With a knife to the gut courtesy of cafe waitress turned villain butcher Anna Windass, Pat Phelan is dead and his reign of terror over Coronation Street has come to a bloody end, as it had to. And while it was right of the soap to deliver justice – especially via the person whose life he had taken a grim and systematic pleasure of ripping apart more than once – it is with a heavy heart that we say goodbye to Phelan, one of soap’s most engaging characters of all time.

To say Phelan was a complicated guy is about as much of an understatement as declaring that Luke Britton’s demise was a tad overkill. From the day we first saw his snarling face five years ago, we knew he was a wrong ‘un – but could we have predicted that half a decade on he would have had a collection of corpses buried in cement and would be taking half of the Street hostage, even shooting Michelle Connor on her wedding day?



Soaps need villains to bring the conflict that our favourite characters need to overcome. As much as we see endless tweets and messages of fans calling for their favourite characters to stay happy, it would soon get boring if they had no obstacles to fight bast and succeed over.

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Soaps have tried the fluffy, happy and realistic approaches more than once – the audience soon loses their taste for what they often demand. Of course soaps need lightness, joy and laughter – and Corrie still delivers that in shedloads (the scenes coming up involving Gail, Rosemary, Audrey and Lewis are stand out examples and let’s not forget Rosie Webster and Gemma Winter’s This Morning debut!) but without baddies, soaps lose that edge that they need to stay exciting.

The fact that fans have been angrily calling for Phelan to get his just desserts shows that the character has done the job he was set out to do. Can you imagine if Twitter were a thing during Richard Hillman’s reign or around the time of other notorious villains such as Trevor Morgan, Den Watts, Alan Bradley, Graham Clark and Trevor Joardache? Social media would have been swamped with ‘KILL HIM NOW’ and ‘When is he going to leave, get rid!’ posts then too and these are some of the prime examples of soap’s most terrifying and successful villains.

Connor McIntyre has played Phelan with an incredible amount of depth. A narcissist with a confusing capability to love and even a few morals tucked away, Phelan is a character that was difficult to understand but his motives for desiring control and getting a family unit with Eileen and Nicola were never far away.

Phelan believed in his own actions and was all the more dangerous for it. Whether we were watching him conning people as he thought he and Eileen deserved a better life or we were seeing pain etched in his face as he dispatched Andy Carver – a man he had kept alive in captivity for eight months – Phelan kept us guessing.

The fact that he had a capability for love – he has had numerous opportunities to harm Eileen but never took them – gave him that added depth and we even sometimes saw a more human edge to the character such as his conversations with Summer Spellman and his attempts to become a better man, a little too late, when he was reunited with Nicola. That was always a lost cause, to be fair.



There is a danger of course that we can fall into the trap of almost justifying Phelan – of course, this can never be done. At the root of it all, the character was absolutely loathsome and monstrous and committed a multitude of heinous acts that made him deplorable and impossible to ever redeem.

Connor portrayed the hateful and malicious edge of Phelan chillingly well. This is a guy whose method acting clearly takes him into that zone and there is no basic script reading here – you really do feel Phelan’s spite when he is telling Eileen that he hates her or he is gloating over Anna, you really feel his rage when he is losing control such as when Nicola discovered his true colours and you feel the chills of the imminent violence when you know Phelan is about to strike.

With fantastic writing from the team at Corrie, Phelan has brought a variety of storylines and emotions to the table, bringing together a variety of characters to create an ensemble effect for a story that has got fans talking passionately one way or another, has increased viewership for the show and has made Corrie appointment TV.

Love him or loathe him, and yes there really ARE Phelan fans (Phans), Phelan has been an important part of Coronation Street’s modern times and he will now take his place as a vital cobble in its long history.

We’re not going to say long live Phelan as he had to go some time – but what a ride it’s been!


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