Hopefully Tracy lays into her good and proper. Can't stand Mary, why anyone would trust her with their kids is beyond me. Although why the kids need picking up or dropped off at school is beyond me, they must be about 12 and have been seen taking the bus with the other teenage brats of the street. Do they need a nanny anymore?

It's always the hens that suffer when a marriage breaks down

Perhaps he will wring the hens necks before he goes, good riddance to them. Just hope he leaves the chickens alone!

I dont think children automatically get a share, do they? I thought everything goes to the spouse unless the will says otherwise?

People can admire someone for doing a job that is difficult for most people, despite their differences, and care about abused children too.


How can they be? The courts are "closed" and so you can only speak about and identify a child when they are dead. (and not always then, even)



I am limbering up in preparation for the naked rooftop protest!

Me too. Maybe it isn't too late?

I'd not seen anything about the Sharif actor, and just Googled to see what was going on

Apparently he's 45! Makes him younger than me by a good margin, but thought he was much older than me!

How old is he supposed to be in Corrie? Him and Yasmeen have just celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary so that would make him 65ish - 20 years older than his actual age!

So he got married the same year that he was born!

He's 55 - got married at 10

He's 55.

Looks older, must worry a lot. Bet he does now!

I bet the actress who is playing his "lady freind" was thinking Im set for a good few months work and then he goes and beggers things up on Twitter

As for him going to look for dear old Emily I bet hes getting on the plane and gets himself all settled in his seat and Emily is outside looking for a taxi to take her back to the Street

I don't want to restart this debate but I have to say that IMO Alex is a wooden actor just reciting lines. The whole point of watching dramas,soaps included, is that they should be believable and I think it was a mistake to give him such a large important role.

I have to agree that the actor who plays Alex does seem very woody and just repeating the lines as if reading them at the same time.

I have not seen him in anything else, so cannot make my mind up if it is down to his condition, a poor actor or lousy script and production / direction.

At the moment, I am in the 'Token' camp.

Whatever the reason, it is not working.

Completely agree - and I thought all the nonsense following on from Meldrewman's very valid comment yesterday was totally unnecessary. The actor has been employed - and is no doubt receiving a decent pay - to play a part he's clearly not competent enough to do. To say 'oh well, he's doing his best' - which is pretty much the gist of yesterday's 'argument' - is patronising.

Actually it differs. I am in Ireland, so here if there is no Will then spouse/civil partner gets two-thirds, one-third is divided equally between children.
In the UK, if there is no Will and if the total estate is under £250k all goes to the spouse/partner, if over £250 then any children get half of everything above that.

This. I don't get why such a fuss was made about some commenting that he is a weak actor. Imo he is wooden and the character is irritating.

Neither do I. And he's like a lot of Corrie characters - irritating. It's the way Corrie write quite a number of their characters.

It's not just Alex though, the whole lot of them at the cafe are irritating. But Cathy and Alex are the biggest irritants! Why on earth did Corrie put those two in the cafe and make Cathy Roy's new woman? She adds nothing. Alex adds nothing. Roy is now reduced to being nothing but a gurning misery, day in day out.

Apart from being another museum like the Duckies, the cafe is now a doom and gloom palace.

Roy's going to lose custom soon. The factory girls and Ty and Fiz will be going elsewhere for their cakes and bacon barms.

Anna, Cathy and Alex are the 'three irritants of Weatherfield' then sometimes you have Fiz and her whiny voice popping in. Poor Roy, he has been reduced to such misery I feel sorry for him.

There are people like Alex and other characters on the show that live and work amongst us. They behave, act and live their lives as such. When you say that they should be believable on soaps that's what you're getting. They are themselves. The other alternative is to get a Hollywood A list actor to play a wooden Alex and deliver the lines exactly as Alex does and that would be applauded.

Did anyone else notice that Freddeh drove his motorcycle and sidecar down the wrong side of the road after he picked Audreh up?

Laughable innit. Mary Poppins she ain't! The Alahan children are like the Jolie-Pitt kids; coddled and pandered to.

They're 10 1/2 according to Wikipedia (born Jan 06). 12 would make them the same age as Amy Barlow.

Alex is not legally the child of what we now discover is his real father whose name will not be on is birth certificate. I doubt he would inherit anything anyway.

Phelan won't be happy when he hears the news.

The intonation of a person with Down's syndrome is likely to be a bit different from people without, so it is not reasonable to expect him to speak exactly as the other actors do. However, I do think it's patronising as has been said earlier to comment on the actor's probable IQ and suggest he won't understand the words he speaks. I'd say this is nonsense.

Personal interest is that I have a son with Down's syndrome, and he is Alex's age. He does a lot of acting in amateur productions, and he is also a Corrie expert, having watched every episode available on DVD from the very beginning. He was interested to learn that there was an actor with Down's coming into the show, though he was a bit miffed it wasn't him! His opinion now is that Alex has been a disappointment in the role, not really speaking his lines with conviction or showing emotion appropriately. By the way, in the previous sentence I am quoting his own words: he has no difficulty whatsoever understanding the words of any character in Corrie, as he has a wide vocabulary, and would feel patronised if anyone suggested otherwise.

My own feeling is that the real disappointment has been Cathy, but that's a lot to do with the writing. She seems so inconsistent, and at the moment so self-obsessed. And there is so little seeming affection between her and Roy. Poor Roy. He deserves better.