Corrie

And, of course, Jason Grimshaw was once Mr Gay Weatherfield.

Not to mention the number of killers and psychopaths on the cobbles!

Too many episodes now, not enough/any rehearsal time.

I’m not a violent person but I was so glad to see a certain person get his comeuppance, especially as he was boiling the kettle for his pot-coital cuppa at the time 

Edit: that’ll teach me for speaking too soon. 

I don't want to spoil anybody's enjoyment before watching replays of tonight's two episodes of Corrie but they have now been broadcast in the normal way and I was sickened and disgusted at what happened. Did other Corrie watchers enjoy the plotline that came to a climax tonight? I don't think that sort of violent story should be part of one of the Nation's favourite soaps. Is that what Tony Warren really had in mind for the future of his brainchild?

It is of course up to me to stop watching, but seeing a wonderful old episode from about 1984 rebroadcast this afternoon with Hilda Ogden, a very young Sally and Kevin, some splendid banter between Vera and Ivy as well as Jack and Terry Duckworth, and a young Gail about to commit a bit of casual adultery with a visiting Australian while husband Brian Tilsley was away in Edinburgh forcibly reminded me what an entertaining place Weatherfield used to be before rape and murder and various other heavy topics became the subject for some of the storylines.

What is the general view on tonight's events?

That storyline has been going for way too long and still not over even after last night's episodes. Corrie has always been the soap with high quality storylines and no one did comedy like them but this was pure sensationalism.
Their audience is very different from Eastenders but the writers seem to be heading in the same direction.
I'm all for a bit of drama but it's all getting a bit silly now. Part of the blame I think is the fact there are 6 episodes a week which is too much.
Go back to what you do best, strong female characters and comedy.

Well, there was a rather lame attempt at humour recently when Gina and Dev were caught in flagrante delictu in Sally's house, but that was just silly farce and lacked the charm that came from genuinely funny characters like Hilda Ogden and Annie Walker, especially when they were getting on their high horse and laying down the law on how people should behave.

As the Monkey just said, the Phelan story line was actually making an important, serious point regarding his treatment of Anna and Nicola's mother but this double murder just went too far. We have had previous psychopaths in Weatherfield but that's not why I watch Corrie. I can get as much drama as I want on other soaps, especially Eastenders, which I have given up watching for that very reason!

Actually, I think that's the answer. Switch over and watch something else for the middle of the evening on Monday, Wednesday and Friday or even find a new hobby altogether away from the TV! Reading, maybe?

Corrie now equals revenue to ITV which is why we now have six episodes a week with such sensationalist storylines. What upsets me is the fact that the "creatives" at ITV or production companies cannot come up with an original idea so that they don't need to flog the street so much.

Of course, a new idea would need time to bed in and gain an audience which means low advertising revenue, so why don't ITV try runs on one of their other three channels? And why am I not a big wig in telly??!!!!

Is there a case to be made for Corrie simply trying to move and keep up with the state of the world? I mean I guess there's supposed to be some form of escapism but really we're talking high melodrama here and I guess things have just become more, well, dramatic, over the years and maybe the writers want to reflect that for some sort of realism? I mean it's a soap opera, opera being the operative word. A dramatic work that examines the lives of its characters.

To me, it seems unreasonable to expect it to stay the same as it was in the 70's and 80's and those who remember the soap from that time may be remembering it better than it was thanks to nostalgia, even when watching those repeats on ITV3, which I have been doing, and if Corrie was the same now as it was then, it would be laughed off the telly. It may have reflected the real world then but that isn't the real world now.

They have so much to compete with to keep viewers interested and watching and they are never, ever going to please all of the people all of the time, but they do need to keep whatever their young audience is interested because they're the ones who will sit down with their kids in the years to come and introduce a whole new generation to Corrie! And believe me, a young fan base will have become so desensitised to graphic scenes that they wouldn't have even batted and eyelid.

I guess there are some exceptions, like last nights story line which seems to have drawn much criticism (for the plot as opposed to its graphic scenes) but, for me, most of the time they hit the mark more than enough to keep me watching every week.

It is in a lot of places. Corrie was always about the daily lives of friends and families, and even in the 1970s and 80s there was the odd sensationalist storyline, but give me those days any time.  But then I am a regular watcher of TV from way back and no, I don't think any of it 'would be laughed off the telly'.  The 1980s re-runs of The Bill are a good example of quality TV from the past (and that series went silly, too, eventually).

I miss the “characters” Corrie used to create, and they were “characters” which were three dimentional. I used to love the day-to-day sagas in the Kabin with Rita and Mavis, the couples like Hilda and Stan, Jack and Vera. And who will ever forget when the whole nation was gripped by the Ken/Deidre/Mike love triangle?

Nowadays every new character has to a) look gorgeous, and b) have little personality. They are created simply to work a storyline. And I honestly can’t keep up with who has been to bed with who in the Street now. Hasn’t every young character slept with each of their neighbours by now?

And why does no character in a soap ever watch a soap?

All this makes me wonder what happened. Were half the cast murdered by robots from Mars or something?

(It's a measure of how little faith I have in modern soaps that I wouldn't be surprised to find out that's exactly what happened.)