Coronation Street, EastEnders, Emmerdale and Hollyoaks are all renowned for their explosive and gripping storylines.

However, none of the shows are free from audience scrutiny, with fans often criticising the writers for taking things too far. Over the weekend, Corrie fanatics were left furious after the news emerged that the programme will revisit Toyah Battersby’s harrowing rape from 2001.

It will be revealed that the victim suffered a stillbirth and had to bury her baby in a local park. When the story first hit our screens, while the press complimented Georgia Taylor’s acting, they took aim at the show’s idea of turning a very sensitive topic into a ‘whodunnit?’

So, with ITV set to dive back into one of the most controversial storylines in its history, we’re looking back at the moments that have well and truly sickened the audience to their core and resulted in the most Ofcom complaints.

When Ronnie Mitchell lost her baby, the audience joined in unison to mourn the death of an innocent child. But their sympathy for the character soon turned to disgust when the Londoner swapped the body of her deceased baby with that of Kat Moon’s newborn son, Tommy.

Furious with the BBC, 13,4000 viewers felt they had no other choice but to lodge official complaints. Consequently, realising the story had hit a nerve, writers cut it short, prompting actress, Samantha Womack to walk away.

In terms of bad guys, Pat Phelan is right up there with the worst of the worst. The Corrie serial killer was renowned for his despicable antics, including a scene in which he blackmailed Anna Windass into sex and shot his daughter Nicola, before eventually being stabbed to death himself.

But of all the horrific storylines he was involved in, there was one in particular that really spooked the audience. In a darkened warehouse, Phelan held a gun to the head of a man he’d kept in a cellar for a year. Horrifically, the villain forced his victim to shoot his own henchman dead in a scene that went on a little longer than necessary.

Rather than spare the life of his sobbing prisoner, Phelan decided to kill him too, leaving both men in a pool of blood, rendering the Loose Women panellists livid. But despite their complaints, Ofcom cleared the show, saying: “While the threatening tone of the 20:30 episode reached the upper limits of what audiences are likely to expect pre-watershed, we considered this was mitigated by other factors which ensured that overall the material was suitable for a pre-watershed audience on ITV and ITV2.”

They defended the violence, which they claimed was limited and not ‘graphic nor gratuitous in nature’. They added that hardcore fans knew what Phelan was like and that his actions were the ‘culmination of an established storyline’.