A drunken Carla Connor tells Liam, Michelle and Steve McDonald that Leanne is a hooker and Paul was a client. Photograph: ITV
It's a universal law of Soapland that the middle classes are inherently evil. No sooner will a visiting professional flash a wine club membership card, then before you know it they'll be plotting some kind of wrongdoing toward a Dingle or a Grimshaw (then doubtless coming to a sticky end six months later).
Right now, this tenet of soap lore illustrates the widening quality chasm between Coronation Street and EastEnders, with the Cockney freakshow playing out the improbable endgames for two bourgeois villains. Kerrazy Dr May Wright's tedious baby-bullying of orange-coloured-Dawn is spluttering to its hastily-rewritten climax. Meanwhile, another professional woman will be exposed a psycho as child-abuser Stella's torment of Gormless Ben Mitchell comes to light.
Neither of these storylines have been the worst things about EastEnders recently, but they pale compared to Corrie's masterful depiction of class difference. For a show that's traditionally been about as true to life as Teletubbies, Corrie is on fire.
Corrie used to draft in its bourgeois villains from London until the Connor family appeared. Irish Mancs infiltrating the middle classes through Thatcherist business acumen, brothers Liam and Paul brought Baldwin's factory and have gone on to symbolise a unique amorality among the Cheshire set. Liam's Lady Botox wife Carla lorded Gucci handbags round Weatherfield while blithely operating sweatshop night shifts to get her vanity business making kids' dungarees off the ground.
But the real masterstroke in the Connor story was the drafting of Leanne Battersby into their world, as Liam's girlfriend and Carla's best mate. Returning to Weatherfield with a few bob and a designer wardrobe, Liam and Carla embraced her as one of their own, little knowing she'd got where she was as a high-class hooker. Only Paul was suspicious, and only because he was on her client list.
A prostitute storyline could have been a nadir of 'Enders sensationalism, but Corrie handled it as a bruising meditation on social mobility. Leanne has always been defined by her quest to "better" herself, and the scenes of her and Lady Botox lunching at Selfridges, blissfully unaware of the lengths each other had gone to get there, illustrates changing nature of class in this country in a way that few TV dramas ever achieve.
One was employing Polish slave labour to build a budding fashion empire; the other was whoring herself and passing it off as feminist emancipation. It didn't matter - as long as nobody else found out, they had superiority over the rest of the rest of the Rovers.
Obviously, both were doomed. This week Leanne's story reached its real denouement when, exposed as an escort and faced with the prospect of returning to the game in London, Leanne broke down and realised what she had become. The scenes at the coach station - her weeping into stepmother Janice's arms, riffing around the nature of an honest living and the lengths a girl from the slums would go to to achieve the respectability she craves, were some of the finest ever of recent Corrie.
I suspect Leanne will make a go of the restaurant, and if Carla is to stick around, she needs to find some redemption and self-awareness of her own, just like Essex wife Frankie Baldwin did. But the way they've got there has been sublime.
