Then she wanted to write for a teenage magazine (when they refused to publish she made a hoax bomb-threat). And when she took herself off to London she was taken hostage by a maniac.
But despite all that action she's an innocent abroad, a naive, easily-led teenager, but with a decent heart under the (less and less) brash exterior. And now they've found the perfect person to lead her astray. Dobber.
Dobber, in the north of England, apparently means big - your largest marble when you're a kid in the playground isn't a gollier or a steely or a glassie but a dobber. But I think they're getting at something else entirely. "And why's he called Dobber?" wonders Janice, Toyah's mother. "It's like, well, I don't like saying. Like he's got something to brag about . . . downstairs." Her layabout husband Les smirks. "Like me?"
Later Janice says to the insolent teen himself: "Dobber. What kind of name is that? Sounds like a horse." Only, it's obviously another attribute of a horse they're implying.
Anyway, this Dobber is a bad 'un - making Toyah steal from the cafe for him, pressurising her to sleep with him, and pushing aside her worries about being careful. Poor Toyah. Still, Dobber is a great addition to the cast - there's always great satisfaction having a thoroughly bad egg in a soap. And actor John Donnelly does a great job with the sneering, seductive, sullen looks.
Things aren't going well on the agriculture front in Ireland and farmers are up in arms about their dropping income because of reductions in prices for their animals. Keeping things realistic, Biddy and Miley are in financial trouble too, so Biddy resourcefully did a computer course during the long summer recess from filming Glenroe. But if you missed a beat, however, you'll find she's not working in an office at all, but is secretly toiling in a factory testing lightbulbs (well, someone's got to do it) while Miley is back on the farm telling everyone what a cushy number she has.
"It puts a strain on a marriage too, a wife out working," Dinny grumbles about Biddy's job. And this seemed to be Glenroe's theme of the week: Working women are taking over the shop, it seems. Or at least hoping to take over the Ritz cafe. Peggy, who has been working there for a while, is hoping to buy the Ritz now that it's on the market. But her traveller husband Blackie, trying to keep in her good books since they got back together after his fling (they're back in bed together, he hints to Miley - "we're operating again, this last week or so"), has been looking after the children, and not particularly liking it.
Blackie is apparently worried that the apronstrings will strangle him - his pal Johnny tells him "you're going to get the name for minding children and no one will offer you work". Decades of trapped women nod in agreement. "It's working mothers are forcing the prices up," reckons Stephen Brennan, always a font of wisdom, when they're talking about house and land prices. But there's an unlimited demand for workers who test lightbulbs.
Gender roles and expected behaviour have been thrown up in the air in EastEnders too. Failing businessman Roy had trouble fitting a new bag on the vacuum cleaner, while dim mechanic Ricky kicked up at the indignity of selling women's clothes in the market. (Then he decided instead to go on holiday with his pregnant wife Bianca - to a health farm. How very East End.) Meanwhile Tony's lying on the couch, bawling into the cushion over his broken heart, and over in the caff they've put on a poncey art exhibition. What is the world of Albert Square coming to?
Still, it's reassuring to know some things never change, like the thuggish attitudes of the Mitchell brothers who have been hovering in heat around Grant's mother-in-law Louise, while Grant's wife Tiffany is at the health farm. Grant suggests Phil go out with an old flame, "that blonde bird", but Phil shakes his head - "Nah, she had underarms like the Black Forest". Said the balding, reformed alcoholic, failed criminal with grease under his fingernails.
The working women in Coronation Street also have their woes - Liz has decided her husband Jim is "not the man I want, mobile or paralysed" and had a snog with the physio who's been treating the same paralysed (as opposed to formerly paralytic) Jim. Incidentally, the physiotherapist seems to spend an inordinate amount of time on this one case - what about the NHS cutbacks? Later, the knicker factory girls Hayley, Janice and Sally (who has lost control of her brain as well as her libido - we can see she and conman Greg are set for a fall) make their way back, giggling, to the factory after lunch. Sall's dull, whining husband Kev (more grease under the fingernails), seething with anger after she dumped him for Greg, poisonously hisses: "Women. It don't matter what they do, they're all on the same side . . . They're all on her side. We don't talk about it like women do. You know - what they like in bed, how they'd like to get rid of us. They do, women. It's all they ever talk about."
It makes Kev sound an embittered misogynist - and indeed that may be true of his character's current personality change - but it's the first time in ages we've seen evidence of any thought process at all with him.
And over in Fair City there are strange women coming out of the woodwork - after long-running character Helen Doyle's recent death her sister Yvonne appeared from Australia, and has lately moved back to Ireland and into Carrigstown. Only, does anyone remember ever seeing or hearing of an older sister Yvonne in the Doyle family before now?
