It’s never been an easy ride for Corrie’s Sarah Louise. Not since birth. Confusion reigned as to her parentage after mum Gail was dallying with lecher from down under Ian Latimer as well as her husband, the less than intellectual Brian.

She had to go through the trauma of losing her real dad in a violent attack before her mother took up with dopey Martin from the café; a bloke way too young for Gail and so boring that his idea of excitement was a game of arrows with Curly in the Rovers. It wasn’t long before Martin had introduced the maniac Carmel to the household, the first in a long line of unstable nutters to get over Gail’s threshold.

Despite frequent visits by sociopaths and being babysat by Emily (who briefly became a nutcase herself, I seem to remember), so dull was Sarah Lou’s existence that she soon found herself having a total body transplant just to pass the time, not that her mother batted an eyelid when she had completely changed appearance. So perhaps it was just a bid to be noticed when she managed to get herself impregnated by a lad not yet tall enough to get on all the rides at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

Still just a nipper herself but now with a baby in tow, she managed to get herself embroiled with Todd Grimshaw, an experience that may have made her briefly happy until she found out that Todd preferred her brain dead brother Nick to her gymslip charms. Nick, you’ll remember, used to be sulky Nicky but also had a body transplant, changing from a brat into a plank not unlike Brian though Gail glibly accepted this with a “haven’t you grown” comment.

Just when you’d think things couldn’t get any worse for young Sarah (who by now had forgotten about the Louise part of her name) her barmy mother, having ditched Boring Martin because he’d got into nursing in more ways than one, decided to take up with the local conman and serial killer. Having survived being driven into a canal our Sarah decided to make matters even worse for herself by taking up with a bloke called Scooter, presumably called that because he was bit of a Muppet though not a very popular one.

Having helped one Grimshaw out with discovering his sexuality, she then had a go at the other one. Sadly Neanderthal Jason seems to be a few stages behind the rest of us in the evolution stakes and it doesn’t bode well that his mentor in life is none other than cheerful Charlie Stubbs, a man whose idea of treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen is just one up from clubbing them over the head and dragging them back to his wood yard.

It’s hard to understand quite why Jason and Sarah’s mothers find it so hard to get on as they’ve so much in common, both lousy parents with a penchant for sleeping with murderers. You’d think they’d get like a house on fire.

Sarah managed to drag Jason up the aisle when all of sudden his brain cells showed a glimmer of life and he did something sensible for once and fled through the toilet windows. Keep running Jason and don’t stop until you get to Hollyoaks. You’ll fit in round there.

As for the future, poor Sarah’s destined for a life of further misery. Even if it’s without a Grimshaw it’ll surely be grim.

Going for the one

The Mailbox in Birmingham is quite a nice place, at least it was until BBC One shoved a great big white shed into it. The reason? It’s the cheap looking studio base of The One Show, a seemingly doomed attempt to bring back a Nationwide style show.

Adrian Chiles seems to fit this format like a duck to water, a Frank Bough for the 21st century as at home with skateboarding ducks as Garth Crooks, he is rapidly becoming the BBC’s everyman. Unfortunately he’s saddled with an over enthusiastic Nadia Sawalha as co-host and there surely hasn’t been such a lack of chemistry between hosts in this type of show since Michael Wilson and Fiona Armstrong launched GMTV.

To make a true splash the show needed to hit the ground running so why open with a bunch of actors trying to annoy rail commuters to make an inconsequential point about our reticence to complain? It was like Candid Camera without the laugh track. Having stumbled through a relatively incoherent and completely unnecessary chat with the reporter from the first item, things went from bad to worse with an annoyingly cloying interview with Doctor Who’s new assistant, who was sitting in Winnebago in Wales.

Memories of Nationwide’s constant battles with technology came flooding back as the delay on the line combined with the lack of any interesting content to make the whole thing a farce. What’s the point of interviewing the star of a show which won’t even be on screen until next spring? Barmy!

Wrapping the local news around the outside of this nonsense is an irritant too.

By Wednesday I turned on to be met with the sight of Esther Rantzen shaking her rear end at the camera while cleaning some windows. There are some sights you just shouldn’t see while eating your evening meal. I switched off.

They’ve got just four weeks to get this right or we may never see it again. The concept is fine, it’s merely the execution that’s proving difficult but if a show like this is going work it needs to be topical and punchy. Shoving Kate Humble in a different field every night just isn’t going to cut the mustard.

New Tricks?

Esther’s worrying appearance on The One Show was to promote “new” consumer show Old Dogs, New Tricks alongside former Watchdog stalwart Lynn Faulds Wood. While I wouldn’t necessarily want to argue with the first part of the title, what’s the new bit? This pair has been door stepping dodgy traders for decades and this seemed more of the same old stuff. Indeed while Watchdog has moved with the times and That’s Life has been consigned to TV History, this seemed very old fashioned.

I’m not over keen on this confrontational approach to tackling the subjects. If someone turned up unannounced at my workplace armed with a camera crew and an accusatory tone, I’m sure I’d come across poorly.

Still, I suppose it’s not a bad idea to pair up these grand dames of consumer issues though it would be nice if there were a third member of the team to reign in their excesses. Whatever happened to Alice Beer?

At least good old Esther tried to find the humour in the situation, somewhat redeeming herself after her efforts in Excuse My French. Lynn seemed to take it all so seriously. It’s not Panorama y’know.

Rome if you want to

BBC Four is normally a good place to go for a bit of variety but lately the nine o’clock slot has been inhabited by I Claudius, a show which in some ways still seems ahead of its time thirty years on.

The studio setting gives the thing a theatrical feel and its worth sitting through the seamier moments to get to some of the wonderful dialogue on display and to see some our best actors at the top of their game. While this has been a treat I hope it doesn’t encourage them to dust off the tapes of The Cleopatras. I had forgotten just how appallingly bad that was until clips appeared in the recent retrospective Togas on TV.

I’ve been watching a fair bit of seventies and eighties drama on DVD of late. The reason that much of it stands up today is that in those days creative decisions were left to creative people. These days the accountant is king and too much television drama feels like it’s been designed by a committee of abacus twiddlers. It really was better in the old days.

Norton continues to camp at the BBC

I suppose we can expect Graham Norton to become ever more family friendly now that he’s pledged himself to the BBC for another three years. One of Channel Four’s edgiest and more exciting talents has made bland by the unsuitably nice shows that the BBC have offered him.

I hope the new deal allows him get to what he does best. The chat show format really suited his style and while he’s doing a perfectly good job hosting these all these reality talent shows it really does seems to a massive waste of his talents. Get Dale Winton in to do the cosy presenter routine and allow Norton to get back to dangerous, pushing the envelope telly. The Bigger Picture is coming back yet again but it’s not an ideal vehicle for his talents.

Method in their madness

Tales abound in the movie world about actors running round the block if they have to play exhausted or shoving ice packs down their trousers if they have to portray being cold. I wonder if it’s the same in the soap world. If so then I can only imagine that Wendy Richard sucks lemons before becoming Pauline in EastEnders.

Now Wendy is departing, I’ve been wondering just how they’ll get rid of Albert Square’s most entrenched resident.

If it were up to me, I‘d have had her bump off Sonia – sooner rather than later - and get sent down for manslaughter. After all the chances of her popping up in Bad Girls must be fairly high.

In the meantime I think it’s high time we started a campaign to get Gus his own storyline. He’s had to play second fiddle to Sonia, Juley and even Wellard. While we’re on the subject of underused residents, isn’t time for Tracy the barmaid's annual piece of dialogue?

The Dawn of a new era

The word “Failed” popped up on my Sky+ against Dawn French’s new Sunday examination of women in comedy. At first I wondered whether the box had been enhanced to provide one word critiques of the recorded content. Sadly not.

So I missed the whole show, missed the opportunity of seeing Mel and Sue back together on screen and missed an all too rare TV appearance by the late Lynda Smith. Pesky Sky box.

Sue Perkins was in fine form this week on Just a Minute on Radio 4, a show where Lynda also used to excel and I found myself wondering why this still hasn’t made successful transition to the box. Previous attempts have attempted to dumb down the format, but surely now a proper version could be attempted, even if it meant screening it on BBC Four.

Snippets

There’s thin line between innovative and self indulgent. Time Trumpet is in serious danger of overstepping.

As if the sight of Esther wasn’t bad enough, we had to put up with Dean Lennox Kelly in drag in Sorted. Maybe they should bring back the warning triangle for stunts like that.

With some many people with blood in their hands in the sleepy village of Emmerdale - even the Vicar’s been slapping his elderly dad about - I’d clean forgotten that Louise was a murderer. Off to Botany Bay with her, that’s what I say.