Off you pop then, Peggy. After 16 years – most of which were spent behind the bar at the Queen Vic and the rest vowing to get back behind the bar after being removed from it for plot purposes too prosaic to go into here – Margaret Ann Mitchell turned her back on home, friends and "faaaaaamleee" and bade farewell to Walford – at least until Barbara Windsor decides she's bored of doing Tesco ad voiceovers, being the brand ambassador for a bingo firm and spending time with her real family, both in and out of the pages of OK!
Peggy did not depart burned, blackened and in a bodybag. We were denied seeing her succumbing to smoke, clutching her beloved bust of Queen Victoria. And we were deprived of the Liliputian landlady – known for yelling "Gerrahtofmypub" and embarking on theme nights, such as her infamous dalliance with grime, to pull in younger punters – being identified not by her dental records but by her flame retardant wig. Well, as Walfordians know better than most, you can't win 'em all.
Instead, she raged vainly against the flames like a very sooty clockwork mouse, and then finally realised the folly of locking crack-crazed Phil in the Vic's living room and of not taking the chance to blow out the match he would use to the set the pub alight. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
And in hindsight, Peggy should have left Walford three or four years ago, her character trapped in a cycle of increasingly samey stories that reduced her to a parody of her former self. Given that her former self was something of a parody anyway, there was little dignity in it, even – or perhaps especially – when proceedings were enlivened by escapades with old frienemy Pat, usually drunk and sometimes involving a stolen ice-cream van. The introduction in 2008 of evil Archie – whose murder marked last Christmas with typical Walford cheer – gave Peggy new purpose as she fell for, married then loathed the latest E20 villain, but it couldn't compare with her late 1990s heyday and marriage to Frank Butcher.
In the end, nothing in E20 became Peggy like the leaving of it, and with the special Peggy's Theme to see her out, all plaintive piano and pensive strings, it was a suitably sentimental sendoff, even if Barbara Windsor was actually the fourth actress cast as Peggy, and Angie Watts (played by Anita Dobson) was the Vic's best landlady. Standing in the ruins of the pub amid so many memories, Peggy's epiphany might have been that, in the words of HG Wells, arson is an artificial crime as "a large number of houses deserve to be burnt".
Of course, life/soap will go on. To fill the Peggy-shaped gap, another iconic Walford woman returns next week in the shape of Kat Moon.
Events such as the burning of the Queen Vic are nothing new: this is the second fire there, the first being back in 1992, while Coronation Street's Rovers Return went up with a whoosh due to dodgy electrics in 1986. Hollyoaks' nightspots explode with alarming regularity with another conflagration due on Bonfire Night, and in December Coronation Street commemorates its 50th birthday with a tram crash and a live episode. Such pyrotechnics, spectacular scenes and special episodes are weapons increasingly deployed by soap producers to boost ratings. How else to compete with the "real-life" dramas of The X Factor and Ultimate Big Brother, which also finished last night?
As for Peggy, you never know. She may have tottered off into the sunset – or just to Aunt Sal's – but give it a year or two and she might make a dramatic return, tanned and with a toyboy under one arm and a piñata under the other. Stranger things have happened. Though usually only in Emmerdale.
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