I Am A Swede

No, he's been cleared. Sinner cleared after testing positive twice for banned substance

I've watched 40+ episodes of Emmerdale Farm in just a few days, and there has not been a Dingle in sight!

It makes me so angry and sad to think about where we are now compared to where we would have been if she had won in 2016. The world would have been a much better place. I'm sure she got a kick out of hearing the crowd chant "lock him up" though. She deserved that.

He certainly was. But there is a noticeable shift after episode 26. The focus is still the Sugdens and Emmerdale Farm, but the village becomes more prominent, and more characters are introduced. The show was originally only supposed to be 26 episodes and that's how Kevin Laffan began to write it, but early on the network ordered more, so he had to expand the canvas.

Sorry Celine, but this is the original and the best version....

Matt is one of my favourite characters, but that doesn't make me blind to his faults. And I think it's a testament to Frederick Pyne's talent that he manages to infuse Matt with enough sympathetic qualities that you can still care for the character. And it's one of the things that makes me love Emmerdale Farm so much, the care that each character gets and the consistency in the writing. Such a little thing for example that Marian isn't forgotten when she moves away. She continues to be a part of the show in a way, long after her departure. And of course the long-running saga of Jackie's paternity. It's very clear even in these early episodes that there are doubts about the identity of his father, but it doesn't get resolved until over a decade later.