[Urban Cragou]

Speaking of this era of Corrie, I also wasn’t a fan of how rushed Mike Baldwin’s dementia-storyline was. I’m not an expert on Alzheimer’s (that’s not where my niche insight of mental health lies) but from the first signs of fading memory and tentative diagnosis there’s only about four months of material. Well-acted, no-doubt, and well-written as far as it goes, but far too rushed.

Something in Corrie fundamentally changed for the worse in the summer of 2005 (at a time when EastEnders was going from strength to strength, between Shannis returning, Zoe leaving and Sam digging up Dirty Den’s corpse in the Vic, even if the Molfie-heavy interim between those points wasn’t the best) and that’s how it stays, albeit never-quite as silly, until about the middle of 2010, bottoming in 2009. Not a good era for the show all-in-all but Mike’s Alzheimer’s is a highlight I try and take from 2006, but I can’t. Not fully, because from a temporal longitudinal perspective it made no sense how he could deteriorate that rapidly and even evade a firm diagnosis.