Back by popular demand (well, I liked it) – its The Sleaze’s handy guide to crucial developments in vintage episode’s of the UK’s most popular soap operas. There’s a terrible shock in store for Coronation Street’s Vera Duckworth when the police come knocking at her door bearing bad news about her husband Jack, in a 1999 episode I caught on UK Bollocks this week. It appears that pigeon fancier Jack has also admitted to fancying ferrets, whippets and Shetland ponies – and has asked for thirteen similar offences involving unconsenting baboons to be taken into consideration. It seems that in these instances it went far beyond the fancying stage – a possible explanation for Jack and Vera’s son Terry. Meanwhile, over at the newsagents – that throbbing hub of commerce – Rita finally uncovers Norris’s illicit trade in under – the-counter magazines with brown paper covers. It seems that Norris is the secret leader of a bizarre cult – The Sons of the Bicycle Saddle – who like nothing better than feeling the firm leather of a racing saddle against their bare bottoms. In a desperate attempt to keep his job, Norris claims that his illicit sales of nude cycling magazines have boosted the shop’s finances fivefold. Sales are further boosted when silver-haired sex machine Ken Barlow attempts to order the entire print run of the Summer issue of Gentleman’s Relish. It seems that peeping tom and former supermarket manager Reg Holdsworth, desperate for money after failing to secure a panto season at Cleethorpes for the second year running, has sold some snaps of one of Ken and Diedre’s consensual spanking sessions that he secretly took with his notorious telephoto lens. Ken fears that the sight of Diedre – her thunder bags round her ankles – bent over his knee whilst he warms her wrinkly buttocks, might be just too much for elderly residents of the street.
Moving north to Liverpool in 2002, Brookside’s resident shag machine, Ron Dixon, has landed himself in a spot of bother with his vigilante escapades. Merseyside’s answer to Batman – hell-bent on finding the robbing balaclava-clad thugs who burgled his house and humiliated his family – rampages around the district festooned with ammunition belts and wearing his patented combat wig. But is vengeance his only motive? It seems that Ron has found that dressing up in military clothing and clutching his pump action is the only way he can get sexual gratification. Problems arise when he believes he has tracked the burglary gang to their hide-out. Clutching his sawn-off in both hands he bursts into a house full of men and women dressed in black leather masks and rubber-wear, only to find that he’s raided the local Women’s Institute Fetish Night. The excitement causes Ron to suffer a spontaneous orgasm and, squeezing his sawn off too tightly, he shoots his load right over the Lord Mayor’s wife’s head – severely damaging the wallpaper behind. Over at the Farnham’s house, grief-stricken Max has taken the drastic step of digging up his dead wife’s body and making messy love to it. However, true to form, he finds that he can’t resist cheating on her and digs up two more mouldering bodies for extramarital necrophiliac escapades. Thus it is that Edna Mayberry, who died in 1967 aged 72, finds herself being named as co-respondent in a divorce case. Max’s difficulties in finding female companions with a pulse could be due to the random outbreaks of lesbianism which periodically sweep Brookside Close. For no apparent reason Jacqui Dixon suddenly falls into the arms of sultry Nicki Shadwick for no other reason than it fulfils some middle-aged male producer’s fantasies.
Down in the Midlands, strange things are afoot at Crossroads Hotel circa 2002. What is Adam Chance’s dark secret? Why does his moustache not meet in the middle? Why does he act as if he has just stepped out of a 1973 vintage episode of Dr Who? Is he in fact a hitherto unknown regeneration of The Master? Suspicions are raised when his new wife, Jill Harvey, becomes the victim of a werewolf murder – just as predicted by Bela the mysterious gypsy fortune teller with a droopy moustache and dangly earrings, who was moved on from the car park by Rocky the porter after guests complained about his curses and their missing underwear. Following the murder, Adam Chance locks himself in his room and will eat only raw meat (which is just as well as that’s the only way inebriated Glaswegian chef and part-time child-molester Billy can cook it), before finally confessing to mysterious guest Dr Niemann that ever since having his leg humped by what he thought was merely an amourous German Shepherd (but was, in fact, gypsy Bela in wolf form – the dangly earrings were a dead give-away), he has been suffering the curse of lycanthropy. In return for this confession, Niemann reveals just why he has been skulking around the hotel’s cellars, and why the sounds of excavation have been heard coming from beneath the hotel in dead of night – in an ice cave deep beneath the building’s foundations, he has discovered the frozen body of former Crossroads handyman Benny. Simpleton Benny has lain there since his titanic battle with wheelchair-bound vampire Sandy was interrupted when the old Crossroads Motel was swept away in 1987 after terrified villagers dynamited the nearby Kings Oak dam. Niemann plans to revive Benny and offers to end Adam Chance’s torment by transplanting his devious brain into Benny’s body. However, complications could arise, as it seems that evil vampire Sandy may also have survived the 1987 holocaust…
Finally, back in Coronation Street questions are being asked about the ingredients of Betty’s hotpots after Kevin Webster complains of finding a finger in his. An investigation by Environmental Health Inspectors reveals traces of human remains in the Rovers Return kitchens. Inevitably the question is asked – was Alma Baldwin really cremated after her untimely death, or is she still very much with her friends on the street?
