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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 367133" data-attributes="member: 22">To me, the coupling of Billy and Sheila felt like a "What if ...?" challenge for the writers. On paper (and when I first heard it rumoured), it made no sense: both are in strong(ish) long-term marriages, she's a staunch Catholic, he's ethically dodgy and not to mention a fair bit younger than her. But "what if ... we make it happen anyway: what would be the most plausible, believable way to make these characters fall in love, without irreparably damaging the credibility of either? And once it happens, how would they then truthfully react?" (And it is very much something that happens to them.)  So a huge amount of time and care and detail was taken in getting them to where they needed to be for it to happen. Spoilers weren't what they are now and I still couldn't quite believe they were going to get together until they finally did, and then it just felt inevitable. But it was real nail-biting, edge of the seat stuff! The week leading up to it was, I think, the first time any soap had gone five nights a week.Again, the implausibility, the awkwardness and the complications of Sheila and Claire moving across the road were factored into the story, and that's what made it work. Conversely, Terry moving where he moves after leaving No 10 killed his character stone dead for me. He became bland by association and never recovered.Those final two appearances of Roger -- the visit to the house while Heather's away, the meeting with Heather arranged by his dad -- are part of a mini-trend on Brookside. I can think of three more occasions where major characters are written out with hugely satisfying final episode ... only to unexpectedly pop up again a few weeks later. It almost feels like a deliberate attempt to undermine the convention of "the farewell episode", as if the show were saying, "LIfe's not really like that. People don't always disappear forever in a nice, tidy, emotionally cathartic way."Maureen is Jimmy Nail's sister -- I never knew that, but of course she is! Sheila being so visibly nervous on TV was a wonderfully naturalistic touc, kind of the opposite of Karen Mackenzie proving to be a natural born talk show host on Knots.It's very interesting how chummy Sheila and Annabelle become, and how they enjoy looking down their noses at Marie together. It feels very real, but it's also quite a soap trope, where the introduction of the Jacksons and later the Corkhills, like Ogdens and Battersbys on Coronation Street and their "white trash" equivalents on the other soaps, present the existing working class  characters (and possibly the audience at home) with someone "even worse" than themselves to look down on. We all get to be snobs by proxy.First Alan, then Marie, now Harry and Edna: each new arrival becoming that much more larger than life, that much gobbier and nosier, that much more conventionally soapy.Strictly speaking, Karen and Doreen had already left a few years before and were just back for brief visits. But yes, 1990 was a real turning point: the series going to three episodes a week and clearly a conscious effort being made to turn it into more of a conventional soap. Perhaps the most telling departure of all that year was Jimmy McGovern's.</blockquote>

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