Colette Metcalfe

What is it with all those bowls of fruit?! Every house has one. Every scene in someone’s home features a table with a bowl of fruit on it. It’s just not realistic. Some of them are crazily OTT. Pity we never see anyone eating any of it; the closest the people in that village get to fresh fruit is the endless bottles,of the fermented grape juice they guzzle whenever anything remotely challenging happens.

After months of pure dross, ridiculous plot lines and little humour, last night was just so beautifully acted and sensitively done. Sinead’s is a truly heartbreaking storyline. Especially for us; yesterday my daughter lost one of her closest friends to cancer at the age of 35, a young woman who has battled this illness with the support of family and friends for several years, undergone several rounds of treatment and always did what she could to support other cancer sufferers. I have serious reservations about this plot, which is leading to Sinead’s death from cancer. There are thousands of Sineads out there, young women who thought they had their lives ahead of them; women with young children and loving husbands; women (girls?) whose parents are frantic with love and worry. They have had treatment, have been given the all-clear and are bravely picking up the pieces of their lives with optimism. They know what might happen but to have it so vividly portrayed in a soap opera is cruel. We know it happens and it’s about time Coronation Street abandoned the implausible nonsense of horses living - where? - in a street of terraced houses and so on, in favour of real life but this is too much, well acted or not.