Emmerdale’s Rhona Dingle is under siege in Friday’s episode (ITV, 7.00pm, see our TV Guide for full listings).
When Rhona Dingle and her mum Mary persuaded Marlon to launch an online
appeal for information about April they thought it was a no-brainer.
With no leads to go on, the women hoped the video would go viral and would reach someone who knew something about the teenager who vanished on Christmas Day.
But the Dingle parents, to their sheer horror, have become the subject of a torrent of online hate, with the majority of the cruel venom being directed at April’s stepmum Rhona.
“At first Marlon is resistant to the idea of doing the appeal,’ says Mark Charnock who plays the dad.
“And then he gets convinced by Mary and Rhona that it’s a great idea; things can become viral very quickly and all it takes is just one person to retweet it and suddenly you can have tens of thousands of eyes looking […] But they do come to regret it.”
As the armchair detectives get to work, digging up Rhona’s past, the mum becomes the subject of speculation and hurtful suspicion.
Before long, the distraught couple can take no more…
“He deletes it because of Rhona suffering, because of the way it’s backfired so wildly,” says Mark. “They get lots of hits, of people who think they’ve seen her, but it’s just so damaging to Rhona and Marlon that they have to take it down.”
Elsewhere in the village, negativity surfaces and boundaries are crossed.
