Is bad boy David the worst soap villain?

As David Platt faces up to the consequences of his latest crimes, Mark Andrews asks if the wayward youth is the worst we've seen.

He's 17 years old, he's sent threatening mail to his family, driven a car into the canal to spoil his sister's wedding, started a fire in an exam room and tried to kill his mother. And up until now, he's not received so much as an Asbo.

David Platt has spent the last two years wreaking mayhem on the cobbles of Coronation Street, but this week the teenage terror finally gets his comeuppance when he finds himself facing a prison sentence after going on the rampage, smashing his neighbours' windows and attacking a policeman.

For somebody so young, he has packed a fair bit in, but does he really compare to some of the real soap villains of the past?

Well it might be a case of like stepfather, like stepson. His mother's husband Richard Hillman was recently voted the greatest soap villain of all time in a poll by TV Times, and David has often claimed his wild behaviour is a result of the trauma caused by Richard.

Initially charming, it soon became apparent there was a dark side to Hillman.

He left his business partner Duggie Ferguson to die on a building site before stealing money from his flat, and later murdered his ex-wife by hitting her in the face with a spade.

At first only busybody Norris Cole suspected he was up to no good, but as the net closed in Richard was drawn into more murders.

He convinced his mother-in-law Audrey Roberts and her family that she was going senile before setting fire to her house in unsuccessful attempt to kill her.

His next target was Emily Bishop, who he was about to bludgeon to death when he was disturbed by Maxine Peacock. He killed Maxine, but Emily survived the attack.

As the evidence mounted up, Richard confessed to wife Gail that he was behind the murders, before trying to kill her, David and his sister Sarah by driving the family car into the canal. Richard died, but the rest of the family survived.

Hillman's antics make Coronation Street's other great villain look pretty tame.

Like Richard, Alan Bradley initially seemed charming when he arrived in 1986. But after moving in with Rita Fairclough, he stole the deeds to her house and, pretending to be her late husband Len, remortgaged it to finance the expansion of his security business.

When Rita revealed she had found out and reported him to the building society, Bradley flew into a rage and tried to smother her to death. On his return from prison, he launched an harassment campaign against Rita, but was killed by a tram while chasing her across Blackpool sea front.

The first really high-profile soap villain was JR Ewing, the philandering, megalomaniac oil baron in the American soap Dallas.

When he wasn't bribing senators to further his family's business interests, his corrupt police chief friend Harry McSween would blackmail his enemies into submission.

While JR was obsessed with family loyalty when it came to the Ewing's long-running feud with the Barnes family, he was not above sabotaging younger brother Bobby's deals to ensure he remained top dog.

In the last episode, broadcast in 1991, a broken and suicidal JR considered how life would have been for his family had he not been born.

While EastEnders' Phil Mitchell was an altogether coarser character than JR, he had a similar preoccupation with family values, while having no scruples about starting an affair with his brother's wife. And like JR, he was at the centre of a major whodunnit storyline after being shot.

While Phil would never be clever or subtle enough to carry out any of JR's devious business activities, he made up for it with heavy drinking and domestic violence. He hit his sister-in-law Sharon during their affair, he invoked the fury of another EastEnders baddie, "Dirty" Den Watts.

Den took revenge by setting Phil up to take the rap for an armed robbery. Den had his moments over the years, impregnating teenager Michelle Fowler, serving his wife Angie with divorce papers on Christmas Day, and later becoming involved in organised crime gang The Firm.

But the misdeeds of Den and Phil pale into insignificance compared those of EastEnders monsters Trevor Morgan and James Willmott Brown.

Trevor was in the soap for less than two years, but during that time he regularly beat his wife Mo, burnt her with an iron and eventually raped her. He finally met his end when he tried to kill Mo in a fire, but he perished while his wife was rescued.

Willmott Brown raped Kathy Beale one episode, attempted to bribe her into dropping charges, and then continued to hassle her on his return from prison. It was revealed in a later episode that he had raped another woman after leaving Albert Square.

Yet even more evil than these pair was Trevor Jordache in the now defunct Liverpool soap Brookside, who had already beaten his wife Mandy and raped his 14-year-old daughter Beth when he arrived in the soap.

Things came to a head when he raped his other daughter, Rachel, and Beth and Mandy plotted to kill him. He discovered one of their schemes, and in the following struggle Mandy stabbed him to death. The pair buried his body under a patio in the garden.

ITV's Emmerdale never had a real villain until super-bitch Kim Barker appeared in 1989, first marrying haulage boss Frank Tate for his money, before embarking on a string of affairs. She used her horse to trample on her daughter-in-law's brother to cover up her antics, and threatened to harm his baby daughter.

She then feigned her own death, framing Frank for the murder, before taunting him into having a heart attack so she could claim the family fortune.

So, maybe compared to these villains, young David is not so bad after all. At least, not yet.