Too mad, bad and dangerous to hang around

Karen (Suranne Jones) was determined to have a wedding the Street would never forget. And she got it.

As Karen MacDonald stood in the snow and gave the street one last look, the bloke on the couch sighed and said: "Well, that's goodbye to the best pair ever seen on Corrie. I'll miss them both."

Farewell to Karen (tonight, 8.30pm, TV One) is restrained on the topic of Karen's cleavage. "She's the acid-tongued temptress, big on front and earrings and she's taken Weatherfield by storm," we are told. "The cobbles trembled and grown men ran for cover."

All good Corrie Street things must come to an end, and that they are coming to an end is usually signalled by increasingly barmy storylines. So we had Karen losing her baby, accidentally stealing baby Amy and setting fire to the car that has been the focus of so much fighting between her and Tracy and Steve. Tracy and Steve thought Karen had killed baby Amy so Tracy, naturally enough, tried to kill Karen.

How this last, mad, bad scene was shot - a Corrie staple which involves two slags getting their fingernails into each other's faces - is revealed tonight.

The least glamorous job on the street proved to be not putting on those awful pinny things the factory girls wear, but playing Karen and Tracy's doubles.

But it took a long time, and many tortured storylines, to get to this point.

We had the wedding, of course. The second wedding after the first wedding which was done for a bet and ended after Karen had a fling with the slimy Joe; and Steve, in retaliation, slept with a slapper. About which I wrote at the time: "you had to wonder why he bothered when he had a perfectly good one at hom.".

There was no reason why a couple on the street shouldn't have married for a bet, says Simon Gregson, who plays Steve. It's a soap, remember, and he wouldn't be surprised to see ghosts and aliens turning up on the set some time soon.

Anyway, they got a quickie divorce and got married all over again in a wedding which rivalled Posh and Becks'. "Karen wanted the most dramatic wedding ever seen in Weatherfield. Well, she got it," we're told.

Oh yes, she did. "Tracy, lurking like a gargoyle in the background" turned up to announce to a stunned bride that Steve was the father of Amy. Karen ran through her repertoire of stunned mullet faces at the news. We've seen all of this before, obviously, but we never mind seeing it all over again.

Her mates on the street turn up to say how much they loved working with her and share some secrets about her farting. And the bloke who will forever be Steve talks about that last, terrible scene where he tells Karen he loves her and can't live with her. The tears came naturally, he says. We knew how he felt. We loved her and didn't want to live with her any more either. Corrie does make it easy to say goodbye: they flog the daftness until you want to throttle the characters.

But what a terrific job Suranne Jones made of Karen. She played her, says a critic, "with a kind of music hall meets Broadway bombast - with snot running down her nose".

"You can't sustain characters like that," says Jones. "It had to end how it ended."

It did. Still, to paraphrase the bloke: We'll miss her, all of her.