Hollyoaks In Rather Good Shocker!

Yes, the whole thing was ridiculous. Sam went from being quite a sensitive, mid-mannered nice guy to a easily-influenced drug-rapist to a psychotic mass murderer within a matter of months. But, and I won't say this often, last night's Hollyoaks was really really good.

The standard of writing and acting is usually amateurish at best, but there were several good performances, some decent special effects which put Emmerdale's recent explosion to shame and a few fantastic scenes which managed to combine both tragedy and some rather dark comedy. The scene where Zoe phoned Joe, only to find the ringtone was coming from a body bag. The scene where Clare seemed to be desperately trying not to smile after seeing OB, who had video evidence of her quickie with Warren, carted off to the hospital.

The deaths of the twins, who'd improved a lot lately, were also genuinely quite upsetting and even though Joe and Olivia had been not much more than extras recently, I would have still preferred the likes of Jessica, the horrendous Rhys and Gilly, and the even more horrendous new Irish student to perish instead.

No doubt Hollyoaks will re-address the balance and go back to being consistently bad pretty soon. I'm sure we'll have months of Sonny Valentine, the worst soap character ever, moaning about his brother saving his mother's killer to look forward to. But for now, it deserves to be applauded and at the very least, it deserves a few soap awards next year.