And so, with merciful expedition, five minutes into the second of last night’s episodes, the verdict came. Tracy Barlow was guilty of murdering her boorish lover, Charlie Stubbs. Of course she was. She was the least credible defendant ever, gurning with pleasure whenever anyone lied on her behalf; a wait-til-you-get-home look when they got near the truth. Tracy Barlow is a childlike sociopath. Appropriately, her final words as she was marched into the prison van were: “It’s not fair.”

This was not a classic episode, anticlimactic more than anything. But some of the tension had drained away anyway on Sunday night when Tracy announced that whatever the outcome she was quitting her mother Deirdre’s life for ever, and that meant ours too. Deirdre, “Sexy Specs” as Tracy unaffectionately calls her, was upset. Goodness knows why. Like Goneril and Regan, Tracy is not a daughter you would want in your life. Deirdre summarised the reasons over a bottomless bottle of red two weeks ago: “Date-raping Roy Cropper . . . selling poor Amy [her daughter] . . . the time you took Ecstasy and ended up on a life-support machine?” It was, you recall, during this drinking session that Tracy spectacularly added to her rap sheet by admitting that Charlie’s killing was entirely premeditated.

Tracy — as opposed, perhaps, to Kate Ford, who plays her — has a fine sense of drama. Not only did she want to get off, she wanted to triumph in the role of a battered woman who could take no more. Working against her was an unruly confessional streak that we should not confuse with a conscience. On Sunday it surfaced again: she just had to tell loin-tormented David that just because he had perjured himself for her didn’t mean she fancied him. But by then she knew she was doomed: her key defence witnesses had underwhelmed, David “cocky and deceitful”, chain-smoking Deirdre weepy, ambivalent and asthmatic.

Smoking in TV dramas symbolises either villainy or, as in Deirdre’s case, pusillanimity. It also suggests humanity, a quality that Ken, Deirdre’s husband and Tracy’s stepfather, has always found problematic. In the recriminatory aftermath, Deirdre committed the only domestic crime worse than knocking someone over the head with a brass statue by lighting up in the living room. “Oh no, not in the house. I am as upset as you,” said Ken. “Then why don’t you let that mask crack just for a minute and show us you are a human being?” she snapped.

Meanwhile, humanity continued to chart its varied course down Coronation Street: racism in the workshop, a new kebab shop, possible subsidence at No 7. The landlord announced the verdict to the Rovers Return at lunchtime. That means everyone knows except little Amy, who had drawn a picture of her mother waving a magic wand. We left her father fretting about how to break the news that it didn’t work and Mummy was spending the next 15 years in jail. I don’t believe in demon seeds, but maybe Corrie’s writers do. There is something in that child’s eyes that makes me think she will bear it.

Simple tales of ordinary folk

— Tracy Barlow joins a growing cast of Corrie killers. In 2003 Richard Hillman went on a crowbar killing spree, before he drowned in a canal

— In 2005, the Street’s Angela Harris ended up in prison after taking the rap when her daughter, Katy, murdered her bullying father, Tommy

— The Christmas edition of Emmerdale showed the tycoon Tom King pushed from his bedroom window at Home Farm. Viewers must wait until next month for the murderer’s identity to be revealed

— Scheming Eastender Cindy Beale hired a hitman to bump off her husband, Ian. She suffered from last-minute pangs of conscience, but it was too late. Ian survived and managed to track Cindy down to a club in Italy

— In 2005 more than 14 million tuned in to Eastenders to watch Chrissie Watts kill her scheming husband, Dirty Den, with a dog-shaped doorstop, in the Queen Vic

Source: Times database

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