HOW do you celebrate your birthday?

A bit of a knees-up down the pub, dinner at a posh restaurant or a get together with loved ones. They do things differently in Weatherfield.

Coronation Street will mark its 50th birthday in December with tragedy and destruction on a scale previously unseen on the cobbles.

So far the 7,000-plus episodes, producer Phil Collinson recalls, have seen 114 deaths (including seven suicides and 14 murders), 39 births, 88 weddings (although 13 didn’t go ahead), six miscarriages, a train crash, a coach crash, a lorry crash, a house collapse and three cars driving into the canal.

What this shows – apart from the need for crash barriers along the canalside – is that life in Corrie is never quiet. “How do you top that?” asks Leedsborn Collinson. “With a train crash? A death? A wedding? Another death? A birth? A murder? A fire? Another death?”

He pauses before saying, “Yes – all that”.

Now this does seem a little bit like, if you’ll pardon the word, overkill. A series conceived, and Collinson provides the words again… “as a drama that looked behind the net curtains on an ordinary street into the lives of the people who lived there”...

is becoming extraordinary.

Emmerdale used to have a reputation as the most accident-prone place in soaps. One time an aircraft fell out of the sky and on to the village.

This week the Yorkshire-set soap had a train crash.

A modest affair in which a car with just one occupant got stuck on the track and was rammed by an oncoming train.

Producer Gavin Blyth denies trying to get their “disaster” in before a whole week of death and destruction in Coronation Street. “This couldn’t be more different,” he says.

“Ours is a train, theirs is a tram. But ours is away from the village and this is the start of a storyline, I can’t stress that enough. This has nothing to do with Corrie and I’m sure they’ll do fantastically well.”

Actor Dominic Brunt, who plays vet Paddy, agrees: “Our crash isn’t the story, it’s the catalyst for the real story about Aaron and Jackson, whereas the stunts in Corrie will be the story.”

Collinson seems to confirm this with talk of ten special effects experts, eight stuntmen, fires, explosions, collapsing buildings. But he’d also say it was as much to do with the characters as the stunts.

He told the birthday launch at Granada Studios that his priority was to make the 50th “a memorable and fitting tribute to all the cast and crew who have ever walked these corridors”.

Those who are killed off might see it differently.

Others might think they’ve switched on to a repeat of an old disaster movie.

What Collinson hopes will make it more than just a BLOODBATH ON THE COBBLES! – as the Inside Soap headline puts it – is the fact that the course of half-a-dozen storylines will be changed by the tram crash. There’s plenty bubbling away, from the paternity battle over Molly’s baby to Leanne and Nick’s wedding.

The cast are being kept in the dark about who’s going to perish in the disaster, only handed script pages affecting them. But with several actors known to be leaving – the Peacocks, Steven Arnold and Julia Haworth, and Vicky Binns’ Molly – they must be prime contenders to be victims.

EastEnders recently burnt down the Queen Vic in a much-heralded episode that saw the departure – alive – of Barbara Windsor. But it was all flames and no substance, a disappointment not least because no one actually died.

The special episodes of Corrie – including a live episode – will, Collinson predicts, be a week of television people will remember for ever. But, I wonder, will it be for the right reasons? The explosions and a tram crashing on to the corner shop and the Kabin might just stick in people’s mind more than the human tragedy.