Emmerdale said goodbye to Heath Hope (played by Sebastian Dowling) over the New Year following a brutal car crash.

One of the stand-out performances came from Lesley Dunlop, who plays Brenda in the long-running ITV soap, and was nominated at the RadioTimes.com Soap Awards 2024, sponsored by Inspired Villages, for the part.

Dunlop spoke exclusively to RadioTimes.com at the event, where she explained it was a difficult thing to film and didn’t require much acting at all to pull out her amazing performance.

“It’s that sort of place where you don’t want to go as a parent anyway. Nobody wants to go there. And also I’ve known Gabby and Sebastian since they were tiny! It’s horrible. It was awful.

“And seeing their mother who went to the graveyard in Emmerdale and saw his gravestone and was in bits. I had to go and say look it’s not real. It was very, very sad and not a lot of acting required because we were just very sad to lose him.”

Elsewhere at the RadioTimes.com Soap Awards 2024, Danny Miller and Lawrence Robb revealed how they think the Dingle family will act when they find out about what’s been happening to their very own Belle (Eden Taylor Draper).

The Mack star told us ‘they’d floor Tom’ if they found out about the abusive relationship, before Miller admitted they’ve have “a long chat” with the villain.