Street dreams made of this...

Stan and Hilda, Jack and Vera, Elsie and Ena… they felt so real they could have been our neighbours.

The writing is often wonderful. “See this smile Betty?” said Bet Lynch. “It’s not really a smile, it’s the lid on a scream.”

And when puffed-up sweatshop boss Mike Baldwin swaggered into the Rovers and snapped: “Give us a large Scotch.” Bet replied: “Say please and you can have it in a glass.” Every waspish word Blanche Hunt ever spoke was precious. Although Betty Turpin’s famous, “What can I get you, cock?” never sounded the same when Sean said it. Then there was Ena on her mother’s death: “She just sat up, broke wind and died. We all having the same again?” Coronation Street has served up more hot plots than Betty served hotpots. Best was the BaldwinBarlow love triangle. But I still remember Hilda sobbing after Bernard “Stan” Youens died in real life. Some 26.6million viewers watched her and her curlers leave the Street on Christmas Day in 1987. We could moan about the show’s slow corrosion after ITV twerps pushed it to six episodes a week, and the inevitable pressure to crank up the agony.

Alan Bradley worked because he was so unusual.

Now every other Street newcomer is a psychopath. (Connor McIntyre was brilliant as Pat Phelan, though.)

The push to shock, and to top the last stunt, has taken the soap away from that old working-class world of pints, pigeons and conservative morality.

But at its heart, it’s still a show about everyday people, a backstreet community with a (generally) friendly local – don’t you miss yours? That’s why we love it.

BEST innuendo, the Street’s cheeky butcher Fred Elliott: “If all goes well, in future she’ll be taking a lot of my sausage.” brilliantly