TV Eye: Like visiting old chums

Steve and Becky finally made it up the aisle - or to the registry office. Photo / Supplied

Hello Corrie, it's been a while. Fifty years, in fact - even if we are a year behind. Still, it seemed a good time to drop in for a brew. I haven't been by for a few years, but it's the festive season, and today is officially your 50th birthday - these seem good enough reasons to make up. Not that there was a tiff, more a drifting apart. I got a bit fed up with popping in and never knowing who was going to be in the Rover's, or Roy's Rolls, or the knicker factory (the places where you could once always count on knowing everybody's name). Because, well, a lot of those young folk, they do talk a load of rot, don't they?

There will always be Gail's place. You know what you're in for at our Gail's. There'll always be some loser bloke. There will always be tears and wails at Gail's. She'll always have that face on, the one like the just slapped puppy. There will always be, now, David the demonic son, who used to be such a lovely lad. Full of mischief, but boys will be boys, won't they? Whatever happened?

He'll either really go to the bad and end up in the clink alongside Deirdre's Tracy - which means that he escapes becoming the next Ken Barlow, by leaving the Street - or he'll undergo another transformation and become ... the next Ken Barlow. Stranger things have happened on Corrie. Stranger things happen all the time - they just take forever to happen.

There was a wedding last week. This was the wedding between Steve and Becky. This was not the first time they were supposed to have wed: the first time the bride got too bladdered to roll up the aisle. Never mind. There was a hen night. Betty was asked for some advice on marriage: "Fill the kettle at night in case they switch the water off."

There was a happy ending - in that the bride and groom made it up the aisle, in the registry office. (The drug squad popped in later, but that is a story to be continued ...) Still, the bride, even sober, was quite a sight: a Manchurian Lady Gaga crossed with a drag queen. You had to love the fag hanging out of that big gob of hers. Now that's class. Would Jim McDonald make the wedding? You prayed not, while knowing that he would. Liz turned up too - in a lolly-pink tracksuit and pale pink cowboy hat, on Deirdre's doorstep. At least she didn't wear that for the wedding, for which she changed into her mother-of-the-bride outfit: a twist on a something one might wear to a tart's party, with a nod to a flamenco dancer. You wouldn't want to upstage the bride. You can see why Liz hates Becky; no one, not even Liz can upstage Becky or beat her in the trash dressing stakes. The bride said about her new husband: "I love him when he's gagging for it." I love it when Corrie goes classy.

The best man got a word in. "Steve McDonald ... a pathetic, vain, dim-witted coward." I drank to that. There was more: "Loving Steve McDonald is no easy task - just ask the mother of his child or his two ex-wives. But you can't, can you? Because one's in prison and the other two are still running."

Now that's what I love about you Corrie. You can pop in after being away and catch up, just like that. All human life is here, which is why some of us have a love/hate relationship with the show. Or, as the waitress at Roy's Rolls put it: "All 'uman life's in 'ere! Does me 'ead in!"

Because we are behind, all human life is still here, even after the actors playing the characters have died or left.

Maggie Jones died in December last year. Her last scene screened in Britain nine days later. Here she's still lashing folk with that acid tongue. A trip to the butcher's shop is a chance for Blanche to have a go. She had a complaint about the last lot of pork chops. These would be very good, she was told, they came from a Gloucester Old Spot pig. "I don't," she said, "have to be on first-name terms with 'em, just so they're better than the last ones. I were fishing bits out of me dentures two days later."

That alone was worth popping in for, to see the folk you've known for so long, who have driven you mad for so long that they feel like rellies.

-TimeOut