Radio Times

Coronation Street

The sort of man who would steal your teeth and come back for your gums, Tony Gordon has been softened by his friendship with Maria. While it's a pity it took murdering her husband to bring them close, let's not dwell on the downsides. Maria certainly isn't. Welcoming into her life the man who once threatened to end it - warning her there was plenty of room in the boneyard beside dead husband Liam and dead baby Paul - Maria is nothing if not forgiving. After all, she needed some flatpack furniture assembled.

With Maria frustrated...

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Coronation Street

Their eyes met over a greasy carburettor. They bonded over a mutual love of exercise, having been circling each other warily for weeks as Graeme might survey a sausage roll. As Tyrone intervenes in Jack's relationship with Connie, and Sally is distracted by the newly minted Rosie's spending habits, Kevin and Molly can finally resist each other no longer and give in to their desires.

This extramarital liaison raises all manner of quandaries, but the big question is: if the pair do make sweet, sweet love, will Molly remove her rucksack?

Happily, it's not all adultery and...

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Emmerdale

Though the motto "When you're in it up to your ears, keep your mouth shut" is a wise one, it's unlikely to be spied on the Wylde family crest. If it's not Natasha opening her mouth before engaging her brain - gifting the church to the village, inviting all and sundry to Mark's and her vows renewal - it's Maisie and Nathan ill-advisedly making enemies (or worse, friends) of Emmerdale's dodgiest residents.

Never one to miss out on publicly messing up, Mark's misdemeanours get an airing when dead-eyed Faye turns up with her son Ryan. And by her...

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Emmerdale

It's just as well that no-one tried to fill the villainous boots vacated by Cain when he departed the Dales. Now back and in fiendish form - after antagonising Andy and the Wyldes, he's turning his attentions to the Kings - Cain would have demanded his footwear back, likely with menaces.

But Cain may be the least of Andy's worries as he seems to sink deeper into a miasma of misery and begins acting even more strangely than usual. In fact, so bewildered is Andy that Debbie starts to feel sorry for him. Let's hope she doesn't tell...

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EastEnders

Had Nick Cotton put as much effort into making an honest living as he has into tormenting Dot, he'd be E20's answer to Richard Branson by now - or, at the very least, a rougher Ian Beale. In this respect, Nick is a lot like Wile E Coyote, who spent inordinate sums on schemes to trap Road Runner when he could have just spent the money on a really nice dinner instead. For Nick, though, as for Coyote, it's never really been about the end, it's been about the means. The chase.

But with robotic Dotty's resolve...

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Hollyoaks
With the approach of summer - or, at least, the months when summer used to be - thoughts may turn to catching up with old friends over a barbecue or else to escape, perhaps, to warmer climes. Curiously - and where in Soapland is life curiouser than in Hollyoaks? - these two considerations coincide as Warren, wilting under the pressure of the hate campaign against him, decides to depart. Before he goes, though, he has one last plot to ignite: the razing of the Loft. And, marshmallows at the ready, who better to coerce into setting the...

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Coronation Street

Fiz by name and bubbly by nature, is there a sweeter soul in all of Weatherfield than the selfless Miss Brown? (Emily Bishop notwithstanding, obviously.) While others bicker, whine and bemoan their lot - we mean you, Julie Carp - Fiz soldiers on with dignity, as her attempts to home-school Chesney demonstrate.

But even this paragon of stoicism has desires beyond a barm cake and pint at lunchtime, so should anyone begrudge her love? Even if that love is for teacher-turned- felon John Stape… (Some might say he did the world a favour by kidnapping Rosie Webster.)...

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EastEnders

Having taken Danielle's death especially hard - not for her a sigh of relief when her dreary pal was squished by Janine's car - Stacey has been spiralling downwards. But where does one descend from rock bottom, you may ask? (This is a question also pertinent to Phil, whose alcoholic antics stun Peggy and spur Ben to contemplate moving in with the Beales. Yes, that's how bad things are.)

Stacey, though, finds the concealed basement beneath the bottom of the barrel. Throwing herself at Max and her market stock at passers-by, is she exhibiting typical Slater stroppiness,...

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Hollyoaks

There are many bad apples in Hollyoaks, but only one that's rotten to the core. Warren Fox has caused so much misery to so many people - Russ, Mercedes, Ste, Cindy, the Barneses, the Deans and don't forget Justin - it's a wonder the villagers haven't ganged up, Murder on the Orient Express-style, and offed him. After all, there's no-one as smart as Hercule Poirot to solve the case. Except possibly Tom Cunningham. One man has had enough of Warren's villainy and that man is Calvin Valentine. (Would you be quaking in your boots? Nor me.) Still,...

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EastEnders

Men - can't live with them, can't shoot them. Or so they say. The shocking way Phil's behaving - abusing Shirley, Heather, Ben, birthday boy Billy, a mute Tracey and indeed anyone in the way of his next drink - means he may well find himself in someone's crosshairs. Again. And all because he's fallen out with his mummy. Charming Tamwar and Zainab, Syed is trying to get back into his dad's good books with little success - though his progress into Janine's boudoir goes infinitely better. Strumpet. Him, not her, that is. Now where did I...

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EastEnders

Balzac said that "the heart of a mother is a deep abyss, at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness." The problem with that, of course, is that certain sons seem so intent on searching for the vein of maternal clemency that they bleed their mother dry.

For "seem" is the operative word. Even if we didn't know nasty Nick's true motives, his attempts at being good to his mum, Dot, would still be like a shark smiling at a surfer. Which is to say, entirely unsettling. Even worse is enlisting his daughter, a Trojan...

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A wedding is like a funeral, except you get to smell the flowers. Assuming you remember to organise the flowers, that is. There's so much to sort out when getting married that you could be forgiven for forgetting to make floral arrangements, and EastEnders' Peggy Mitchell has had more on her plate than Heather at a community centre cheese and wine evening.

If she's not been fretting about her dress (she wanted something razzy; Archie wanted her frock to meet the Taliban's approval), she's been worrying about the bridesmaids, whether or not her far-flung son Grant will turn...

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Imagine you watched TV and saw no-one like you - no-one in similar circumstances, no-one you recognised, however loosely, as being like yourself. How strange would that be?

Now imagine that you don't have to imagine. For significant swathes of the population, their experiences have only lately been portrayed with even vague realism on TV. People from ethnic minorities, gay men and lesbians, people with disabilitise…accurate representations of such individuals are fewer and further between than they should be in a society as diverse as the UK.

Soaps are at the forefront of TV's attempts to reflect...

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An invitation to the nuptials of Coronation Street's Steve McDonald and Becky Granger was, at the very least, a summons to bedlam, even by the standards of Soapland. Were you to devise a measurement on which to gauge the inauspiciousness of soap weddings, it would range from one to ten, where one is the bride running late and ten is the groom being declared dead before the end of the reception.

The latter was the case when Rosemary Sinclair and Tom King wed in Emmerdale on Christmas Day 2006. After his almost-marriage to Charity Dingle the...

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