Best TV drug addicts

Jimmy Corkhill Brookside



Drug-takers in soaps. Here's how it works: someone smokes his first joint, then after a week or so he's living on the streets, giving blowjobs for crack.

Brookside was always smarter than your average soap though; it didn't deal in quick pay-off storylines. Jimmy's descent into full-blown smackaholism was slow and realistic ' the impacts on him and his family lasted for years. And that's soap years, too, which are about twice as long as dog years. (Making Bouncer and Well'ard roughly 250 years old each.)


Moralizometer: 2



Not really. Jimmy felt the consequences of his actions but the show never judged him; just left him to deal with the fallout and let that tell its own story. Even when a terminal disease was written into the character for Brookside's final episodes, Phil Redmond chose lung cancer, when it would have been far easier to go with any number of drug-related ailments to show how Jimmy got his 'comeuppance'.

What dickhead axed it, by the way?
Christopher Moltisanti The Sopranos



Always on the outside looking in, Christopher was a frustrated character, never feeling he got enough respect ("Where's my arc?"), and eventually turned to heroin. I can relate. My organised crime career never really took off either. Luckily I had this as a fall-back option.
Moralizometer: 2



Moralizo-freakin'-what? They held an intervention for the guy and ended up kicking the shit out of him! Fugeddaboutit!

Zammo Grange Hill



Now we're getting to it. Never afraid of showing, like, proper issues and that, Grange Hill went all-out and brought us Zammo McGuire, who was bang into his horse. That's right, after his girlfriend went off with his best mate or something like that, Zammo did what any other man in his position would do, and went dancing with Mr Brownstone. We've all been there.
Moralizometer: 5



Off. The. Scale. We're talking CHARITY SINGLE.