Coronation Street is back on top of its game. For how long, nobody knows, but last Thursday's episode was a ripper.
The wordplay was just scintillating; we were often rewinding to check what we had just heard. Did they really say that?
Had the show unearthed a brilliant new writer, one who would change the unchangeable Coro forever and rescue it from the crawling-on-all-fours inanity it has suffered from this past year?
I looked her up. Debbie Oates. No, she is a seasoned veteran.
112 episodes of Coronation Street dating back to 2002, plus a host of other TV stuff and 12 stage plays.
I watched the episode again and took notes ...
Ex-reform school slash butcher boy Graeme has become Coro's funniest man, and the show's producers have inspiringly run him up against Coro's dumbest man, Jason, he of the perfect body and face, the latter permanently tugged frownwards as he struggles to understand what people are saying. A month ago, during one encounter on the cobblestones, Jason asked Graeme if he was thick. Graeme just looked at him and said pot, kettle, black.
Brilliant.
Last Thursday, Jason made another attempt to get the key to his ex-girlfriend Tina's flat from Graeme, who fancies the barely clothed slapper Rosie, but also obviously the gorgeous-before-her-dad-died Tina, whom he is trying to bring back to psychic health with sensible cooking.
Graeme: I went to get your key cut but they said it would be tomorrow.
Jason: Yesterday?
Graeme: Jason, they can't do yesterday, they're cobblers not magicians.
Jason: Wot? They told you yesterday would be tomorrow?
Graeme: No, today. They said tomorrow, yesterday, meaning today.
Jason: Well, have you got my key to the flat or not?
Graeme: Not yet. Yesterday's tomorrow.
Jason: Well, I want it today!
Graeme: That's what I SAID! You just keep those great cells buzzing - yeah?
This is the link between The Goon Show and Waiting For Godot, hitherto never achieved.
But Debbie Oates had a lot more for us last Thursday. She had to work hard. The director gave her a wretched opening scene of Deidre in the kitchen dressed in a cheap vinyl dressing-gown, joined by Ken in a spotted Bali beach copy of a Hugh Hefner smoking jacket. Ken tried to appear elegant and ageing in this shocking thing, but he just looked the same knob he has always been. The acting and faux-grief from these two as they revisit the recently departed crapehanger Blanche has been the worst acting ever seen on British television. But Debbi hauled the show back on to the rails with a succession of lovely phrases.
Blanche's friend Gracie, who made a tea bag last 30 cups, was a wart in human form, while the heart of Blanche was alternately described as not the jagged lump of granite everybody thought it was, and neither a box of shattered glass.
Somebody else was described as being fiddly as a kipper.
Then there was Becky filling in her application form to adopt a troubled child, one inconceivably even more troubled than her. She not surprisingly struggled enormously when asked to list her relationships with significant others. That's quite a list, said Steve, his eyes wider than Lake Michigan. Oh, said Becky, scribbling out two, does it mean you have to have done it with them?
I mean, this is Coro, not Curb Your Enthusiasm.
This episode was so deliciously weighted down I'm surprised it didn't fall out of the MySky box. Not only did they put Tracy in Gail's prison cell, but they had Hayley wearing not one but two pretty outfits, one of them purple, and coyingly applying lippy. As a counter, they showed Roy without his slippers in the middle of the night. "ROY!" screamed Hayley when she came downstairs to find out where he was.
"You haven't got your slippers on!"
Rational thinkers will be pleased to know the next Debbie Oates episode is only 48 episodes away, Series 51, Episode 145.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
