Coronation Street

How rubbish some are Jack is appalling Sam is absolutely fantastic can't you at all look at your actors and even see how trash they are it is embarrassing to watch 30 years of cars I watched this season it's got to be the worst please try and do something about this it's atrocious.

There was a time, when I used to look forward to watching Coronation Street, but those days are no more. There are a number of reasons for the decline in the show, to understand them you have to seperate the show into two eras - before and after Eastenders! The soap was significantly different before February 1985 - the year that Eastenders began. The characters were likable and you warmed to them, the stoylines were almost an issue free environment. In order to compete with the new kid on the block, the establshed characters, and their storylines became darker. New, more realistic characters were introduced, in the begining they worked quite well. We are talking about the period from 1989 to the early nineties. The episodes increased from twice a week, to the six we have in the modern era. The quality of the writing and acting has fallen dramatically. Many of the modern storylines are issue led, which can make for tedious viewing. I can't tell whether I am watching Eastenders or Brookside sometimes!. The show has become a shadow of it's former self,

I have been watching Classic Corrie and it is up to 2004. The storylines are better and so is the acting. At this point in time the programmes were shorter and this may possibly mean the script writers were not under the same pressure. Around 2004 the storylines were also believable, things that could have happened anywhere including the murders. At the moment the storyline includes Tracy and her baby and about the McDonald's reaction to it. No wonder Suranne Jones went on to bigger things, she was brilliant as was Katherine Kelly and others of that time. There are still some excellent actors such as the actors who plays Paul and Damien but there are also some actors who don't make the character believable, although that may be the writing. The solicitors, oh please. The police, dear me. I think the programme makers could do with sitting down and watching a couple of years worth of Classic Corrie.

I once rated this legendary soap as the best drama series ever made! It had everything...great characters, superb storylines, lots of laughs intermingled with some hard hitting and serious plots. A wonderful programme, it was peerless, no other series came close. It was quite easily a 10/10.

Then the slow decline started from the late 90s. It remained a good show though, despite losing its unequalled dominance...but the rot set in deeper and deeper until it is now just another British soap that is using murder and mayhem to shock us into watching. Gone is the comedy that set it apart from other soaps. Gone are most of the legendary characters. Gone is the superb acting where just a raise of the eyebrows told us all we needed to know. It has been replaced with shouty, unpleasant characters, serial killings galore, forced and unfunny "comedy" lines and unbelievable nonsensical plots.

They maintain some decent performances with a few of the characters from the old days still there flying the flag for this iconic show. But I dread what the show will become when the very last one of them finally leaves. With regret, it will probably die a natural death and be removed from our screens.

That would be a sad day indeed.

TV is a fickle business and never more so than in one of its dramatic mainstays - the humble soap.

Getting the balance between comedy and drama can be a tricky affair, not to mention having (and keeping) a cast of likeable characters who make you want to tune in for more week after week.

While Eldorado and Albion Market failed to capture the imagination of the nation, there are others that manage to shrug off the birth pangs, cope with a difficult adolesence and settle down while seizing the heart of the nation.

In case you didn't know it, Corrie is 40 this year and as one of the world's longest running soaps it has earned its place in the record books.

It began not with a bang but with a whimper.

The opening scenes are still etched in the mind of creator Tony Warren, who developed the show while still a mere slip of a lad. Mrs Lappin slipped a coin into a bubblegum machine outside her corner shop, and Ena Sharples, scowling like a bulldog beneath THAT hairnet, demanded: "Are those fancies today's? I'll take half a dozen - and no eclairs. NO eclairs."

Lest we forget, the show gave rise to some of the best actors and writers in the business, including Joanna Lumley, Ben Kingsley and The Royle Family's much loved mate, Twiggy (Geoffrey Hughes).

Scriptwriters like Jack Rosenthal (Yentl, London's Burning) and Frank Cottrell Boyce (Jude, Hillary and Jackie) gave us dialogue and scenes that went above and beyond the realms of most shows while it enlivened many a dull night's TV by its very presence alone.

Over the years, we have relished the clashes between Ena (Violet Carson) and Elsie (Pat Phoenix), thrown soft furnishings at the TV while dithery Derek (Peter Baldwin) and Mavis (Thelma Barlow) tested the patience of saints and wept buckets as Judy Mallett (Gaynor Faye), Des Barnes (Phil Middlemiss) and most of Ken Barlow's (William Roache) wives became another statistic in the suspiciously high list of Weatherfield residents who met their maker far too early.

This year has been as unmissable as any in its four decade history with the Tony Horrocks murder and the 'Martn' (Sean Wilson) and Rebecca (Jill Halfpenny) affair coming to a head, not to mention Jez (the excellent Lee Boardman) and Alison (Naomi Radcliffe) reaching a sticky end as polar opposite characters both cut short by some brutal scripting.

The Street has become so ingrained in people's hearts that, over the years, many have lost sight of that thin line between fact and fiction.

When Elsie Tanner was lying unidentified in a London hospital after being knocked down by a taxi, viewers wrote to her husband to tell him where she was.

Dozens of women took up their knitting needles to make dustman Eddie Yates a new woolly hat when his own was shredded in the washing machine, and when Ena lost her post as secretary of the Glad Tidings mission, the job offers flooded in.

People have even tried to book Christmas parties at the Rovers Return and rent the houses which become vacant in Britain's most celebrated terraced street. Former producer Bill Podmore once said: 'All over the country, old terraces like Coronation Street are disappearing, but a change in the Street could destroy the roots of the programme, because the architecture is as much a part of its character as the people.'

But it was regular script writer Harry Kershaw who summed up it's enduring popularity and extraordinary success both at home and abroad. 'Coronation Street is about life,' he said, 'and life has its universal situations, its problems and laughter; therefore it has an international appeal.'

We have laughed, cried and run screaming by the sight of hamster-faced Gail (Helen Worth) and the haircut from Hell, poodle-haired Liz (Beverley Callard) dressing like a woman half her age and Mike Baldwin (Johnny Briggs) working his way through the Street's female residents. How long can all this go on?

Well, as long as Granada keep hiring some of the best cast and crew in the business while putting a fresh spin on age old stories of love, lust, infidelity and, in Fred Elliott's case, fine meat products, let's hope it never ends.