By GREG DIXON
Blackpool. It hardly sounds like the sort of place you would want to spend the hols. More like a place you would go to drown yourself in a fit of despair.
Yet this seaside town is apparently Britain's most popular holiday destination, with as many as 120,000 pasty Poms arriving there on a summer's day to see such breathtakingly humdrum attractions as its tower, the world's biggest mirror ball and, of course, its crowd-puller since the 19th century, the illuminations. No wonder people emigrate from Blighty.
But even half a world away, ancient attractions in Blackpool cannot be escaped. Coronation Street (7.30 tonight, TV One) seems to have spent the past three years - though it may only be three or four episodes - stuck in a sort of Blackpool Groundhog Day with old "stars" dragged out to jack up the ratings.
The appearance of the bad oil painting that is Bet Lynch (Julie Goodyear), the taxidermy that is Liz McDonald (Beverley Callard) and the wild Irish clichés that are Jim McDonald (Charles Lawson), have made watching Corrie a grinding chore in the past couple of weeks.
The acting of these three unwanted throwbacks has you wondering why they were invited back.
But, worse still, the terrible trio's return has produced some of the most irritating, asinine and badly written storylines in recent memory.
Jim's escape from prison to make sure Liz wasn't about to run off with the Blackpool barman she works for and Bet's improbable marriage proposal from silly old Cecil smacked of an utter desperation by the producers and writers.
And this awful combo of stories ended with the most predictable and/or jacked-up of denouements: Cecil popping his clogs within metres of the altar and Jim heading back to Big House after saving Claire and Ashley from certain (and one might say deserved) death at sea. Corrie fans deserve better.
Certainly recent events on the Street have been exasperatingly and infuriatingly dull: the never-ending privations of dumb and dumber, Todd and Sarah; the horrific, dodgy May-December shenanigans of Martin and Katy (and the subsequent fall-out in the Harris household thanks to barking ginge, Tommy); the three-pointed annoyance of Peter, Lucy and Shelley's love triangle-cum-polygamy experiment; the will-they-won't-they bore of Claire and Ashley's inevitable love match.
Only the wildly improbable, incredible adventures of Roy and Hayley, as they have tried to secure ownership of scrubber Tracy's unborn baby (to Steve McDonald), have made recent Corrie episodes worth tuning in for.
But the Croppers' plight has inevitably paled into melodramatic insignificance compared with the rise and fall of mad, murdering Richard Hillman late last year. And the Croppers seem destined for genuine tragedy rather than panto catastrophe.
And, on top of all this, we have been dragged to the Gold Coast of the north.
I realise that the Street's association with Blackpool goes right back to its beginnings and that the characters might want a bit of a holiday from Weatherfield (and the actors might want a bit of a holiday away from Manchester). But, really, this trip to the seaside has offered nothing but obsolete enticements and nothing terribly illuminating.
Corrie St trip to Blackpool a towering mistake
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