The Rover Returns (Coronation Street)

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Product:	Coronation Street
Date:	18/06/02 (20 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nostalgic novelty value

Disadvantages: Dreary repetition of old storylines

The best thing on television last week was Six Feet Under - a term which, personally, I had been hoping summed up the whereabouts of Coronation Street's knackered old drag act, Bet Lynch.

Last week's Corrie double episode proved that, sadly, this was wishful thinking.

"I'm going to Weatherfield, cock," Bet said, as she wedged herself into the back of a cab. "A pub called The Rovers Return."

An hour later - after Tonight With Trevor McDonald - the cab was just pulling up: "Keep the change, cock." Two "cocks" in the space of 60 minutes, but that's Bet Lynch for you. After a Pulitzer Prize-winning speech by Ken Barlow, the episode saw Betty and her hotpot leave The Rovers, a move which suggested the series was taking a much-needed leap into the 21st Century.

Storylines such as the historical skirmish, the Save Our Cobbles campaign and Roy Hudd's "comic" funeral director have seen Corrie's famous cosiness becoming positively suffocating. After seven years, the decision to bring back Bet (Julie Goodyear) seemed not so much like scraping the barrel as desperation.

Unlike other stalwarts of the series during the 70s and 80s, say Vera or Hilda Ogden, Bet Lynch never struck me as particularly POPULAR. (Like Goodyear, she was always too full of herself to be likeable.) Last week's episodes confirmed the suspicion that her arrival will leave the series horribly unbalanced. We know Bet will, inevitably, take over at The Rovers, if only because she said she didn't want to so many times.

"I'd rather bag horse muck and sell it door-to-door," she tutted. Yes, we would rather you did that, too.

"Still at it, then?" clucked Vera Duckworth pointedly - a comment aimed shrewdly at Goodyear as much as Bet.

Despite her self-professed reputation as a sex bomb, Bet was never that good-looking, even when she was youn
g. Now she is a pantomime dame and two ugly sisters rolled into one. She looks like an old ostrich that has just had a shock.

With two wigs fighting it out on her head and earrings Pat Wicks would shy away from as too gaudy, the leopardskin handbag and cigarette-holder operate more as scene-stealing props than as accessories.

"Still smoking, I see," Vera observed. "I'm still everything, love," said Bet. Everything except entertaining.

In the following episode we were treated to the hoary old image of Bet without her face on. Waking up slumped on Audrey Roberts's sofa, hairdo akimbo, high heels on and fag hanging out of her mouth, she looked like like Rod Stewart on a bad day; a drag act dragged through a hedge backwards.

Bet and Rita clashed, like wizened Siberian widows or two decrepit dinosaurs. "People like me and you, we don't change," Bet told her, underlining the bad news. "It was my birthday last month," Bet sighed. "Have a guess how old?"

I dunno... 162?

It's hard to see how the series can muster any support or sympathy for her when younger characters such as Fiz or even Karen, who have never seen Bet before, keep saying what a fright she looks.

"Hey, Gail, who's the old slapper?" asked Janice Battersby, who's not known for being particularly fussy.

Staggering around The Rovers with her tatty beehive hairdo, she looks like a tart from an old Fellini film set in Salford.

"You've turned into a hard, petty woman," sniped Rita, summing up the audience's feelings nicely. "Do us all a favour and get lost."

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