Neighbours: Family

(Monday 27^th April – Monday 4^th May 2020)

To make ends meet, Mackenzie advertised for a housemate and acquired none other than Mannix who turned out to be less than friendly, demanding that she ask permission to have guests and putting a lock on his bedroom door. She continued to try and hide her difficult situation but it wasn’t long until Harlow sprung her and it wasn’t long after that, that the police showed up and raided the house. After Sheila bought a necklace from the pawn shop, Yashvi recognised it as an item from the Kennedy robbery, leading them to Mannix being the perpetrator. Making things even more complicated, however, was the fact that he was robbing places to pay back his debt to Paul, further souring Paul and Harlow’s relationship. Now Mannix is in custody and Paul has dumped a load of dodgy electronics on poor Aaron who had nothing to do with anything! On a more positive note, Shane and Dipi invite Mackenzie to move in with her, declaring that she is family. Hooray!

So, to go back to the Kennedy Family… Susan had a bad week. Not only is she bereft with her own guilt over Finn, she overheard a conversation between Sheila and Karl that indicated that he also blames her. Upon challenging him, he admitted that he knew in his heart of hearts that things would end badly but reminded her that it was Elly that fought for Finn to live with them. The PTA are calling for Susan’s resignation.

Susan isn’t just overwhelmed with her own guilt…
(photo credit: Digital Spy)

Oh and the reason Sheila was in a pawn shop at all was because she has been saddled with Gary’s debts and has had to sell some of his things to begin paying them off. She has also begun to get visits from a particular pigeon. And thinks it’s Gary. Oh dear.

Meanwhile, Elly is persuaded to take Sky’s deal – they will downgrade the charge from murder to involuntary manslaughter if she pleads guilty, which will give her a much better chance of a non-custodial sentence (but with Jodi Anasta leaving the show, this just seems unlikely to me). While Bea objected to the idea of her sister pleading guilty to a crime she didn’t commit, Elly eventually realised that Sky was actually trying to help her and accepted the deal, not wanting to serve time and potentially be without her daughter. When she took the deal, Mark was finally able to come forward with his opinion – he knows she is innocent.

Unfortunately, the deal made Claudia step up her campaign to steal baby Aster. If Elly isn’t going to jail, she needs to find another way to find her unfit in order to gain custody. I mean, what court in the world is going to say that Claudia, a woman who abandoned her son to torture and potential death because she couldn’t be bothered to pay ransom money that she could have easily provided, would be a good option for a baby? She left her son to suffer to the point that he turned into a psychopathic serial killer! You’re looking at how to dress Elly up as an unfit mother? Why don’t you just lend her an outfit?! Ridiculous!

Speaking of parenting… Mark got the news he’s always wanted – he’s going to be a Dad! Paige is pregnant! Well, they must have really enjoyed their wedding night!!! He gave Pierce and Chloe first refusal when he told them he was selling the house. I still find this scenario hilarious. Pierce is meant to be a millionaire. He has all these businesses; he runs a hotel; he has his wine company; he owned an island before Finn burned it to the ground. And yet he lives in a little rented house in a cul-de-sac. Hilarious.

In today’s episode, Aaron and David decide upon fostering. In about ten seconds flat, they manage to fill in an application and get a home visit arranged for the next day. Who knew it was that quick and easy? But I am not going to complain. I love these two. They are the modern day Scott and Charlene of Neighbours as far as I am concerned. They absolutely have to be together forever and they have to be happy always. I am so excited at the idea of them fostering. It’s so much better than them having a ‘their own’ baby. The idea of this beautiful couple giving a safe home to children who need it is the most perfect idea for them. I love it. I just hope this stolen electronic storyline isn’t too much of a distraction.

Neighbours has resumed filming

There has been no break in schedule in Australia

In the UK, Channel 5 air episodes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 1:45pm and 6pm

Next week, episodes will resume to five days a week

Emmerdale: The Job

(Monday 27^th April – Friday 1^st May 2020)

Having not had the reaction she wanted from Charity, Vanessa turned to Rhona over custody of Johnny, should she not be there to take care of her son. Charity was hurt by the move but… well, she did ask her first and she did balls up the answer! You should have just said yes, Charity instead of panicking!

Vanessa asks Rhona to be her son’s guardian if she dies…

Will has completely messed up by attempting to warn Lucas’s foster parents away from him and the family, wanting to let Dawn bond with her son. Unsurprisingly, this has backfired and they and Social Services want to be more involved than ever. Dawn then found out about the whole gun incident and also unsurprisingly, wasn’t very happy. I do hope Will is going to turn out to be a short-lived character. He’s very annoying. He’s like the new Daz but without the likeability factor.

So, the day of ‘the job’ came around and only Cain and Billy were sent off to do the deal; Malone kept Will at home. Cain and Billy were on edge, feeling that something wasn’t right. Well, duh! Will then discovered that they were being set up by Malone but of course, the idiots had obediently left their phones at home.

Jamie and Belle can’t keep away from each other…

On the Easter Egg Hunt, Belle gained a conscience and ended her relationship with Jamie for all of five minutes, not wanting to break up Millie’s family and be ‘the other woman’. Five minutes later, unbeknownst to them, Andrea spotted them kissing in the woods. She was heartbroken but has so far kept quiet.

Bear alerted Chas to how worried he was about Paddy whose anxiety over Eve is spinning out of control. Mandy reminded us that before he was paralysed, she was sort of interested in Dan. I am rooting for him and Kerry to get back together, personally. They were made for each other and she has been so good to him since his accident. Leanna and Gabby continued to give Liam a hard time over dating Leyla instead of pining for a woman who left the country without even bothering to break up with him. Hmm… perfectly reasonable. As if Bernice isn’t off with another bloke in Aus already!

Due to the Coronavirus, Emmerdale have had to suspend filming

Emmerdale will now air on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on ITV1 at 7pm

Doctors: So Much For My Happy Ending

(Monday 27^th April – Friday 1^st May 2020)

It looks like we’re not quite free of Jimmi’s prison storyline, as Leon, the guy who stabbed him, requests a visit in prison. Al sensibly advises steering clear while Daniel understands his curiosity. Jimmi shows his strength by confronting Leon rather than pandering to him.

Good old Sid puts his foot in it when it comes to Bear’s potential relationship with Ayesha. Please can these two either just get on with it or get over it so we can all move on?

Zara and Daniel manage to manipulate the cultural diversity out of their son and tempt him into giving up fasting for Ramadan. Such good parenting!

Daniel gets involved with his friend (they do pull these character’s ‘old friends’ out of nowhere, never seen before and never to be seen again, don’t they?) who has unknowingly got a woman pregnant as she stuck a pin in the condom. However, what she doesn’t know is that his player attitude and not watching children is because of his genetics. I think this is a really interesting and important story to tell. What this woman has done is awful. As women, we have the right, 100%, to say what is okay to do with our bodies and there is a lot of coverage on that, as there should be. But why does this woman think there is nothing wrong with doing this to a man? Tricking him into fathering a child? Doing this to him without his permission? And then taking his choices away as to whether he should be allowed to be part of his child’s life. This sort of thing sets feminism back several paces.

Ruhma unwittingly sets up a Midwife Hotline to her old patients. Perhaps not the wisest choice, considering she is currently suspended… However, she does get a sort-of-nice visit from Valerie and Karen. I mean, I think it was nice. Kind of. Well, it was amusing to see Karen sat on an inflatable unicorn because her bottom is still sore. Then as part of Ramadan, Ruhma and Shak volunteer to work on a building project for the homeless. While Shak works with a rather annoying girl, Ruhma cannot resist helping out one of the decorators who has been secretly living in the property as he has nowhere else to go. Well, you just have to love Ruhma, don’t you? I just hope things go her way at her hearing. She’s the best midwife ever!

Wednesday brought us a particularly moving episode involving Ayesha tracking down the family of a homeless woman who died in her arms in the street over Christmas. It was informative to people who might not know much about the process and these kinds of funerals and also emotional as we journeyed through finding out about how this woman lived her life and ended up on the winter streets of Letherbridge. As I said in my last blog, this is one of the many reasons I really love Doctors. It can use an episode space so creatively and tells such intricate stories.

Thursday’s episode takes a very dark turn as Sid attempts to support a young, male escort who has been drugged and raped by a client and is being forced to work by his brutal employer who has clearly manipulated the situation so that he is actually in debt to her rather than earning money. It was one of those brilliantly devastating stories where your heart breaks at not having the happy conclusion, all neatly tied up at the end but your mind absolutely adores Doctors for having the balls to be honest about how the world really works. Not everyone gets a happy ending, no matter how much we wish that was true. Not everything can be sown up in a tidy, half hour episode. Not everyone can be saved, as devastating as that is. I do genuinely think this show is underrated because of its time slot (although I read a Tweet from Elisabeth Dermot Walsh this morning about gaining extra viewers due to the lockdown so that’s a plus). I do think it deserves so much more credit like the other soaps get for the subjects it tackles and the creativity it uses to tell the stories it does.

Having said that, I did post a somewhat lazy tweet this week, where I am a little worried I may have sounded like I was criticising rather than complimenting, which caught the attention of the writer of this particular episode, Dale Overton, one of their Story Producers, Naz Ahmed and also Matthew Chambers who plays Daniel Granger. So, should this blog also come to anyone’s attention (unlikely!), I was definitely complimenting the episode! Just to clarify!!!

Moving on… Rob and Karen get a new teenage boy to foster. I do like these stories. They bring a really interesting and often very moving element to the show.

Next week, despite Doctors ceasing filming due to the Coronavirus, the show does appear to still be airing every weekday on BBC1 at 1:45pm

Coronation Street: Yasmeen’s Darkest Day

(Monday 27^th April – Friday 1^st May 2020)

Dev showed what a lovely Dad he is, taking back the words he unthinkingly said in anger, pledging his support to his daughter, offering to retract his statement to the school and begging Asha to go back to her education at the end of the holidays. Kelly tried and failed to apologise, having been taken in by Billy and Summer.

Tracy proposed that Ken allow her and Steve to delay buying the house, in the meantime he pay for the broken boiler and that he let them keep the master bedroom. Ken declined. He is no longer selling the house at all, he will indeed pay for the broken boiler and he wants his bedroom back! Well, at least all will soon be as it should be in the Barlow House! Oh and Daniel returned with a slightly improved beard and a much better attitude.

Things are getting seriously dark in the Geoff and Yasmeen abuse storyline, which is quite frankly saying something. The guy has taken away her freedom, her money, her dignity, her confidence, he locked her in a box and left her in it and he killed her chicken and fed it to her. And now, thanks to his frequenting of ‘escorts’, he has given her chlamydia. Of course, has taken no responsibility for it, even blaming it on her, accusing her of cheating on him and even suggesting she caught it from her ex-husband long before she met him.

The scenes of sheer verbal, mental and emotional abuse are horrifying to watch as Geoff called Yasmeen all the vile names he could think of. It’s truly uncomfortable and upsetting to watch. Shelley King and Ian Bartholomew have given everything they have to this story and are absolutely faultless. Yasmeen is heartbreaking and Geoff’s character is utterly hideous. Knowing full well that he is responsible for the STI, he even phones the escort agency demanding a refund! All the while, he continues to blame his wife for the situation. With the last vestiges of energy that she has left, she contacts the woman Sharif was having an affair with. She had an STI test at the time the truth came tumbling out and it all came back clear. Yasmeen cannot be the source of the chlamydia – it has to be Geoff.

Geoff destroyed Yasmeen’s last hope
(photo credit: Digital Spy)

Wednesday was a particularly harrowing episode as Geoff’s accusations continued. Then at the shop, he spotted her on her phone with her bag, hidden in the cupboard. Returning home, he bullied her into giving up the key before snatching the bag and taking it into the garden, locking her in the house where she could only watch him send her hope up in flames, burning the contents of her escape plan. By the end of the episode, I confess I was nearly in tears as Geoff forced Yasmeen to get onto her knees and swear she would stay. He told her he would rather see her dead than with someone else.

Geoff continued to humiliate Yasmeen…
(photo credit: Digital Spy)

Things have most definitely taken an even more sinister turn now. There is no pretending anymore than he is looking out for her or doing any of this because he loves her. He has shown all his cards. He doesn’t need to lie to keep her. Now it’s about force. He has made her believe that she is completely isolated and that nobody would want her. He has eradicated any sense of self worth in order to destroy her. All we can hope is that in the coming days, Sally will remember what she saw through her conservatory windows, Yasmeen standing over the fire looking devastated. She also mentioned to others in the pub that it was a strange time to have a bonfire.

We then have the most incredible episode on Friday, focussing solely on Yasmeen and Geoff, covering the course of an entire day. It’s heartbreaking and harrowing in equal measure as we witness Geoff humiliating, bullying and traumatising Yasmeen to the point that she can hardly stand. One of the worst moments in the whole episode is the sheer obliviousness of her neighbours and friends, as he allows her to go for a drink with him, Tim and Sally but dresses her up in this awful red dress he has bought for one of his escorts. Not one person in the pub seems to realise the depth of the horror that’s going on in front of their very eyes. When he eventually drags her out of the pub, they even laugh at her for her outfit. It’s awful. Eileen, who has previously had her suspicions of Geoff even sees him locking her in the house but rather than raising the alarm, merely comments that they were having a row.

Things became very tense in The Rovers…
(photo credit: Digital Spy)

Inside the house, Geoff taunts and torments Yasmeen, holding a knife, threatening to kill her. Having not eaten in days, utterly traumatised, on medication for the chlamydia he has passed onto her, out of her mind with grief and fear, she lashes out. Now, we don’t know if he will survive. It doesn’t currently look likely. And I’m in two minds over whether it would be better for Yasmeen if he lived or died. On the one hand, if he died, she would at least be physically free of him and the police would have a much better chance of discovering the phone evidence of his abuse – the video he recorded of him tormenting her and the camera he has of the house, which will have recorded so much of what has transpired over the past few months. On the other hand, she has been through enough without having a murder or manslaughter charge against her and she is trapped in such a cycle of abuse that she will blame herself for what she has done when it was not her fault.

And things spiralled out of control at home…
(photo credit: Digital Spy)

This episode was so incredible. It was perfectly written and directed and if Shelley King and Ian Bartholomew don’t get awards for their performances, there is something wrong with the Soap Awards. This storyline is so frustrating in all the right ways. All I want is for someone to rescue Yasmeen but the truth is, she has to save herself. This episode was so sad in so many ways but hopefully, whatever the outcome, she will find love and support in Alya when she returns and even those who laughed at her and gossiped (Cathy, Eileen – shame on you) and those who were concerned but not enough to respond (Sally and Peter, I’m talking to you), will be there to help her through these dark days. Well done, Coronation Street. You have excelled yourself.

Due to the Coronavirus, Coronation Street has had to cease filming

For the foreseeable, Coronation Street will air on ITV on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 7:30pm