A lockdown treat

bit where the dummy’s head flew off. He could then, with respectable safety, roll over a (presumably sanitised) car bonnet on to a crash-mat two metres from the camera crew. TV history in the making.

Of course, the veteran characters – actors forcibly “shielded” as being over 70 – will have to be shown Zoom-ing for a while, or referred to as if they’d just left the room.

That’s a loss: we were relishing Maureen Lipman’s new character Evelyn, and nothing is the same without Rita’s improbable orange hair, David Nielsen’s superbly eccentric Roy and, left, Ken Barlow (he’s 88!) annoying his family with references to Ibsen.

But the young are good, and the mid-life ones shape up nicely.

Like Peter Gunn as the hapless ex-headmaster Brian, who with his metal detector plays “sexy treasure hunt” for a 20p piece in his girlfriend’s crevices.

For all the grief and anxiety, this Covid-19 year has seen some remarkable national ingenuity: in treatments, medical engineering, vaccine research, and reform of creaky NHS systems.

Some people in lockdown learned for the first time to garden, cook, craft and Zoom. But of all the brilliantly inventive making-do, the thing which charms me most is how producer Iain MacLeod and his team on the good old Street stepped up, technically and creatively.

PRE-RECORDED episodes had to carry title warnings reminding us that any snogging, fighting or hugging were done pre-Covid and not to be copied by us in the real world as we creep round one another at two-metre distances and wear masks in shops.

But now the splendidly impertinent trick is that after never showing us the Street

GREAT TO BE BACK: Filming again after lockdown, although careful to be socially distancing; top, Yasmeen; and, left, Sarah Platt