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We are back! Not Des and Daphne, unfortunately, but still a great week of Neighbours.

Yes, all it took was a sharp whistle down a phone line to make everything more interesting. Now I'm kind of heartbroken at the end for Jim and Zoe (not heartbroken enough to want them back together though, don't worry), after Lucy is exposed as her tormentor. Alan Dale, Ally Fowler, and even Kylie Flinker are at their best here, with some really great scenes between them all. Even Bradley and Andrea come out well from the twist!

After the latest Lucy hospital drama recedes, the latter half of the week belongs to Scott and Charlene. Once they've finished filming a terrible version of the Especially for You video, it's time to get down to business, and boy do these two throw everything at a pashing scene. It's almost like there's some real life sparks flying...

Hopefully J-dog is a bit more respectful than Scott, though, as our boy immediately starts thinking with only one part of his anatomy. Thank goodness for Helen Daniels, whose "no means no" speech might be ignored by Scott, but firmly tells the audience what they need to know. We should bring her out to give the Andrew Tate generation a good talking to. Plaudits also go to Clive, for a) not dispensing medication on the sly, and b) giving Lennie some great advice on family planning centres, that's only slightly undermined by "condom" clearly being on Network Ten's banned words list. On the other side of things, Madge implores Charlene to remain a virgin because - wait for it - men find it attractive...

Anyway, after Jack Lassiter proves himself a problematic wingman, our star-crossed lovers find themselves in a hotel room, where things take a turn for the worse thanks to some additional Scott brand misogyny. Yep, Charlene having been with someone before is a real turn-off for him, and proceedings end there and then. Oddly, Scott is also established to have done the deed previously, which rather dampens the 'first love' story otherwise being told here. And his awful reaction to Lennie's sexual history would have felt more recoverable from if there was an aspect of insecurity at his relative lack of experience, rather than being just unfiltered hypocrisy. Not to mention that he was definitely a virgin in his Darius Perkins days - that must have been quite a summer camp!

Also this week: Jim says "necking", Tom's improvised backstory forces him to retcon in a dead wife, Danny gives up on getting a storyline and heads off to play golf instead, and the YouTube title sequence is still wrong.

War on the Moon declared by end of year

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This week, Neighbours embarks on one of its occasional "really bad weeks of Neighbours". The lowlights include: Des and Daphne still not getting back together, Jim prematurely proposing to someone again, Jim telling his kids he's getting married before Zoe says yes, the gang carting everything out of the coffee shop while someone paints the back wall- I mean to move to Lassiters, and the YouTube title sequence still being wrong.

But they pull it all back with a really good end-of-week cliffhanger. Is Jim's grand "take what's on offer" romance finally going somewhere?

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Welcome, Tom Ramsay! Neighbours lore might say he's an identikit Max, but so far he strikes me more as a man who is making up his performance on the spot. Which is understandable in the circumstances, but also what show did Gary Files think he was on with those comedy karate moves? Anyway, he's here, and I guess I have to give the show a free pass for yet another new character who already knows everyone, but it's nice to see him get stuck straight into taking down Mrs Mangel and proving he's not just an interfering drongo.

Mrs Mangel's big defeat is also the big debut for Clive Gibbons' Gift of the Gab business, which is typically nuts. You'd really think from his return era that the gorillagram was his whole thing, not a two week wonder, right? But I think I prefer it this way. Clive is in fact so unable to turn down any form of commission that he gets far too involved in a spat between two teenage girls, though to be fair he ducks out of actually verbally abusing Charlene just in the nick of time.

Jim and Zoe's relationship is also continuing apace, and I can only describe it as a storyline that is currently happening on Neighbours. This week's inevitable moment of tension comes when Lucy dumps an entire glass of water on Zoe's lap, and I'm still not sure if it was a terrible performance from Lucy Robinson or a terrible performance from Kylie Flinker. She's had a cold for the last eighteen months, so don't be too hard on her. (And I feel like when a child who had a biro rammed into her neck a few weeks ago complains of a sore throat, you may have a few more follow up questions.) Jim is too hard on her, though, and gives her a spanking for her crimes. I know, it's the 80s, but I still did not enjoy that.

Oh, and Shane and Daphne have split up! I forgot, because it's immediately like they never even happened. Eileen speaks for us all by insisting Des makes a play for Daphne, and he's finally convinced by Jim's sage advice to "take what's on offer". And they say romance is dead... Please tell me that means the big reunion is imminent?

Also this week: Clive, errr, sparkles at himself in front of the mirror, Helen suggests Nikki and Charlene show A Little Understanding(TM), and the YouTube title sequence is still wrong.

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Talk about carnal knowledge. A large part of this week is dedicated to Lucy and Bradley learning all about the birds and the bees, which hopefully will stop Lucy describing everyone in her class as "sexy", but was still pretty weird. At least Jim and Des could farm the responsibility out to some form of public lecture. Elsewhere, while I had my theories on how the pancake contest would go, "Madge loses due to post-coital fluster" was not on my bingo card. And, of course, Max drops everything to answer a booty call from his ex-wife. Maria has given up on Dick at last!

It's also a week of daddys - no, we're done with the sex talk now! - a week of fathers, as Bradley is asked to select his like a dog choosing its owner, and Fred Mitchell turns out to be more dullard than philanderer. And for those here just out of sheer hope, I'm sorry to report that Bradley is still on the show after all that.

At the Ramsay house Tom is just around the corner, so it's time to play our only ever game of Who's Covering for Max Ramsay? Highlights are:

• Helen, as I suspected, stepping into the pancake contest. Anne Haddy takes a fair shot at a Max Ramsay comedy flip moment, but it's not really her wheelhouse.
• Shane becoming despondent about his life for a single episode out of nowhere - was Max scripted to have a dig at him to set that off? He even breaks up with Daphne - hooray! - but she talks him out of it - booo.
• "You sound just like your father", says Madge to Shane when he gets annoyed at the noise in the street. Yep, probably because he's speaking lines written for him. He acts pretty Max-like when Fred shows up, too - how nice it would have been to see Max defending his sister for once...
• Charlene inexplicably crying to Daphne and Clive about her family issues - that was surely meant to be her uncle, right? (I was also confused about Clive mentioning that he's met Henry, but then remembered he actually did after the wedding debacle)
• Clive's shoulder to cry on does double duty, as he ends the week as Madge's confidante in lieu of a post-pancake reconciliation with her brother. Expect that little secret to be passed on to Tom Ramsay ASAP.

Also this week: Mrs Mangel threatens to shut down the coffee shop Daphne's already been evicted from, or stop the pancake contest that's already ended. Unmissable drama! A parallel universe where Max and Maria return to the show as a couple is teased, Fred describes the mother of his unborn child as "a good kid", and the YouTube title sequence is still wrong.

But the highlight is of course the community building church visit, where Eileen Clarke brings the house down with her voice of an angel. Astounding. Is Clive now giving her singing lessons purely for the bit? Who knows? Who cares!

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Farewell Max Ramsay / Gone way, way, way, way too soon / Without a goodbye

I am sad. You may not have realised it, but that was Max Ramsay's final week, and he's about to vanish before the pancake competition is even over. So for once I'll be taking a wider view of the week's significance, paying tribute to a Neighbours legend taken from us long before his time.

Max was absolutely instrumental in shaping what Neighbours could be in its early days. The Aussie working bloke who loves his family and stands up for his community, but is also self-centred, has a notoriously short temper and struggles to voice his feelings. This show isn't all sunshine and pleasantries, Max tells us - these people can make mistakes, and sometimes hurt the people they love before coming good in the end.

Taking Max out of Ramsay Street for so much of 1985 was some kind of madness, to be honest, but once he was back where he belonged number 24 was the most pure fun of all the early households. None of Des's romantic travails, none of Jim's weird moralities - the Ramsay house is where we go for a laugh, and Max is at the centre of it. As much as we all love Madge, it's clear things will never be the same without him.

At least the Neighbours gods gave us some consolation this week: although Max tragically doesn't get an on-screen goodbye, he does end on a week that shows off his character at his best. Daphne's pancake competition turned out to be an excuse for some classic Ramsay shenanigans, with Madge and Max going head to head - and Helen roped in to give it a Ramsay vs Robinson angle too. Max even gets two comedy cliffhangers in a row! And then, after a final moment with the boys, his last episode gives him a couple of genuinely touching two-hander scenes with Madge, where Max's character and family history are foregrounded. I know that Neighbours lore is that Francis Bell quit overnight, but it does feel like there's an element of design here - maybe there was time to cobble together something of a celebration of the character in his final scenes?

Some groundwork for his departure seems to be laid earlier too: while there was sadly no time to film Max's cooking lesson from Helen, instead we see Shane spontaneously remind her of how Max and Maria separated suddenly, and you never know what's just around the corner...

It would be remiss to not give a nod here to Bell himself, also gone way too soon less than a decade later. He may not have enjoyed playing Max, but he did it brilliantly. And while he just missed the show's huge explosion in popularity, I truly believe that it would have been a much harder sell to Network 10 if he hadn't been there.

So what now for the big pancake contest? Does Tom Ramsay step right into the breach? Or Helen takes over to make the fake feud with Madge a reality? Or will Mrs Mangel get her wish and cancel the whole thing? Yes, you read that correctly, Mrs Mangel makes her debut this week. No family to speak of, no indication she lives on Ramsay Street, just a wonderful neighbourhood gossip who sticks her beak in and is ripe for some gentle mockery. She even coaxes the long-forgotten Mrs Armitage back into some off-screen muck spreading! Long may she reign.

Meanwhile, in ostensibly the big story of the moment Bradley's real father shows up, and ultimately dupes Eileen Clarke into aiding him in some kidnapping. Oops. Anyway, we get our first proper look at the original Lassiters logo while that's going on, and it's absolutely hideous. By contrast, Andrea does a reverse Terry Inglis and abandons all inclination towards criminality. I don't think trying to make her more sympathetic was a good move for this story - if anything we want a pantomime villain to be standing in Daphne's way! Also, I know I tend to tune out when Lucy and Bradley are talking, but this week the YouTube upload did it for me. Don't worry though, there may be a less copyright compliant upload for episode 242 knocking around to help you catch every word. Credit it where it's due to the end of that episode, though, where McKinley's first attempted kidnap of Bradley results in the entire street (including Max) pitching out to stop him, showing community spirit and some well-choreographed chaos.

Also this week: Paul launches a typically misogynist plan to get his hands on Lassiters, Kylie Minogue is severely underused, and the YouTube title sequence is still wrong. Now let's raise a tinny to one of the Neighbours greats.

Have you no emotions, Sir Keir?