"Just yer average everyday millionaire lesbian vet..."

 

Leah Bracknell - Zoe Tate from the TV soap Emmerdale - is the most popular telly personality surfers come here searching for. We're only too happy to oblige...

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Emmerdale. The one programme that always made you think "Hmm, I must have some maths homework to do". All cowpats, sheep dip and Amos Brierley mutton-chopped landlords who don't serve strangers. Dry stone walled characters just waiting around for the inevitable wipe-em-all-out plane disaster.

Then suddenly a brand spanking Land Rover purrs into view driven by a vision in Burberry. Zoe Tate. The most gorgeous apparition ever to stick her hand up a cows arse!

Now I know it's all about ratings and market demographics and five-nights a week domination of the peak time telly. Since Granada took over our Yorkshire Telly (Corrie wigs and Bette Lynch earrings in tow) the telly 'zecs have had to turn up the heat a little. So out go the sleepy coffin-dodging curtain-twitching chicken-pluckers and in comes the sex, the intrigue, the corruption, and rumpy in the bushes.

If anything the survival of Zoe Tate through all this is quite remarkable.

The fun started back in the late eighties when Carlton, the new London TV company, threatened to kick the show off southern schedules unless ratings improved. In came Brookside and Grange Hill supremo Phil Redmond to quite literally smash the cozy old Emmerdale Farm mind-set to bits. He dropped a passing 747 on the place in '93 in a game attempt to kill off half the cast - Zoe's brother Chris Tate was put in a wheelchair, Beckindale village, the Woolpack pub, Sugden farm and most of the plotlines were all reduced to rubble. Our Zoe avoided the whole thing somehow - as did most of the shellshocked regulars - emerging from the rubble to wonder what on earth the script writers were going to pull next. Zoe had come out as a lesbian over the summer, after a series of well dodgy (and pretty scuzzy) boyfriends. She was having quite a year...

Since then Zoe's private shenaneggans have provided the more compelling aspects of Emmerdale's increasingly daft and yoof oriented plotlines. Devoted gals tell me that of all the outed pouters she's the most realistic and believable. She moved in with interior designer Emma Nightingale and there was all the hoo-hah over THAT KISS, pre-dating Anna Friel's Brookside snog by a good year or so. Then there was that rape attempt by that farmer and then ex-lover Suzie took Emma away just as they were about to get hitched. There was another steady - Sophie - and some other lass called Jude. Oh and then she discovered her father Frank's body and there was that whole Kim Tate murder mystery suspense thing. Don't even mention the flirtation with married women Becky Cairns, that kidnap by the long-lost brother when she shot and killed (you DO get away with murder on the soaps...) and the burning of the evidence.

Now, of course, it's all about gorgeous pouting prozzie Charity Dingle (Emma Atkins) and the three-cornered love affair that everyone's talking about. Brother Chris proposes, Charidee accepts and Zoe is devastated. Blah blah blah.

So what keeps Leah Bracknell (the actress behind this Zoe Tate woman) number one in the telly totty stakes with so much local competition about? Emmerdale has had a breathtaking array of womanhood over the years. For a while there it even matched the heyday of Coronation Street (All fur coat and no knickers in the Elsie Tanner era) for pure older-woman girl-next-door bitch-queen glamour. Not for nothing has the show gotten a reputation for sensation and outrage - the women are usually right in the thick of it, immaculate nails drawn...

Through the 90's the Emmerdale broads were led by the Uberblondes: Ever-stillettoed Kim Tate (Clare King, who later took the character on to even greater bitchery in 'Bad Girls') who after a couple of hundred affairs - one with the farm hand - killed her father-in-law and legged it.

And of course cutesie cafe owner with a heart of gold Kathy Glover was played by tabloid fave Malandra Burrows - a focus of lusty obsession by impressionable young lads for close on fifteen years. After proudly picking up a Best Soap BAFTA for YTV last year Mal was sacked and poor long-suffering Kathy was packed off down under. Not murdered or arrested or blown-up, in the time-honoured Emmerdale fashion. She left with a whimper, Neighbours style - leaving the door on the sneck for a grand comeback if the plucky independent pop-star-serious-actress lark doesn't pay off and Emmy ratings slump.

In reality actress 37 year old actress Leah Bracknell is a world away from Malandra style TV Guide spectaculars or Lad Mag tease shots. Daughter of Children's Film Foundation director David Bracknell she had been limited to bit parts in shows like The Bill and The Cannon and Ball Show before joining Emmerdale in '89. She's married to TV director Lyall Watson and has two young daughters. She has absolutely no plans to join some Nu Metal band and splatter herself all over the papers. Perhaps it's her serious attitude towards career and character that hits the spot and keeps her a cut above.

We can try to get into the young un's with their sex and drugs lifestyles and teen-queen attitudes . There's Adele Silva steaming up the screen, Amy Nuttall getting into Loaded Magazine's top 100 babes, and Emma Atkins keeping the Dingles dangling. And some of you are getting rather hot under the collar about buxom young Vicky Binns after recieving racy skinnydipping pics via email lately. After randy Mandy set the tone (sadly now in Primetime Heaven) chunky chicks are clearly all the rage. But it's still the classy older broads that get the pulse really racing. Zoe Tate is still our favourite lesbian millionaire vet.

Our mate Gaz wants to buy a goat just so Zoe can roar up in the Land Rover and go into that doe-eyed Vet Spice barnside manner just for him. Dream on, Mate. Zoe's strictly green wellie material.

(Thanks to reader Glen Mason for putting our facts straight early on! Top Man.)