I know it was 5 years ago and these characters are long gone, but if Paul Marquess hadn't gone along with his ridiculous last minute rewrites and axing several characters he had only just introduced, what do you think the long term storyline plans were for the Sharpe and Davenport family originally?
Obviously there was Amber's pregnancy, and Arlo Davenport was Taylor and Amber's half brother with Phil's secret wife Helen. So the family were also heavily tied to the O'Connors.

Where do you think their storylines were originally intended to go?

I'm not sure there was a proper plan, one of the main problems that I can think of (apart from the woeful acting) was that their stories were too complicated.

Tony and the Sharpe's moving in with Diane and Rob, Amber's pregnancy, Diane's obsession with the baby (not helped that Finn was the dad), potentially Taylor and Sinead and then of course the secret family. It was just too messy, so I guess the beat way was to write them out quickly. But i still don't know why Rob had to be a casaulty too. That period of Hollyoaks was a bit of a mess production wise anyway with all the last minute cuts, edits and additons.

Funny enough one of them sort of survived the axe. Charlie Behan played Tré, Arlo's brother, now plays Charlie Dean...

*clip clop*

I liked the double life/secret second family plot it could have potentially been really good. It's something that I don't think has been done before. The problem was it came about far too soon after the family were introduced it should have been much later once the Sharpe's had been established and we actually cared what happened to them.

I don't even remember the Davenport family. Amber was an interesting character and her crush on Rob was interesting. I can't remember why he left- I think he told the kids he got together with Diane when she was his pupil and they thought it was icky so he left and they didn't go with him.

I kind of felt if they had recast the characters the family may have been salvageable. The recast Amber who appeared for a few episodes was much better and I felt someone like Sharlene Whyte would have made a good Gabby

That was a funny old time - it effectively sank Paul Marquess at the Oaks, which was a big shame.

I've got no evidence, but I always thought Phil Sharpe was meant to be the original firestarter, so he'd have gone to jail, leaving Gabby (clip clop) to deal with the fallout of his 2 families. They changed the arsonist to Dom to make it easier to write the Sharpes out, but it wrecked the fire and the reveal. (Though I did love it when Dom confessed to Brendan. ).

I guess if they'd stayed, the paternity of Amber's baby would have been revealed as Finn, getting Rob off the hook. But they wrote him out as well.

Of the Sharpes, Gabby and Amber particularly were spectacularly bad as I remember,so he was right to ditch them, but it was done pretty brutally.