"Chives!" Coronation Street's recidivist adulterer, the wretched Ken Barlow, is quaffing a forkful from Martha, the floozie he found on a barge in the canal while walking Eccles.
Credit Ken with having a dog called Eccles, but credit him morally with nothing else - he is back in the sleaze saddle, spurs clicking hungrily.
And there is no tastier sight in Coro than Ken Barlow on the make.
"It's only scrambled eggs," simpers Martha, eyes extraordinarily heavily made up for so early in the day on a barge.
She adds she might have whiffed in a touch of parmesan.
Ken is drooling.
He says he has had scrambled eggs before, but nothing like this, a clear denigration of the dreadful tucker Deidre serves up to him nightly.
And this is what's great about Ken being out there with a poised bag of wild oats.
He not only gets to be utterly pretentious about literature and French art films, but his misogynist treachery will ultimately drive the wretched Deidre into jaw-jutting black despair.
Her best aspect.
"Chives!" I'll warrant in four decades of Coronation Street, this is one of the 10 finest lines.
Significantly, this episode on July 1 began the second half of 2010 for New Zealand viewers with the power of the Octagon cannon.
The first half of 2010 for Coro aficionados had not been good.
Witless story lines and numbskull new characters, it had been enough for us lovers of the show to seriously question where we stood, what, really, was the point in carrying on.
But July 1 was a doozie.
The wretched Peter Barlow, reintroduced to the series with the outrageous comment from one of the women that he looks a bit like George Clooney, has not been in rehab after all, but has been yacht-bonking in the Mediterranean.
A highly unlikely story, but maybe Peter's own floozie-on-a-boat thought he was George Clooney.
Peter's girlfriend, the former hooker Leanne, has found out, and she is off to Leeds.
"I hate Yorkshire," moans her mum, Janice.
"Besides," she opines, "if we binned every man who cheated, there'd be no couples left anywhere."
Janice is one of the street's many Gestalt Philosophers.
She should get in touch with Deidre as soon as possible.
The episode's crowning scene came in the Platt living-room, where just for the sheer sport of it, the writers decided to re-craft Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
Four characters at war with each other, theatrically placed accordingly in the room to underline their conflict.
Edward Albee would have smiled in approval.
The wretched bi-polar Joe finds out daughter Tina has had an abortion, Tina finds out her dad sold her down the river to a get a kitchen contract, the wretched Gayle, shouting as angrily as her cygnet neck can allow, finds out all of this, plus why Joe moved in with her, quite a lot for one day, and the wretched David somehow comes out of this cathartic detritus smiling.
Except he has lost Tina.
"Why can't he be normal like all the other blokes?" wails Tina, not one of the street's Gestalt psychologists, as David shuffles shoulder-sagged off down the cobblestones.
But there was light relief too.
Dev's Uncle Umed, with a face like those slow-moving wooden puppets we used to pop ping-pong balls into at the A&P Winter Show, clearly a liar, wastrel and thief, has arrived from Mumbai.
He embraces a surprised Dev, who, as one of British television's most consummate over-actors, slips seamlessly into pigeon Marathi. But at least listening to their incomprehensible slum dog jabber answered one of life's most enduring questions: what two help desks would sound like if they talked to each other.
The virtually perfect Becky claimed in this epochal episode that she was as mad as a bag of walnuts.
I suspect, before 2010 is over, Uncle Umed could prove even madder.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
