It's been a busy week in soapland as Tina McIntyre's exit storyline led to high drama in Coronation Street and Hollyoaks were the surprise winners of the Best Soap gong at the British Soap Awards.
Here, in the second edition of our new soaps column Soap Spy, Daniel Martin gives his reaction to the latest talking points.
There she went. Tina McIntyre, Weatherfield's moral conscience and friend of the pensioners, was shoved from a rooftop as iffy penance over some dodgy hairdryers and an affair with Peter Barlow that nobody who understands what it is to fancy men has ever been able to compute.
I've been angry about all of this since January, which is a shame because, eventually, it delivered as Corrie always does.
In the big 9pm week we always get when the Britain's Got Talent finals are on, there were even laughs along the way. Peter can now add bad provincial snooker player lookalike and "jellyfish" (yes, Liz!) to his rap sheet, and Kate Ford got to relish in Tracy's comedy new role as bargain bin crime queen. She's so much more fun with lower stakes than she ever was a murderer, which of course is part of the problem...
In the end, Tina was given a final gobby soliloquy before smooth criminal Rob (yay, a storyline!) caved her head in with lead piping, finally delivering the murder we were promised. Which was just as well since I was in the middle of drafting a strongly-worded letter to Ofcom over false descriptions...
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Yes, Corrie delivered on the nights. But I still can't get on board with this Topshop lioness being turned into a treacherous and simpering love fool so quickly and conveniently. "Feisty" is lazy shorthand for female characters given personality by male writers. But in a show predicated on camp catfights (sorry, another one there), we were denied the final showdown between the Street's two fiercest women? Seriously?
Alison King was as brilliant as Alison King always is. And Michelle Keegan deserved the year's biggest send-off. But just as much and in every single sense, Tina deserved better. So I'm taking a lead from the Skins fans on Tumblr over the tragic end to the Emily and Naomi story by denying it happened altogether ("I'm aliiiiiiiiiive bitches!!!").
In my reality, Tina and her hair straighteners are off on a one-way Easyjet to Magaluf, dancing to Duke Dumont records with nice Tommy in a parallel world where Chris Fountain never made that rapey hip-hop video and Rob's having murderous hallucinations after weeks of putting up with Tracy and living on a diet of Deirdre's stuffed marrow. It's plausible.
The real historic development this week was the coronation of Hollyoaks as the Best Soap. This had never happened before, and can be explained by more reasons than proving the dividend you can reap when you put a Vote For Us slug at the end of every episode for a solid month.
Here was Hollyoaks' UKIP moment; never again will anyone be able to refer to the British soapscape as a three-party system. In the often-cynical business of show, the surprise, delight, shock and pride in the eyes of Team 'Oaks last Saturday is one of the most touching things I've ever seen. Also, they like foreigners.
The most impressive thing is that this really could have been it for Hollyoaks. Last year saw them lose a heroic group of favourites - Jacqui, Brendan, Cheryl, Rhys, Myra, Browning... and that's before you even consider the various nonentities killed off in the explosion. Yet in recasting almost the whole show, Hollyoaks has reinvented itself as an epic, suburban Wars of the Roses, just with gangsters who dress from the high street.
Everybody is probably related to everyone else. Alpha Hunk family the Roscoes were introduced only for their matriarch, Sandy, turning out to be the long-rumoured witness protection identity of Kathy Beale and the natural mother of Darren. While his schoolteacher wife Nancy is looking like repeating the mistakes of her sister Becca by having an affair with a schoolboy and getting promptly murdered, he was almost linked with the master criminal Blake-Savage family when Sienna pretended to be pregnant with his kid.
That family, through Maxine's pregnancy by demon headmaster Patrick, gets linked to the late Costellos and, through her cousin Riley's kid with Mercedes, the McQueens. And McQueen DNA is everywhere. Carmel is getting it on with Sonny Valentine, the brother of her late husband Calvin's kid with her cousin Theresa (who she murdered).
Meanwhile, John Paul is endlessly on the verge of shagging Ste, who nearly shagged his own dad Danny, father to Leela and Tegan and granddad to Peri and Rose - whose dad Fraser links her back to the Devine/Black family, who then link back to when Clare plotted against Max Cunningham, whose sister is Cindy, who was married to Tony, who is now patriarch to the O'Connors. And they're all sex offenders.
Yet even at its most ludicrous, in the same beat Hollyoaks 2014 is capable of soberly delivering harrowing stories like male rape, transgender struggles and ongoing domestic abuse alongside things like Sienna's theft of Nancy's life, which have never actually been done before.
The Hollyverse has its own laws. And I'm sorry to be the one to break it to everyone, but watching Hollyoaks is both exhilarating and exhausting. Yes, watching Hollyoaks is a lot like having sex.
