Published at 08:56, Saturday, 04 June 2011

There are some serious parenting issues in Weatherfield. Safe to say the Corrie lot just don’t seem to have the child-rearing knack.

Doesn’t matter where you look, which net curtain you peep behind, not one of them is getting it even close to right.

There’s Gail, for a start – oh Lord, where do you begin with gruesome Gail? And Kevin for another – has the play-away grease monkey been banned from Father’s Day yet?

Little Katy – only 16 – hasn’t started as a mummy yet and already she’s considered abortion. And her dad was no help in her hour of need either.

Never mind skin deep, Dracula-bride Tracy Barlow’s mothering instincts don’t even penetrate her pearlised blusher – which might explain why little Amy always looks as though she’s been drained of blood in her sleep.

Clueless Kylie sold her son Max to sister Becky and her hapless husband Steve, who didn’t have the finest of parental role models in boozy, blousy Liz and jailbird Jim... so he didn’t.

Across the road, the Stapes are struggling with parenthood – as you do, when Dad’s a murderer, kidnapper, blackmailer and identity thief. He and Fiz called their new daughter Hope. Adding the prefix Some might have been more appropriate.

So, finally Social Services have turned up on those hallowed cobbles for a little nose around the Rovers Return, where bought-and-paid-for Max has been cared for by a chain-smoking tart-with-heart landlady and her ineptly scheming, gambling hubby.

You’d think they might have stuck their beaks into Coronation Street a lot sooner than this – what with the Fiz and ex-con John thing going on over the way and Tracy so recently out of jail for murder.

But they’ve no doubt been too stressed, overworked and busy with paperwork to notice Becky’s biggest crime: she smokes!

Interwoven extreme parenting issues have given us a full week of daily Corrie fixes, each growing darker and more menacing day by day.

Extravagant, over-the-top, blackly amusing and sharply dramatic, this was textbook soap opera at its very best.

What a crying shame ITV schedulers saw fit to shift it to make room for that dross known as Britain’s Got Talent. Is there any string Simon Cowell can’t pull?

Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk