I wanted to start this thread because I was really shocked that there wasn't one already. So, I actually watch it in Ireland and I think we're pretty far behind. The episode I saw today was about Laila lying about her sister dying so that Nelson wouldn't break up with her for Jesse. (BTW, why either of them like him is just beyond me). Oh, and Toni tore Logan to pieces in front of everyone (I say everyone but it was more like a handful of people 'cause they've a hospital to run damn it!) when they were in the hospital car park which was kinda awesome. Oh and Barb is still on her never ending quest to feel young again (blah!)

I was on the official NZ site for it as well and I don't recognise like any of the characters except for Chris and Toni. Can anyone fill me in on some goss?

Hmmm... as for Chris and Toni, they get back together when Toni's brother turns Grade A psycho and multiple murderer. Toni gets pregnant again, leading to a shotgun wedding and eventual miscarriage. Chris being Chris cannot keep it in his pants and after the third affair (with Rachel McKenna!) Toni takes Harry and runs off to Australia with... wait for it... Guy Warner. Who is now a total cokehead.

That is SO freaking amazing! I'm really excited about the return of Dom and Rachel! But Dom dies the next time he comes back, right? Toni and Guy Warner?! WTF?! That's kind of cool in it's absurdity.What's not absurd? Chris having 3 affairs!

The whole Layla and Logan plots that I mentioned before are more or less over with Logan going all stalkery and Layla left to make her grandparents miserable, I guess. I'm invested in the storyline (which I'm sure will only be short-lived) is Tash turning into a school bully. Her and some other character whose name I haven't bothered to remember are picking on Scarlet Valentine for being new or whatever.

Cheers for the spoilers!

Unfortunately all the coolness with Toni and Guy (like Chris catching them snorting coke together and throwing a schoolmarm fit, forgetting that he's probably had about fifty different strains of syphilis by now) takes place about three years after the storylines you've mentioned, and Rachel's only back for a couple of episodes. However, you're not too far off the Awesome Return of Dom! With more murder and mayhem! Layla hasn't finished her antics yet either, and she actually ends up being genuinely tragic. Still annoying as hell, though.

Scarlett ends up being quite important. A bit like Marshall, she introduces the rest of her family to the show, and they become major characters too. Her dad's still there in fact, being a dickhead. Has Norman shown up yet? He was quite cool and I miss him. Thanks in part to him, Li Mei almost became nice and was actually missed by other characters when she left.

ETA how many times did I just say "ends up"? Enough to justify an edit, methinks.

Three years, huh? Thankfully I'm a fairly patient person. So top of my hitlist for Dom's murderous antics has got to be nurse Vinnie (I dunno if you'll remember him but he's really annoying and hasn't done anything interesting, yet) Oooh, I didn't know the Layla thing was over yet. I'm really intruiged.

I kinda got the impression Scarlet may be important. Chris hinted at a new Doctor post as well so I figured it would be her mum or dad. It's quite interesting that you said her dad was a dickhead because there was this one scene where Scarlet was really upset that her cricket annual's pages were glued together and her dad would be really pissed, so I figured he was a bit of a dickhead.

Yes, Norman's around. I think he's really cool too and I'm really pleased he'll be hanging around for a while.

So, we FINALLY got the return of Dom on Monday. I really liked the way they brought him back actually. I was obviously expecting Lucy to have a boyfriend but actually gasped out loud (kinda pathetic, but still) when I seen Dom at the door. I think the actor who plays him is brilliant though, he looks innately innocent but also can do this devilish grin so well.

Oh, also, I read in a teeny article over here that Adam Rickitt is in Shortland Street, but I probably wouldn't have found out if he wasn't caught shoplifting!? He was in a British soap, Coronation Street over here. I dunno if you get it over there but he played this dull member of an otherwise really good family. His onscreen mother married a serial killer that tried kill the entire family, his onscreen sister gave birth at 13 and his onscreen brother is a twisted attention-seeker, who fakes his own suicide next week! Adam Rickitt's storylines consisted of being in love triangles with actresses he had zero chemistry with. What's he like in Shortland Street?

Ps, here's a video of his failed singing career. http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=PEm-aYoK_BM.

Argh, sorry I missed your post! Yeah, Adam Rickitt's arrival was big news, with lots of gossip about how well Nick Tilsley's aged since he left Corrie. There's a big scary serial killer storyline going on at the moment (we find out at the end of the week, there's been much mayhem about the big reveal, including some illicit scene leakage on Youtube) and Adam's character Kieran was an early suspect. And yeah, he was in a love triangle this time too. Kieran is now a semi-respectable bar owner, but he turned up in Auckland as a backpacker with a head injury and a shady past. When it all came out it turned out he'd had the crap kicked out of him by hired thugs in Thailand and had a blood clot on his brain. He'd left England when his girlfriend and his dad did a Leanne Battersby/Danny Baldwin (that was pretty much where Corrie was on NZ TV at the time too!) and ended up in Thailand as a bodyguard/pimp at a nudie bar. After ripping off his bosses, getting his head kicked in, fleeing to Auckland, shagging both his female flatmates, becoming prime suspect in the murder of one of them, and having brain surgery, he ended up being quite a nice normal boy. Dad turned up to invite him to his wedding, he said piss off, Dad gave him fifty thousand quid, and Kieran -- by now an illegal overstayer -- was able to buy the local pub and obtain a nice legit visa, becoming the Liz McDonald of Shortie. He actually made quite a good intense crazy guy and I kinda miss it now he's all about pouring drinks and listening to everyone's woes.

If you like Shane Cortese (Dom) you might like Outrageous Fortune, an awesome Kiwi comedy-drama which I believe is being adapted for ITV. It's about a white-trash criminal family trying to go straight after the father is sent to prison and the mother has had enough and hands down the edict. Shane Cortese turns up in the second season as yet another corrupter of teenage girls. Not quite so homicidal, but definitely sleazy and over-hairgelled.

And oh my god, please let David Platt's antics end up one day with him genuinely dead. Tracy's about to kill Charlie over here at the moment, and David is, of course, being an evil little tosser, and I'm not looking forward to it getting worse as I know it must. Although I guess if David dies Bethany will have to turn evil or something.

ETA: OMG, thanks for the video, it's cheese-tastic! Reminds me of the days TVNZ used to promote Coronation Street with topless photos of Nick.

Wow, cheers for all the info. Isn't it always the way that exciting characters eventually end up calming down and listening to other peoples woes, in soaps!

I actually watched bits and pieces of the first season of Outrageous Fortune here on an Irish channel, TV3 last year, it was pretty well received here as well. I'm definitely loving Dom at the mo, (he killed Avril last week, it was great) so I'll keep a look out for season 2.

Yeah, you're right David's antics in Corrie do get worse, and there's no plans to kill him off yet, I'm afraid.

Oooh, I've one question: Does Victor's incredibly annoying daughter, Jay, ever come back?, she left here last week, to go to Sydney or something, and I'm really scared she's going to come back and suck some more.

Oh yeah, Maia and Jay actually got married (much publicised as "NZ's first onscreen lesbian wedding!") just after the civil union law was passed. Sorry to let you know they'll be whinier than ever and spend a lot of time making other people miserable, but they do have a beautiful wedding (until it's crashed by a fundie church anyway).

Ah, only on Shortland Street, awesome. Some useless info: Gay marraige is still illegal in the Republic of Ireland, where I live. This country's still kind of run by the Catholic Church.

So I was watching today and Toni was making snarky comments at Lei Mei about how skanky she is and all I could think was, well you're kind of as skanky as each other, (not to forget how Chris is in a whole other league) so why don't you just be friends, but I guess someone has to be at the bottom of the totem poll.

I seen Waverly on Neighbours the other day as Toadie's sister-in-law, and she was just well, just Waverly, except in White Trash clothes and less funny.

I'm always impressed by the hold the Catholic Church has on its followers. My Mum's long lapsed and she still got her kids baptised and reminds me to ask for the last rites if I think I'm about to die.

Waverley also played a great character on Outrageous Fortune as the long-lost childhood love of sweet brain-damaged twin Van, who is played by the same guy who played Wave's brother Stratford. The kids had some serious chemistry, too, which was kind of weird at first.

I guess Toni's still bitter about Li Mei shagging her husband, but really, if you pretend to be in love with and marry your best friend just to keep him around you're not really looking at a marriage made in heaven. Silly Matt, too, believing Toni's sudden change of heart. Anyway, Toni might be dead now. Chris finally tracked them down, talked them into coming back to Auckland, and then when his back was turned, a completely-mental Guy packed Toni, Tuesday (who's now been rapid-aged into a teenager) and Harry into his car and went screaming off with predictable results. It's the bloody summer cliffhanger; well, that and the serial killer reveal, which was completely obvious and is a character who only turned up in the past year. The summer hiatus is always a laugh because they're all Christmassy up to the cliffhanger, and then it resumes where it left off only Christmas has mysteriously disappeared because by now it's late January.

Yeah, I suppose Toni is still bitter about that, and I also think Lei Mei tried shag Logan when he was with Toni too. I think Norman's adorable presence is definitely clouding my view of her, like you mentioned up-thread.

That sounds like a pretty exciting Christmas cliffhanger. We're totally out of sync, so our Christmas cliffhanger was really uninspiring, Craig kissed Scarlett and Jake's PE teacher. I don't think we have to wait as long as you do, it starts up again on the 7th of January here so I won't be in suspense too long! It's really weird though because we tend to take our soaps seriously and all the British soaps air on primetime throughout Christmas and they tend to be rating winners, bringing a climax to the stories building up throughout the year, for example, last year Tracey killed Charlie on Christmas day.

I think your summer hiatus confused me a couple of times. I dunno if this was during your hiatus, but I was totally confused when Rangi disappeared and died. It just seemed to be totally random and out of the blue and I felt I must have missed something somewhere.

Also, about Tuesday's rapid aging, I remember reading once that scriptwriters say that it was easy to write storylines for babies and for teenagers but "take creative liberties" during prepubescent phase. I think someone was trying to explain Sophie and Chesney's age on Corrie, but it's still annoying and totally stupid.

Now I'm back from my own summer hiatus (ha!) I can offer a speculative explanation for Rangi's weird ending. When the writers decided to replace a whole bunch of characters, Katrina Devine (Minnie) was on the chopping block because her storylines ended up being so horrible and she hadn't really grown up to be a great actor. Blair Strang, who was her husband at the time (they were all over the women's magazines despite the dodgy age difference), quit in response, claiming it was because he didn't like the Hudsons and felt they were poor Maori role models or something like that. I'm guessing Rangi's character assassination was revenge on the part of the writers. I also remember a wicked interview that Fergus did on my uni dorm's inhouse TV channel, in which he said that Devine/Strang were treated like a royal couple and behaved accordingly. It's easy to see why the writers wanted to take Rangi down a peg, and hilarious in theory, but in reality it kind of jerked the viewers around.

Tuesday's rapid ageing gives me hope that she's not dead, because the part she's played thus far could have easily been played by an eleven year old or however old she's really supposed to be -- just the precocious kid who has to look after her crazy dad. If she's going to be a teenager we need to see some teen angst and hijinks, dammit!

And Tracy's still setting up her elaborate plot. She's taking her time! It reminds me of when Richard Hillman was plotting his crimes and we'd get scene after scene of him putting his gloves on and taking them off and looking all tortured.

Thanks for clearing up the Rangi thing. That is pretty funny. Kind of reminded me of when the writers killed Joey's "Days of our lives" character on "Friends". So, did Blair say the stuff about the Hudson's because it was popular opinion at the time? I know I was fairly frustrated that they COULDN'T. CATCH. A. BREAK. for a good while on the show. Getting rid of Joe early was a good move, imo. I thought he was the weak link.

"Outrageous Fortune" is starting over here on Thursday night so I can look forward to catching up with loads of my fave Shorty Street actors. ;)

I'm actually loving all the storylines airing over here at the minute, Dom's getting sloppy and pushing Scarlett down stairs and everything. We've just been introduced to Sarah Potts recently. I quite like her already, I feel they've given her a strong storyline with her son being raised by her parents and her dealing with that. I've been speculating that her and Craig might get together at some point even though I really don't think I wanna see that happen. I don't know much about the writer's but am I right in thinking that a vast majority of them are older males playing out their fantasies of shagging hot younger females. We've already had Victor/Anne, Victor/Lei Mei, Dom/Delphi and other ones that didn't last long and I know there are several exceptions but sometimes it feels a bit much. Anyway it also looks like Tama and Shannon are getting back together but I kind of have zero interest in that "twu wuv" story, so they can hurry up and just be angsty together or whatever and stop wasting airtime, that could be better spent on other stuff.