Coronation Street (ITV1)

Is anyone else spooked by the floating face of Tony Gordon? The masks the men of Coronation Street are wearing for Tony’s endless stag night — showing Tony’s granite-like visage itself — are horrible and brilliant, because (as the smallest ant under the biggest rock must now know) this week lovely Liam dies on Tony’s stag night. And so every time he steps off the kerb or takes a drink you think: “Yes, that’s it. He’s a gonner.”

But Liam is still magically, cosmically alive and deserves to die now if only for sheer stupidity; if someone was making the loaded comments and giving you the kinds of looks that Tony is giving Liam, you would think: “Yep, psychopath at 12 o’clock, I’m out of here.” But this is Coronation Street, where the most obvious villains go undetected until one orgasmic moment of revelation — Gail’s “You’re Norman Bates with a briefcase” to Richard Hillman was the best.

Liam has to die on Friday, surely — or maybe the stag night will become its own soap spin-off and we will be taking bets on how and when it will happen into the new year. I do hope Blanche is involved.

Hollyoaks (Channel 4)

Soap stress continues in Hollyoaks, where a church is rigged to explode with a number of the gaggling McQueen daughters in it. Niall the psychopath who wants them all dead is, in fact, their brother, half, many times removed — abandoned years earlier at the church by matriarch Myra. Hollyoaks knows how to do this kind of thing: it blew up the pub once and unlike other soaps — which tease with big bangs and no casualties — tends to deliver on a proper body count. Anyway, you’re never really dead in Chester: one character came back as a ghost, and another who was supposed to be dead has been living in the loft. Confusing, as in Hollyoaks The Loft is also a club.

The Family (Channel 4)

Even tenser, five episodes (out of eight) in and still the main focus of reality documentary The Family is Emily and whether she should go out so late, when she will find a real job, and the swings of temper her appalling behaviour causes for her parents. Still, the cat unsuccessfully tries to take cover from all the domestic shrapnel. This week it was revealed that Emily’s bed was a storage dump for bottles and crisp packets. She drifted from one job disaster to another. And the shouting was unabated. According to one correspondent, the charm of The Family is that “it’s just like ours”. But is it? That level of rowing and chaos all the time? Even if it is, can we have another story except for Emily and her night-time pursuits?

Desperate Housewives (Channel 4)

The season finale of Desperate Housewives was reassuringly insane. Wisteria Lane’s gay couple — despite initial fanfare, they’ve been sidelined for most of the season — were getting married and arguing over ice sculptures. Sadly the big day coincided with the pesky arrival of Katherine’s abusive ex-husband and (if you’d managed to follow it over countless months) there was an explanation of who Dylan, Catherine’s daughter, really was — which, of course, was not her daughter but a young girl she’d adopted from an orphanage after her own daughter had been crushed under a wardrobe. Hey, it happens. For a while Desperate Housewives lost its way, but — like Ugly Betty — its mesh of the everyday and fantastic, drama and humour, bitching and pathos is winningly ridiculous.

At the end, the writers deployed the now common (One Tree Hill) conceit of suddenly somersaulting forward five years. Bree’s son had become her PA, Lynette’s was in juvenile detention, daughters hijacked from orphanages were being married off. The concessions to ageing the lead actresses allowed for this ruse were predictably, um, subtle: Lynette had longer, flatter hair; Bree looked a little tauter in the face, Gabrielle bigger — and Teri Hatcher was miraculously totally the same, although she was now married to the guy who played the horniest, dirtiest character on the US version of Queer As Folk.

Greatest Cities of the World with Griff Rhys Jones (ITV1)

Should it ever go wrong for Griff Rhys Jones, a future beckons as a tour bus guide. His gallop through London was delightful, and not just for its rich and scatty stew of history, but also for the loopy grin he wore every time he chanced on something he absolutely loved. Up in Big Ben’s clock tower, when the bongs began, even the effect of earplugs couldn’t knock the look of boyish pleasure off his face.

When GRJ is having a really brilliant time, he wants you to know about it. He went up in a crane and watched daybreak, he went on the Thames, and — best of all — found one of those secret underground networks that lie, empty and out of bounds, alongside the Tube tunnels that thousands of commuters use every day. This wasn’t encyclopaedic, it wasn’t Peter Ackroyd, but it was a lot of fun.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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