Soap and water

It's as plain as the nose on Cyrano de Bergerac's face that soap and water don't mix. Put a soap resident near anything remotely damp and they tend to get wet, wet, wet.

Something is stirring in the Walford waters next week. Is it a bird, is it a plane? It looks more like the Loch Ness monster? No, it's Phil Mitchell, Albert Square's answer to the Man from Atlantis doing his Moby Dick impersonation.

He's swimming to the rescue of young Peter and Ben, trapped in a submerged car after the vehicle has gone off the road on their way home from the disastrous camping trip.

Before you can say Davy Jones' Locker, Phil has dived into the murky waters and is frantically trying to open the door of the car in which his son and Ian Beale's son are trapped.

Will they end up in a watery grave like serial killer Richard "Tricky Dicky" Hillman did in Coronation Street? He had no one to blame but himself. His idea of a family outing was to strap wife Gail, her children David and Sarah, and granddaughter Bethany, into the family's silver people carrier and drive it straight into Weatherfield canal. They survived, he didn't.

This was the same canal into which cab driver Don Brennan and his vehicle had earlier plunged. He abducted Alma for the ride and, amazingly, both survived the icy waters.

The question of whether Don was trying to kill himself or was just a bad driver was solved later when he crashed his car again, this time into the viaduct and was burnt to death in the ensuing fire.

More recently, Cilla took a tumble into the Weatherfield water while fleeing the authorities after a shoplifting spree. The buggy she was riding hit a bump and toppled into the canal.

Canals have a fatal attraction for soap residents. Dirty Den, in his first incarnation, was gunned down by a bunch of daffodils - concealing a gun - and fell into the Walford canal. He must have been wearing a bulletproof vest and a lifejacket because he survived and later returned from the dead.

Sometimes getting wet is a cause for merriment as in the Street when Bettabuys' boss Reg Holdsworth, determined to consummate his relationship with Maureen Naylor, lured her up to his room to try out his waterbed. Their passion proved to much for the floating love nest, which burst and flooded the shop below.

Rovers' potman Fred Gee got in hot water after forgetting to put the brake on the parked vehicle in which he'd left Bet Lynch and Betty. It rolled down the hill, coming to rest in the middle of a lake in the park. He was faced with paddling out and giving them a piggyback to dry ground.

Emmerdale is set in Yorkshire farming country, but you're more likely to get soaked than mown down by a runaway herd of cattle. This year has been particularly bad for water-based incidents. A van, whose mechanics had been tampered with, crashed into a lake with Billy Hopwood at the wheel and young Victoria Sugden in the passenger seat. They both lived to tell the tale.

Then Cain Dingle's car went sailing off the top of a quarry into the water below. He escaped too, mainly because he wasn't in the vehicle. The deception was part of an elaborate plan to enable Cain to escape the country with a large bag of someone else's money.

Even a sea crossing can prove fatal in Emmerdale. Shelly Williams thought she'd escaped the clutches of psycho Steph, only to be confronted by her on the deck of a ferry - and to be pushed overboard.

A life on the ocean (well, canal) waves awaited Des Barnes until he was jilted by his girlfriend on the day he was set to launch the boat he'd been building on the canal. The boat went up in flames, a flaming reminder of his ruined love life.

This was minor compared to the Family Affairs massacre, prompted by the decision to eliminate many of the original characters and give five's soap opera a revamp.

The entire Hart family, except for one who'd already departed the series, were blown to smithereens in a gas explosion that blasted through the boat on which a wedding reception was being held.