Drinking really is bad for your health in Soapland

POPPING down to your local for a quiet drink isn’t an option on Soapland.

There’s always something happening.

Not just a karaoke night but a punchup, birth, death or a fire to go with your packet of pork scratchings.

Whether it’s the Rovers Return, Queen Vic or the Woolpack you can be certain that something awful will be happening that makes you wish you’d spent a quiet in front of the telly instead.

Next week, the Rovers Return in Coronation Street is getting a makeover – the burnt look after a major blaze and the rumoured death of a major character in the fire. I’ll give you a clue.

Landlady Stella and Sunita are both trapped inside the burning building. Shobna Gulati, who plays Sunita, is leaving the series. The odds are she’s toast.

You take your life in your hands every time you order a pint of Newton and Ridley. Proof if it were needed that drinking really is bad for your health. An early casualty was Martha Longhurst, who slumped on to the table by her glass of stout in the Rovers snug in 1964. She died of a heart attack. Alf Roberts passed away during a birthday party on January 1 (would it be insensitive to wish him a happy new year?). Ray Langton returned to the Street in 2005, only to die during a party celebrating the second wedding of his ex-wife Deirdre to Ken Barlow.

In 1979 a lorry crashed into the Rovers, which seems very careless of the driver. Alf Roberts was only injured that time, along with Mike Baldwin and queen of the hotpot Betty Turpin.

Fourteen years later Lisa Duckworth was killed by a speeding motorist outside the pub.

Whether the driver was aiming for her or the pub is unknown.

The heat was really turned up during The Great Fire Of Weatherfield in 1986. That was Jack Duckworth’s fault. He mended a fuse but not correctly. During the night fire broke out, leaving landlady Bet Lynch trapped in the burning building. She tried to get out but was beaten back by the flames and was overcome by the smoke. It was left to Kevin Webster to save the day – and Bet and her leopard-print wardrobe.

The Woolpack pub in Emmerdale has fared no better. The passenger plane that crashed on the village may have missed the pub but Tricia Stokes later caused the place to burn down through her carelessness with sparklers.

How ironic that she later died during a storm when the Woolpack roof collapsed on her. Doctors declared her brain dead, something we’d all suspected for some time.

Which brings us to that centre of discontent, the Queen Vic, final resting place of murdered Dirty Den who was buried in the cellar of the EastEnders watering hole.

There was even a Queen Vic Fire Week in 2010 to mark the departure of Peggy Mitchell.

It was her own fault. She shouldn’t have locked her crack cocaine-addicted son Phil in the pub to force him to go cold turkey. He escaped and set the pub on fire.

Not only did this give Peggy a dramatic exit from the soap, but gave the producers the excuse they needed to give the pub a makeover because of the transition to high definition television broadcasting.