By MICHELE HEWITSON
Alma dies tonight.
Saying so does not give anything away. This is Coronation Street after all. Once we learned that Alma had cancer, that she had refused all further treatment, had rejected quackery, and turned down Mike Baldwin's desperate offer to fly her to America in the hope of
a medical miracle, Alma was going to die.
When a character departs this way, Coronation Street's writers and script editors are not about to insult their audience by inserting a last-gasp cure, a mistaken diagnosis or Mike Baldwin making a pact with the devil to take Linda instead.
This ending was always going to be as emphatic as a statement by Fred the butcher: "Alma's going to die. I say, Alma's going to die."
So we have, over the past few weeks, inexorably inched our way forwards towards the inevitable. Although lurched our way towards the inevitable was perhaps nearer to it.
The tone marched to her death bed with wild unevenness: from outright melodrama (we do not watch Coro for melodrama, thank you very much), to the kind of unflinching, moving imitation of real life meeting real death that makes the Street so very good when it hits all the marks.
It did seem to take its time getting there. Yet in Coro terms (you can tune out for three months and tune back in to find that Jack Duckworth's still got his face stuck in what looks to be the same fry-up he was gobbling last time you looked) this has been a writing-out of almost unseemly haste.
Still, at times it felt like it had been going on for as long as Ken Barlow's been boring us.
The scenes between the made-in-hell couple Mike and Linda, after he rushed to Alma's side, were at once hysterical and leaden.
And Linda deciding to bonk Mike's business rival for revenge, and then being get caught out doing it, was sheer silliness and try-hard distraction.
Nice exchange between the two resident hard-faced bitches, though.
Linda: "Mr Baldwin's gone off chasing his ex-wife."
Karen (a beat later): "Which one?"
We could forgive the incongruity of Mike deciding that Alma was the great love of his life and that he was leaving Linda for her.
Although the scoffers out there might suggest that saying, "I'm going to be here for the rest of your life, Alma", wasn't going to cost the rat Baldwin much more in time than a couple of episodes.
Even we, dedicated watchers that we have become, did a bit of an eyeball-roll at the sight of Mike hanging up Alma's clothes. Getting sloshed and sentimental on whisky by her bedside would have been more like the Mike we love to hate.
All can be forgiven. The second half of tonight's episode is a return to the reason we watch the thing at all.
Alma dies in time-honoured Coro St fashion.
It's comforting and sad and full of those little domestic touches so well-observed: Linda, who nobody wants there, makes sandwiches that nobody wants to eat.
There is a touching, deftly scripted and delivered death-bed exchange between the arch-rivals Mike and Ken.
Nobody had a dry eye in our living room. Nobody had a dry eye in that bedroom.
Oh, except for one. You might be able to guess who. I'm not giving a thing away.
* Coronation Street, TV One, 7.30 pm
By MICHELE HEWITSON
Alma dies tonight.
Saying so does not give anything away. This is Coronation Street after all. Once we learned that Alma had cancer, that she had refused all further treatment, had rejected quackery, and turned down Mike Baldwin's desperate offer to fly her to America in the hope of
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