Y e s.

Coronation Street simply hasn't been the same for these past 11 months or so and it's all due to one thing. No, not the severe lack of storylines that don't involve someone dying or being horribly maimed. No, not the fact that nobody on that street is able to exist for two weeks without finding themselves in another love triangle. It's because Norris Cole has been absent - and sorely missed. Late last year, actor Malcolm Hebden who plays Norris suffered a 'silent' heart attack which left him fighting for his life. The 78-year-old was admitted to hospital in December soon after he had to be tended to by medics on set. It looks like Hebden is going to be returning to the cobbles a lot sooner than expected though. Patti Clare, who plays Mary Tyler in the soap, said that Norris had been hiding out in Peru with Emily Bishop all this time, but that there has been a "whisper" that he's going to be returning some time next year. She told Rochelle Humes and Philip Schofield on This Morning: 

"Mary speaks to him on the phone often, so there’s a faint sort of whisper that he might be back, maybe, next year?”

Unreal. Hebden later said that he hadn't realised how bad his heart had gotten until he was told that he had split a hole in his left ventricle. The actor spent three weeks in a coma before undergoing a procedure that saw his heart patched up with tissue from a cow.