When it comes to playing the put-upon gran at the heart of The Bay, there’s no more apt choice than professional matriarch Lindsey Coulson.
Her detective daughter’s slept with a murder suspect, her granddaughter’s runs drugs and her grandson’s a thief.
Yet, with the finale of the ITV show hitting our screens on Wednesday, it still sounds like one of Lindsey’s quieter weeks when playing EastEnders’ Carol Jackson.
Which might explain why Lindsey has revealed we won’t see her joining the old stars returning to the Square.
For while Tamzin Outhwaite’s Melanie Owen, Robert Kazinksy’s Sean Slater and even Leonard Fenton’s Dr Legg have found their way back to Walford, Lindsey is adamant she wants to leave Carol - last seen riding off on a motorbike in 2015 – firmly in the past.
She tells me: “There are a lot of people going back. And I absolutely loved playing Carol. It was a wonderful time and a wonderful show.
“But I do think Carol had her time and had her story - after she had a death of a son and cancer, I feel like I’ve done them.
“So would I go back? I think not. The stories in it are great and the people are great but time moves on.
“Maybe ask me again when I’m 80!”
Lindsey, 58, spent 10 years over three decades as Carol, having first appeared between 1993 and 1997, before returning in 1999, and then between 2010 and 2015.
Onscreen daughter Sonia, played by Natalie Cassidy, is still on the show.
Although thankfully the only time she blows her own trumpet nowadays is when she wins a war of words in The Queen Vic.
