Emmerdale will air a “fantasy episode” next week where Paddy Kirk and Chas Dingle’s dying daughter Grace will be seen as a toddler and teenager.
Dominic Brunt – who plays the bumbling vet in the long-running soap – has urged viewers to tune into Monday night’s episode because they will be taken into the future and get to see the little one’s life if she had survived.
Speaking on This Morning on Friday, he said: “It’s an incredible episode, it’s done very cleverly. Very early on, Lucy had a line that said: ‘If this baby lives for three seconds, or three minutes or 30 minutes, that’s her life and we have to give her the best life we possibly can.’
“So it’s kind of a fantasy episode where we jump into the future, where she’s three and 12 and she has a life. It’s not as depressing as it sounds!”
Viewers have spent the past nine months watching the couple come to terms with the fact that their daughter wouldn’t survive for very long outside of the womb after it was picked up at her 20-week scan that she had bilateral renal agenesis.
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Dominic explained: “I think the writers and producers have treated it with real reverence. They’ve not exploited it in anyway, they’ve done it really delicately and it’s been hard to read. They’ve done a really great job on it.
“I’m not sure if I’d tune into an episode where the end is the death of the baby but they’ve really turned it round and given it real love, real hope and it really is incredible and I urge everybody to tune in.
“It goes in real time from the birth to the end and it’s done with real love.”
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The 48-year-old actor found it particularly hard to shoot the storyline because his own son Danny, now nine, had to undergo life-saving surgery at eight months old.
He explained: “It’s resonated an awful lot as a parent… I think even if you weren’t a parent – just as a human being – that situation would affect you but I suppose I can mirror that scenario.
“He’s nine now but he was eight months at the time.
“It was mother’s instincts because the doctors said he was fine, he’s got a hole in the heart which is quite common but it wasn’t and Jo, my wife, just knew.
“I kept saying: ‘Listen to the doctors, they know what they’re doing.’ And she said: ‘Absolutely not, I’m going for a second opinion.’ And she was right!”
Will you be tuning into Monday’s episode? Leave us a comment on our Facebook page @EntertainmentDailyFix and let us know.