Michele Hewitson: Corrie fandom hard yakka

You have to have the patience of Job - and the long-suffering Ken Barlow - to have carried on being a Corrie Street fan over the past weeks. Actually, make that months.

But we have hung on in there, gritting our teeth, texting during episodes - this was once bad Corrie etiquette and would have had you thrown out of the club faster than the Battersbys' spa bath came crashing through the ceiling. We know it's been bad before. We've tried to count our blessings, and found we can count on one: that the truly ghastly Jim McDonald remains locked up in the slammer so that we don't have to watch him not act.

It is true that his wife, the almost equally ghastly Liz, is back on our screens doing not acting, but, honestly, it's getting to the stage where the screen company she's keeping is beginning to make her character look positively Shakespearean in depth.

The best of the Corrie characters have always resembled the bard's best comic characters: the fools and clowns, the bunglers and wide-eyed-idiots over whose eyes pulling the wool is community sport.

We still have the dullards in Tyrone and his side-kick Kirkie. We have the declaiming "I say, I say" Fred the butcher, the Street's resident lonely clown. We still have the Duckworths, bickering and loving their way through telly's best-ever depiction of a long marriage.

But now we have Dev and Sunita whose marriage, to pinch a line from Princess Di, is a bit crowded. There are three of them in it.

You'd think that this might have produced some wonderful soap: a bizarrely reluctant menage a trois, with a mad woman making up the third.

Alas, crazy Maya plays mad like some third-rate method actor with those wild eyes and darting head movements. But we found ourselves agreeing with her when she told that snivelling drudge Sunita that she was, in fact, a snivelling drudge.

And that scene where she blew up the shops which make up the Alahan empire - how did she manage that, exactly? - was pure horror. But only because we knew we were going to have to suffer through scenes with the three of them on screen at the same time. Dev, though, had already taken the prize for the most hilarious transition from unconscious to conscious in the history of telly acting. It was hard to tell the difference between these two states.

All of this is pushing the limits - although not in the way the makers of Corrie obviously hope.

They had such success with the melodrama-meets-panto storyline of serial killer Richard the Rat that they've either run out of ideas, or they think they can go on introducing ever more psycho characters. And Cilla is beyond panto. She is, says a Corrie fan, "just cabaret". And the cabaret is well over.

You know things have got beyond dire when the best line in weeks goes to Liz McDonald. On the girls' night out - if I want to see people getting pissed I can go to the local and see it done much more convincingly - Deidre recounted all the men she'd'ad. Now this was pushing it anyway. I'd almost managed to erase from my memory the true horror of the Deidre/Dev bonk, when she had to bring it up (which nearly made me bring my tea up) all over again.

Still, Liz got to say: "To Deidre. And all who have sailed in her."

Which was really quite funny, in a vile sort of way.

You could make a dog joke here, but I won't. But on that note, I don't know why I find Wonder Dogs so amusing. I don't much like dogs. But at a remove - you can't smell them on the telly - they provide a bit of a laugh.

The jokes are worse than the ones on Corrie, that's true. But the gags are better. I love it during the retrieving section when the dog has to fetch the bread and, almost always, eats the bread. The owners end up retrieving most of the rest of the stuff the dog is supposed to bring back.

I suppose this is what people mean when they say: "Fido's very intelligent, you know."