Hello, I'm Kathryn Spencer, a new Coronation Street episode reviewer on this site, pleased to "meet" you!
Following award-winning Katherine Kelly's fairytale but somewhat unbelievable farewell - as avenged and trumphant Becky flew off to a new life in Barbados, swigging champagne with Mr Nice but Boring Danny - the Street picked up the pieces following lying Tracey's long awaited and deserved comeuppance at the altar.
Unrepentant the morning after, a furious looking Tracey (Kate Ford) was in fine eye-swivelling form, claiming she had framed Becky "to save my family", demanding "booze, lots of it, to render me unconconscious" from her family and charmingly telling innocent passer-by Dev:'What you looking at? Want a fat lip?"
Meanwhile her hopes of making up with duped bridegroom Steve looked unlikely following the latter's withering put down:"You are an insane, lying, deceitful manipulative cow ... I was an idiot to think you had a human heart in that ribcage of yours." We get the message Steve. Then he announced he was getting an annulment. Time to put that meringue wedding gown on eBay, Tracey!
Elsewhere, a nice bit of comedy relief as Norris's amazing keyboard playing skills were unmasked as a sham - he has an automatic machine - by a suspicious Rita, "he's good - too good" and Dennis.
And a shellshocked Steve Macdonald and Ken Barlow - furious after being lied to by both his wife Deirdre and daughter Tracey over the latter's miscarriage - took solace in a shared bottle of whisky in a darkly humorous scene as they bemoaned their mutually chequered love life.
"I lost a woman I loved - more than onesh," Ken (William Roache) slurred, misty eyed, comparing himself, somewhat dubiously, to King Henry V111. "Good things enter your life and shine like a bright star and then you do something wrong and they fly back and you're right back to where you started," he sighed. Thinking of a certain actress who lived on a barge and force fed you homemade soup in your kimono, Ken?
Meanwhile Peter and Carla's adulterous web of lies came one step closer to unravelling as sharp-suited rapist Frank clocked her meeting lover Peter on one of their clandestine dates.
And Jason, never the sharpest tool in the workbox, finally realised the truth about his mother Eileen, glowing after an illicit night of passion under the family roof with fireman Paul while his Alzheimer's sufferer wife had conveniently gone into to care. "As soon as his wife is in a home, he's straight in your bed," he noted. "That's wrong and you know it." Eileen, clutching her bouquet from soppy Paul, looked too lust-sated to care.
A fine episode, this one, well written, with suitably light and dark moments and the emphasis on some of the older characters, rather than the tedious teenage Hollyoaks style dramas which are never the Street's finest moments. Shows how it deservedly won best serial drama at the National TV Awards this week.
