Soap spoiler alert!

The funeral for a scheming Coronation Street character....

12:14 27 January 2010

Coronation Street will show dramatic scenes of unlucky-in-love Gail McIntyre (Helen Worth) burying her latest husband.

Joe McIntyre (Reece Dinsdale) dies after a plot to fake his own death accidentally leads to his actual demise.

In a storyline that echoes real-life canoe fraudster John Darwin, debt-ridden kitchen fitter Joe planned to jump from his boat on holiday in the Lake District with his new bride Gail in an insurance scam.

However, a strong gust of wind knocks him overboard causing him to drown.

Funeral scenes were filmed recently which will be aired in the next six weeks. The public mourning could expose the attempted fraud, but soap insiders are keeping the repercussions a secret.

It marks the end of Gail's fourth rocky marriage on the ITV soap. Her first wedding was in 1979 to car mechanic Brian Tilsley. The marriage resulted in two children, Nick and Sarah.

Then Gail had an affair with Ian Latimer, prompting her husband divorced her. However, the couple repeated their vows in 1988. Soon after, he was killed in a nightclub fight.

Gail didn't stay single for all that long, marrying for the third time in 1991 to another mechanic - Martin Platt. They had one son, David, but divorced in 2001.

The next year Gail made another failed attempt at marriage, this time unbeknown to her, to a serial killer. She wed Richard Hillman in 2002, but in 2003, after a his plot to kill Gail and her children went wrong, he drowned.