Animal Mummies (five): Coronation Street (ITV1): TAKE one dead cat. Gut it, wash it, wring it, tumble and blow dry it, stuff it and then mount it.

Your moggy is preserved for life, although not quite as active as when alive, but the good news is you save a fortune on cat food.

In place of a pet, you get a new ornament - and people are willing to pay a lot of money for that - as much as $4,000 to preserve the cat called Kutzu featured in Animal Mummies.

It involved a three-month process at a special centre in Salt Lake City in America, where head mummifier Ron Temu took us through it step by step.

"I believe that all things have souls. I don't think it's just a piece of meat lying there," he said.

Kutzu was dunked in a tank of chemicals for several months to stop her body decomposing, then wrapped in bandages and coated with a sealant to stop bacteria getting to the skin.

The bandaged cat was then sealed inside a bronze mummy form and that, said Temu, is how she'll remain for eternity, as a cat ornament in the corner of her owner's living room

At least Kutzu didn't smell. Salima Ikram, a mummification expert working in Cairo, decided to follow the Egyptian method of drying animals in the sun. Her research involved catfish which have been found in the ancient burial tombs. Unfortunately, the smell was "so intense" that her experiment had to be moved to the roof.

She gutted a fish, drained the blood, filled the cavity with bags of salt and left it to dry in the hot sun. This made it sound like one of Delia's recipes.

Two weeks later, Ikram had a beautifully desiccated fish. She rubbed oil into the skin - signifying the rebirth of the corpse - and wrapped it in bandages.

All that seemed an awful lot of fuss and trouble over a dead animal. But the Egyptians believed mummification was preparation for the afterlife.

They didn't have the advantage of freeze drying used nowadays. This gives a more lifelike effect because it removes all moisture and stops shrinking. There can be nothing worse than welcoming your mummified dog back home and finding that your alsatian is now the size of a chihuahua.

Equally bad is kissing your new best friend Nick and finding that he doesn't like it. Todd emerged from the closet in Coronation Street by tentatively snogging Nick and swiftly wished he'd kept his lips to himself.

Perhaps Todd misunderstood when Nick told him: "Let's see if we can put a smile back on your face". Anyway, before you could say, "What a gay day," Nick was blabbing about the incident to Todd's live-in schoolgirl mum lover Sarah.

Todd is confused. So are the viewers. He's shown no sign of sexual confusion in the past. Clearly, being gay is something you catch like flu, brought about when the writers run out of storylines.