Well, I wondered how long it would take before the torch was fully passed. It passed on Friday. This was an episode, which brought whingeing up to the level of a fine art, as well as not only giving us a profile glimpse of the plastecene Ms Ellison’s pert, surgically enhanced breasts, it also gave us a full frontal outline of Ms Lamont’s, replete with nipples. As Ms Lamont turned the ubiquitous eighteen in August 2001, perhaps this was her erstwhile producer’s parting gift to a formerly adequate actress who’ll soon be filling the pages of The Daily Star as the brunette version of Ellison. Bounce, bounce, bounce, they did in her skimpy little top. Message: Hey, girls who wear glasses have big boobs too, so who needs to look at a face, if you’re a boob man.
Bed scenes? Well, they’ve become a staple of Brookside in the past year. A staple of comedy, no doubt, where the participants emerge from the sexual act, clean, fresh and as fragrant as Mary Archer. There are no wet spots in Brookside bedscenes, no satiated men rolling over to go to sleep, and the women keep make-up and hair intact. Oh, yes, and bed scenes only occur between physically attractive people. I mean, they tried a bed scene with Jessie and Ray once, and that didn’t work. Why don’t we see a real nitty-gritty bed scene between Leanne and Christy?
Bobos? Well, that’s the Spanish word for idiot, and there were plenty of them to be had too - namely, most of the male population of Brookside Close and The Parade - with a couple of females thrown in, like Dire and Anthea.
Two not-so-subtle intimations of storylines yet to come too, if the show survives, that is. See if you can spot them. I’ll help those more intellectually-challenged of you with obvious hints. (This last reference is not about anyone who posts to the Soapbox Forum or the Brooksider site).
‘Oh, think twice, it’s another day for you and me in Paradise ...’ Well, not exactly, but then that’s just a song by some stupid get from Sarf London, Phil Collins. What do Londoners know anyway? No, it’s another day for Dire and Mart in Sitcom House. Not exactly the happiest place to be nowadays, but then, is any house happy on the Close?
The couple sit upstairs in the en suite bathroom, off their bedroom. Marty is trying to shave. Dire is trying to whinge and being the more successful of the two. For the umpteenth time, Marty is trying to explain to his selfish, obsessive, and unreasonable wife WHY the couple can no longer afford any further IVF treatment, after this latest failure. It’s simply impossible. It would mean coughing up at least another £3k, and they were already twice that amount in debt already. Christ only knows how they even managed to pay the mortgage on the house.
Dire yells back, determined ot have her way, whatever the cost. Downstairs, the three Murray offspring sit at the sitcom table, trying to have breakfast and listening to the burgeoning row upstairs. Adele asks Plank if Marty and Dire were having yet ANOTHER row about IVF. Plank is clearly bored and fed up with all this claptrap about IVF. Pretending to be engrossed in his morning paper, he instructs his sister just to let their parents ‘get on with it’.
Adele is not about to let the matter drop. She voices her opinion that she’s truly sorry that Dire didn’t get pregnant from this course of treatment. Then the Antichrist seeks to impose his particular brand of religious bigotry on the proceedings. That’s a rich sentiment, coming from Adele, he remarks, particularly since she’s actually guilty of killing her own baby. There would at least have been one baby in the house if Adele hadn’t committed murder. (SOMEBODY SEND THIS LITTLE PRICK OFF FOR INSTRUCTION WITH THE TALIBAN? I MEAN, WHO’S NOT ROOTING FOR PAIGE AND IMELDA?)
Adele implores Plank to come to her defence and to make Antichrist Ant stop voicing his foul beliefs. Plank instantly castigates his little brother, implying that he’s stupid for making such blather (he’s right ,there).
Upstairs, the battle rages. Again, poor Marty announces with finality that the couple simply could NOT afford another attempt at IVF. Dire refuses to accept that, announcing, yet again, that SHE was quite capable of finding a way to finance the treatment.
Marty stops her in full flow. This attitude of hers is getting to be a big problem. He reminds her that THEY are a couple and that THEY are part of a family. Since when does Dire detach herself from the responsibility she assumed when she joined the Murray clan? Since when does this become a quest for DIRE and DIRE alone to find a solution?
Marty has gone as far as he can in support of her quest to have a baby, often to the detriment and neglect of his three other children. Now, he can no longer afford this financially. Dire screams at him that if he won’t help her, then SHE wants to find HER OWN way of accomplishing this feat.
Next door at Hotel Corkhill, Timily are engrossed in a gross snog - the tonsillectomy with a tongue variety - but cleverly staged for the camera’s benefit in ofer that the viewing audience are treated to the perfection of Ms Ellison’s boobs, shimmering beneath her skimpy tank top. It’s arguably the most boring scene between the two most boring characters ever to grace a soap, and the sooner they depart, the better the soap might be.
It’s quite clear that Emily’s attraction to Tim is virtually the same as that of her Eastend alter ego Janine’s to Billy Mitchell. The only difference being that Charlie Brooks (Janine) is much more watchable as an actress. The bulk of Emily’s attraction to Tim is the promise Tim holds out to her of financial and material wealth. As she rises from her snog, she enquires as to when Tim will be able to hand her over more money. She’s tired already of slogging in the salon. (Er, wasn’t Emily SUPPOSED to be intelligent and heading for A-Levels and uni?)
Tim confides to her that he’s got a big job planned on the horizon, but that will take time to put together. It has to be planned properly. Emily is disappointed. She clearly thought that the pair would be able to find their own place and enjoy the life of Riley soon. Tim promises her that this will be so; in the meantime, however, someone has to bring in a wage, and it might as well be Emily.
As she prepares to leave for work, she assures Tim that she has faith that he will come up with the goods.
The Murrays have now convened for breakfast around the sitcom table. Dire has a face like thunder, which means that, because SHE has a serious cob on, no one else is allowed any other mood of any other sort. Adele, with her usual lack of tack but good intention, confides cosily to Dire that the three kids couldn’t help but overhear the row. She sincerely wants her stepmother to know that she’d be over the moon, if Dire were to fall pregnant. She sincerely means it.
The sentiment is like waving a red flag at a bull, in Dire’s twisted, hate-filled and jealous mind. Hark at her, she prods poor Marty. Did he hear what this one had to say? Her naturally hard face, hardened by the plaster of Paris make-up, becomes an ugly mask, as she verbally lets rip. She, DIRE, is bleeding her heart out trying to get pregnant, whilst THIS ONE had to go and have an abortion and rub HER fertility in Dire’s face!
Turning back to poor Adele, Dire snarls at her. Did the girl have any idea what her abortion had done to Dire? Adele, all this time, is telling her stepmother to shut up, whilst Dire bleats on about baby-killing et al. Finally Adele snaps and lets her true feelings out, screaming for Dire to shut up.
Dire turns to Marty for support, demanding that he deal with Adele, but Adele won’t be silenced.
‘Shurrup!’ She screams. ‘You’re not me moother! I wish me Dad had never married you!’
All the time this banging and shouting is happening, the Antichrist sits at his end of the sitcom table and cries like the overgrown baby he is.
Plank stands up for his sister, telling Dire to leave off her nasty comments about Adele. He’s had enough of this baby-killing, guilt-trip. Adele was a kid who’d made a mistake, end of story. She didn’t need to pay penance the rest of her life for her stepmother’s jealousy.
Marty tries to interrupt, hoping to stop Plank from proceeding further, but - like Adele - Plank won’t be silenced. Look at this family, look at what they’ve become, shouting and screaming at each other like a bunch of banshis. Look at Ant, bawling his eyes out. This is all down to HER (and he points at Dire accusingly) and her selfish obsession.
He’s risen from his seat as Marty approaches him and tries to push him from the room, telling him to get out. Plank continues. Marty is stupid, he maintains. Can’t he see that every penny that comes into this house goes on her IVF treatment. She won’t be happy until she’s bankrupted the household just to get what she wants. The family had knuckled down and gone along with her wishes for a second attempt at this thing. It failed. Now was the time to forget about IVF and get back to normal.
Marty pushes his son from the room, demanding an apology, but getting none. Plank says he’s off for the day, and Marty shouts at him not to come back until he’s ready to apologise to Dire. He’s clearly had enough of this.
In the ensuing moments, Adele rises from the table and practically lifts Ant from his chair, advising him that the pair of them are off to school. It’s then that we notice something different about Adele. As she’s in the Sixth Form, she’s not wearing a uniform. She IS, however, wearing a skimpy blue tank top, similar to the pink one worn by Emily. Somewhere in the past two months that she’s been absent from the Brookside screens, ADELE has developed BOOBS. Big ones. Bouncy ones. Buxom ones. Ellison ones.
After the siblings have left, Dire turns accusingly to Marty, demanding to know why he let Plank and Adele speak to her like that. Marty wimpishly cops out by promising that he’ll try to explain the situation to the older two kids.
As they leave The Close for school, Antichrist Ant attempts sancitmoniously attempts to inculcate his sister with a sense of guilt. She shouldn’t have said those things to their mother, he begins. Adele contests that she could say what she damned well liked in her own home, and for Ant’s information, Dire was not her mother. (At least, so far, the Brookside producers have allowed her to keep a modicum of intelligence along with her newly-enhanced figure).
But, Ant continues, Adele was still rotten to say what she did. He wants to know if she really meant it. Adele rounds to face the squriming, little hypocrite. You know, she begins, she’s really disappointed in Ant. And she’s really hurt by all the nasty things that both he and Dire have been saying about her. Did he ever stop to think that she had feelings too? No, this IVF malarkey has gone on too long (Jaci Stephen agrees). It’s time to get back to normal. If that meant that Dire couldn’t have a baby of her own, well, she’d just have to live with it.
And to emphasise her point, she informs Ant that she really did mean everything she said in there. Dire won’t stop, she tells him. She can’t stop. And Adele wants Ant to realise that Dire’s not interested in anything but herself and IVF and the rest of them be damned. All that good mother bullshit that they’ve witnessed for the past seven years has been just that - bullshit. (And one of the horrible, little Antichrist’s delusions is shot down).
Back inside, Plank puts his wooden head around the door of the sitcom kitchen to sulkily inform his father that he’s off out to try to find a job (ha ha). He stalks off petulantly.
Marty sits, visibly distraught. He’s appalled at the fact that he had physically manhandled his own son in response to the lad’s speaking his mind. In his heart of hearts, he knows Plank was right. Looking at the hard-faced cow he married, he implores her to look what her attitude is doing to the family. Sure, there’d been arguments in the past, but nothing ever like this, nothing like him ordering his own flesh and blood from the home.
Not heeding anything he’s said, Dire merely looks coldly at Marty and asks if he’s behind her in having another attempt at IVF. If he isn’t, she says, she’ll go it alone. There’s no argument about it. Dire wants another course of IVF, and she’s determined to have it. Marty shakes his head. He sincerely wishes he could help her, but he isn’t prepared to put his family anymore on the line to finance what’s become an obsession with Dire.
Back at Hotel Corkhill, we are treated to another snog between Timily. Then Emily decides it’s time she went to work. (Yawn).
As he arrives at school, Antichrist Ant is joined in the corridor by Paige, still friendly. Ant, still mildly suspicious, asks the whereabouts of Imelda. Paige surmises that Imelda is probably too ashamed of her treatment of Ant to make her presence known. Anyway, does Ant fancy a walk to the shops at dinnertime? Ant agrees and the two walk down the corridor together.
Plank has made it as The Parade in his quest for a job. (Why does everyone only make it as far as The Parade?) Of course, he runs into - surprise, surprise - Nisha, and they end up in her flat. He informs her that he’s come away from Sitcom House in the hope of using Nisha’s phone to search for jobs, rather than phoning from home. He hopes he doesn’t bump into Dire around the salon or The Parade. He confesses to Nisha that he lost his rag with his stepmother, told her she was obsessed with IVF and that this obsession was screwing the whole family.
Nisha is shocked, but maintains her composure. Didn’t Plank think he was being a bit mean there? She asks. After all, says the nurse, acting like a nurse, poor Dire HAS been through a hard time of it. Nisha can well imagine how Dire must feel at this failure.
Plank is still petulant. Dire is selfish, he maintains. Anyway, Dire’s done Nisha no favours. Why is she so intent on taking Dire’s side?
Nisha says that this situation could be a thousand times worse. She knows. She’s seen many of these sad women desperate to have a baby. Really, she advises, Plank should apologise.
Plank abashedly confesses that he doesn’t think he could face Dire at the moment. Nisha suggests making him a coffee, but Plank tries to act according to the script and manfully pulls Nisha toward him.
‘Oh,’ she trills, ‘does this mean that you don’t want coffee?’ (Tee hee).
Marty, in his desperation, has sought comfort from his brother, Christy. They sit in a booth in the bar, whilst Christy fiddles with the latest in his line of knock-down goods - a remote control car (didn’t he give one to Ant last Christmas?). He tries to mend the gagdet, whilst telling Marty that this lot should make a nice little earner for Christmas.
Marty is despondent. The way things were at the moment, there wouldn’t be much of a Christmas, if at all, at Sitcom House. Marty admits that he’s skint.
At first, Christy thinks this is a whinge about the insurance scam, but Marty elaborates. It’s Dire and this IVF lark. The second attempt failed, he tells Christy, and now she wants to attempt a third.
Christy shakes his head dubiously, reminding Marty that the couple already have three kids. But, Marty insists, Dire is adamant about having a baby of her own. In fact, she was determined.
Isn’t that always the way with Dire? Asks Ckristy, and - in a surprisingly good scene - we are at last given some insight into the Murray background a little. Wanting something bigger, better, no matter what the cost and be damned the consequences? Christy reminds Marty that it was Dire who pushed him to buy HER a house of HER own, when Marty was well-satisfied enough in the council house where the family had previously lived. Never mind the fact that a mortgage on a house like Sitcom House would stretch Mart to the limit, Dire had to have it.
She knew that such a purchase would mean Marty struggling to make the payments, but noooooo ... RDire had to have a home she could call her own. Well, muses Marty, the whole family’s struggling now.
Because of Dire, states Christy. Is that fair? The problem with Marty, Christy surmises, is that he’s too soft on Dire - always giving her what she wanted. It’s time to get tough with her on this one, he warns.
And now for something completely different ... Oh no, not another BEDSCENE!!! This time, Plank and Nisha lie side by side, camera angle shot from above, so we can see that they pair of them are both ostensibly nude, with the satin sheets, diplomatically arranged to cover their private bits.
Nisha, in the apparent afterglow (and she doesn’t have a hair out of place, nor a smudge of lipstick), makes some silly comment about mechanics being good with hands, and Plank makes an equally inane joke about Nisha phoning her own personal mobile mechanic for a full service. (Yuck! Is this puerile humour or what?)
Once again, Nisha admonishes Plank that he was too rough on Dire and should apologise. Besides, she might have calmed down by now. Plank suggests that the couple go for a drink tonight, but Nisha informs him that she’s due at her parents’ for tea. Plank asks Nisha if she gets on with her mum? Nisha avoids answering and Plank then asks if he’ll ever be invited over to her parents for tea, the way Nisha was with the Murrays’. Nisha informs Plank that the likelihood of that happening is very remote. Plank asks if it’s because of his colour (or lack of). Again, Nisha avoids answering the question. (Potential inverse racism storyline on Brookie? Maybe showing that racists aren’t ALL white? If Brookside does this, it’s good - but does it come at a propitious time, with all the banging on about race, religion, colour, creed and WAR?)
Antichrist Ant and his new friend Paige amble across The Parade. Ant is explaining to Paige who Kate Bush is. The pair walk down a flight of stairs, quite happily and round a corner, seemingly in back of the shops on The Parade. >From around the corner steps Imelda, smiling maliciously.
Ant looks desperately at Paige for help, but suddenly Paige smiles, equally maliciously, and mouths the words: ‘Girl power’. (Er, I thought that went out in 1997?) Imelda, referring to Ant as ‘Altar Boy’, demands their money and the girls push the little prick to the ground and start raining blows upon his prone body.
Equally suddenly, Adele appears on the scene and orders the girls to clear off, chasing them away. Imelda shouts over her shoulder that she won’t forget this, as Ant remains crying on the ground.
Adele asks Ant why the girls were hitting and kicking him. Ant continues to cry, but tells Adele that those were the bullies who had been bothering him. Adele is shocked. How long has this been happening?
Ant says that this started at his junior school, before Easter. Adele is even more shocked. The bullies are GIRLS?
Still lying prone on the ground, Ant tearfully nods. He thought his problems were over when they went to a different secondary school, but last week they showed up at Brookie Comp. Adele is flabbergasted. Their parents were under the impression that Ant was being bullied by boys. Did Ant mean to say that he’s been letting GIRLS bully him?
Now on his feet, Ant collapses in Adele’s arms. (Suddenly, she’s not so bad - or is it her new boobs he finds so appealing?) He begs her not to tell anyone.
Plank has arrived back at Sitcom House and finds Dire bustling aimlessly about the sitcom kitchen. Sheepishly he enters the room and stammers an apology for his outburst that morning. Dire glances at him coldly over her shoulder. Why should he want to apologise, she asks, when she knows he’s glad she isn’t pregnant? What was it he called her, she reminds him - selfish and obsessive?
Plank protests. He only said that, he says, because Dire’s quest to have a baby of her own had virtually taken over their lives. Just look at what she’d brought the family to, he urges. Why, they were broke because of the IVF - not just broke, but they didn’t have two red copper pennies to rub together.
Dire sneers that she doesn’t see Plank doing anything to alleviate their situation. After all, there was no money coming into the household off his whack.
Fair comment, admits Plank. He has no money. But he could at least get a job, some kind of job. But what about Adele and Ant? Adele wants to go to university. They’ll need to find money for that. And Ant - he’s a clever lad. He’d probably want to go to uni and all. Is the additional debt of more IVF fair on them? He ask.
Dire scoffs. It would be years before Adele and Ant were ready for university, she surmises. (Well, no, only two years for Adele, you idiot). They’d be all right by then.
No, asserts Plank, they wouldn’t. It was much more than money, what Dire had inflicted on his family. Look at the kids now, he pleads. They’re afraid to ask for as much as a new pair of trainers, because they know if they did, they’d get an endless lecture about the costs of IVF that would send them on a guilt trip.
Look at Adele. Dire treats her like a cross between a pariah and an overgrown infant, all because of her abortion. When she’s not openly castigating her for what happened, she’s silently blaming her. And Ant, look what this IVF thing’s done to him. He mopes around the house, blaming himself for killing off her first baby by hating the fact that she fell pregnant. Then he immerses himself in prayers and rosaries and lighting candles and the like. Is that sort of behaviour normal for an 11 year-old boy?
Not to mention Marty, he continues. Why, his dad’s adamant that Dire shouldn’t be upset for any reason, because she was like an unexploded bomb that ignited whenever she didn’t get her way.
Oh, Dire remarks. So is Plank saying she’s a freak because of her obsession?
Not at all, explains Plank. It’s normal to want a baby of her own, but she’s turning this desire into an obsession that’s destroying his family.
Unable to take anymore home truths, Dire picks up a plate and smashes it on the floor. Plank, however, is not deterred, and says that she needs to see what’s happening to her and also to them.
Hard-face Dire breaks into selfish sobs, as her stepson awkwardly and plankishly puts hi s arms around her.
Back at Brookie Comp, Adele bounces provocatively down the corridor in the company of a couple of mates. The viewers are treated to a full frontal outline of her new and enhanced nipples, and in a thousand households, a thousand adolescent boys and sad older lads unzip their crotches and insert their hands.
Marty appears and calls out to his daughter. He only wants a word. As the other two girls depart, Adele stands reluctantly in front of her father. Marty reminds her of the hurtful things she said do Dire that morning. The new Power-packed Adele gives a surly reply. She was only trying to protect herself against Dire’s taunts, she says. Anyway, her stepmother gave as good as she got.
Marty tells the girl that she must apologise.
‘Apologise?’ Laughs Adele. ‘For what?’
Out of gratitude, Marty says, and for seven years of Dire bringing Adele up as her own. Why, lately her behaviour and that of Plank was despicable toward poor Dire. None of the kids appreciate what Dire has done for them, only Ant really appreciates her as a mother.
Adele interrupts - pleasantly insolent (and I find myself liking the new Adele and hoping that TPTB find a young man worthy enough to shag her - no dim Leo or Bullethead Thugfest). Marty doesn’t know the HALF of what’s been going on with Ant, she informs him, saucily. Ant is still being bullied - and by the same two kids whe started the episode last spring. And guess what? The bullies are GIRLS. She saw it happen, had to chase them away. And know what? He isn’t even fighting back.
Marty’s face is a picture of shock and disbelief.
Plank has managed to calm Dire down and now the two sit at the sitcom table. Dire dabs her eyes and starts to speak. She tells Plank that she never really sought the opportunity to speak to the three Murray kids about sex, did she? Oh, she told Adele about periods and the like, but she never delved into her past sexual life with any of them.
That’s private, mumbles Plank, uncomfortably.
But maybe if she’d told them a bit about her past, Dire continues, they’d understand where she was coming from in her drive to conceive a child. (This woman is so self-absorbed, it’s a wonder she’s managed to be as successful as she has in rearing these children.)
She begins a tale about herself (what else). She was seventeen years-old and involved with her first serious boyfriend. They were so much in love, or thought they were, that they really wanted to sleep together. She was in her first job at the time. She and the boy had everything planned. It would be perfect. It would happen during the afternoon of Dire’s half-day off from work - in her house, upstairs in Brigid’s big bed.
All went according to plan and the two were about to consummate their love when the boy, in question, pulled out a condom. (Considering the fact that this event should have happened in 1981, it has a singularly 1930is Dublinesque air about it). Well, mercy me, Dire is a convent schoolgirl, who’d always been taught that contraception was a sin, along with sex before marriage etc.
But the boy, being persuasive, had convinced her that there was nothing wrong with using a condom. Preventitive measures etc. So she let herself be swayed, when all of a sudden, they were caught in flagrante delicto by none other than Brigid, who stood in the doorway to her bedroom, shadowed by the priest of the day, Father O’Brien. (Now whatever was Brigid doing going up to her bedroom in the afternoon with a priest, I want to know? Hey - wait a minute - maybe Brigid had an affair with a priest!!!!!)
It was a nightmare, Dire recalls. She assures Plank that Brigid has since mellowed since those days. And did she make Dire feel guilty. Actually, she made Dire feel more guilty about the condom than about the sexual act, itself. (True to Catholic form, I can tell you that from experience).
Well, a lot of boys followed after that. (Did they, Dire? Do tell.)But they ran a mile whenever the relationship got serious enough to warrant sex. Once any of them suggested sleeping with Dire, they got a lecture from her about the sanctity of marriage, no contraception etc. In short, sex lectures. It was about this time she started getting involved with the Church as well.
She was about thirty when she met Marty, she recalls. And he was the first man to have ever respected her beliefs, which was what she loved about him. She wanted a baby from the beginning of her marriage to him, hoping that HER baby would cement HIS family to her. But it was disappointment after disappointment . And as her 40th drew closer (so she’s 40 again, eh?), she would cry with every passing monthly period.
All the refusals by the NHS and all the money wasted on treatment and she still wasn’t pregnant. Well, last winter, when she fell pregnant, she was elated ... Until she lost the child. Could Plank ever imagine the horrible despair and disappointment she felt?
Surreptitiously, the easily impressionable and thick (as a) Plank reaches out and takes Dire’s hand. (DUM-DE-DUM-DUM-DUMMMMMMMMMM! Could this be another storyline?)
Timily meet up in the bar. Emily is late finishing work and she apologises. Dire was late into work this morning, herself, she explains breathlessly to Tim. Not only that, Dire had been a right bitch all morning, for no apparent reason.
She asks Tim if he’d devised any money-making crime ventures for the moment, but Tim responds that he hasn’t. Well, then, suggests Emily tentatively, perhaps he should think about doing some sort of ordinary job just to tide them over. After all, her salary wasn’t much.
Ah, but that’s why Tim was in the bar. Spying Christy, he begs a word. Christy wants to know what Tim wants. Why, Tim wants to help, the lad says. With the gear Christy was shifting in the bar.
Gear? What gear? Asks Christy, all innocence.
Tim persists. The knock-off gear that Christy specialises in. Christy again protests his innocence, to an increasingly concerned Emily.
Tim rises suddenly and takes Christy by the elbow, leading him away for a word. Look, he begins, Tim needs some quick cash. He thought perhaps Christy might have some sort of ‘work’ for Tim ... You know, as a driver or something.
Christy huffs, shortly. Was Tim soft? Who did he think Christy was - Al Capone? Anyway, why should Christy trust Tim when Tim had managed to cock-up a phoney break-in? Tim, says Christy, is a loser.
Emily hears this last remark and sets up a caterwaul. Christy is unperturbed. He wanted no kid gigging in on what he does with his business. Let Tim in on his empire? Why, he wouldn’t even deign to talk to Tim!
Emily shrieks that Christy’s a runt and a rat, and Tim pulls her to her feet, assuring Christy that he wouldn’t want to soil his hands with no-marks like him. And he and Emily leave the bar.
Outside on The Parade, Emily demands to know what Christy meant by Tim cocking up a phoney break-in. Tim tries to deflect her questioning, but vowing vengeance on Christy, but Emily demands to know about this phoney break-in.
Tim is annoyed, reminding her that she had said that she didn’t want to know about any of his business. Stuff that, Emily maintains. Finally, Tim relents. Without naming names, he tells Emily that Christy had set Tim up to do a phoney robbery, an insurance job. But it went wrong, only it went wrong because of Christy, not Tim.
And Tim vows that one day he’ll be able to buy and sell the likes of Christy Murray; and one day Christy would come crawling to him.
Plank and Dire have bothe apologised to one another and sit in the aftermath of their argument. Dire sadly muses about never giving up hope of having her own child, even when she was bringing them up as her own. Plank says he feels frustrated because he couldn’t help her. He remembers when Dire had first married Marty, and he would still hear Adele and Ant crying for Jan, their mother, at night. He was unable to comfort them, but her remembers how Dire was always there for them, to hold their hands and talk.
Plank vows to get a job and save enough money for Dire to have her IVF treatment. What a plonker!
Marty is still trying to get over the shock of finding out that Ant has been being bullied by girls. Adele assures him that what she saw was true. She actually chased them off and got the full story from Ant, himself, although he had made her promise not to tell anyone. She begs Marty not to let on that he knew as Ant would be annoyed that she had broken a confidence.
Keep quiet about this? Asks Marty, suddenly realising that he IS a father to three other children and not to one who has yet to be conceived. This IVF didn’t work, and the past year has been all about Dire, he maintains, suddenly aware of the patsy he’s been. His youngest son was now being humiliated and being bullied by girls because of events at home. Well, he promises, it’s time someone got this family back on track, and sooner rather than later. She can forget about her IVF and her own babies, he proclaims. It’s time Marty Murray looked after his own.
Summary © 2001 Marion Watts
Brookside and all related materials are © Mersey Television 1982-2001