Hollyoaks launched a new issue-based storyline late last month as Cindy Cunningham began showing signs of a mental illness. In a surprise twist, show bosses have brought back Andrew Moss - who played the late Rhys Ashworth - as part of the ongoing plot.
In the latest edition of our soaps column Soap Spy, Daniel Martin offers his thoughts on the story so far.
After two year of hard knocks, Hollyoaks' village veteran Cindy Cunningham has developed a bipolar disorder. And this being Hollyoaks, it's manifesting itself by her imagining she's still having it away with dead Rhys Ashworth, who appears in visions beside baby Hilton's hospital bed and urges her to do terrible things like steal her mates' lottery tickets. Since she's always been what you'd politely call 'unpredictable', nobody's yet cottoned on that something isn't quite right.
Cindy is one of the 'Oaks most evergreen characters, and it's credit to Stephanie Waring and her acting that despite a number of personality transplants that shouldn't really have worked, she's managed to maintain a mostly consistent character. Yet up until now, she's rarely taken complete centre stage in her own right.
Cindy was the 'Oaks original pramface. Knocked up by Stan, she kept her pregnancy a secret, initially dumping Holly on a doorstep and then trying to suffocate her. But after that, as her sister Dawn succumbed to leukaemia, her other sister Jude became the show's first great vampy villainess and her brother Max became one of its best-loved characters, Cindy was left mousy on the sidelines.
When she returned years later, Cindy had become a piece of work, gleefully gold-digging her way around this village until finally bagging herself a millionaire, Alastair, whose granddaughters had an unfortunate habit of getting murdered. Possibly just as well since Cindy very quickly spunked away any inheritance they might have had to speak of. But not before a few months of hilarity when she started wearing lurid tiaras and buying extravagant snakes. Different times.
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More recently she's gone through two Hollyoaks rites-of-passage; a marriage to Tony and getting away with murder (although that Doctor Browning had it coming).
And now, down on her luck slumming it behind the counter at Price Slice, with actual female friends in Mercedes and Lindsey, and shacked up on the houseboat-of-innumerable-bedrooms with Dirk the friendly bear, she's become something approaching a stable character and a decent mum to Holly. Who, after a few rounds of personality roulette herself, has emerged as normal teenage girl - something that has never exactly been Hollyoaks' strongest suit. Although even now nobody, certainly not her or the writers, seem to remember that she's actually still related to Tom.
Of course, this slew of stability could not be allowed to last. And after enduring a murder attempt, a long-winded murder cover-up, a premature birth and a baby on life-support, Cindy has buckled under the pressure and is on a cruel descent into bipolarity. And it's not all Ghost Rhys. We saw her frantically scrubbing down the boat when she should have been at Hilton's bedside.
Like the recent rape and domestic abuse stories, here's another example of Hollyoaks doing issues well. (To wit: "Want advice on real issues?" "Yes! A minibus just ploughed through my wedding venue and killed half the local sixth-formers!") Because bipolar really is one of the issues that people who haven't been through it don't completely understand. And Andrew Moss's surprise return as Rhys the devil-on-the-shoulder has been one of the show's most creative and compelling twists of recent times.
Also, I love their creative ways of bringing back dead characters. My friend Paul and I regularly lobby the producers to air a ghost-only episode. It would feature either Tom having a dream about all his dead relatives, or Carmel holding a séance to congress with all the village's murder victims. So far they've poo-pooed it as being a bridge too far. But for now, we have bipolar Cindy. And that's enough.
