I know all the fanboys bouncing in their prams at Walford Webb creche - especially Cack Jarr the Jark and Shamelessness, whose vocabulary hasn't progressed past four-letter words of the profane variety - absolutely adore Bouncy Tan to the point that they'd willingly allow her to wet-nurse them; but she's not the fragrant madam she pretends to be.
"Madam" is the operative word. Folks who hail from whence I came would call her jumped-up white trash or trailer trash scrubbed-up well. No matter how hard she or her satellites try, she's strictly tradesman's entrance. And I suppose "entrance" would be the operative word there as well.
Tanya is suffering from a terminal illness, and before widdle *Betty* at the creche stomps his pwetty widdle foot and says I'm being mean, it might interest him to know that her terminal illness is headuparseitis. Put succinctly, she's a flaming hypocrite and as amoral as the man from whom she cannot stay away.
There's a link between Tanya and Cora, and it isn't the link that exists between mother and daughter, although the traits Tanya shares with Cora are, indubitably, inherited. Cora, historically, has always put herself before her children - even before her dying husband. All well and good to say whimsically that she only loved one man in her life, her "Cross" to bear, but truth is, she spent the majority of his illness propping up a bar someplace, gambling and flirting. I can't believe there are people who hunger for Cora to take over the Vic. She is neither matriarch nor wise woman and certainly not landlady material. She's just another failed old lag who's latched onto the Brannings' rising star, courtesy of Bryan Kirkwood's god complex in his quest to remake Eastenders in his own shallow image.
Tanya, however, is something else.
When we first met Tanya, it didn't take us long to realise that she was the wife of Max Branning and the mother of his two children - but also the wife on whom Max had regularly cheated. Scratch the surface, and one found out that Tanya was Max's second wife, that Tanya was a teenaged hairdresser who had an affair with a married Max Branning. Once she found out he was married, she doubled-down her pursuit of him, becoming pregnant and holding out for him to abandon Wife Number One and his son, Bradley, to set up home with Tanya and their child.
So, in a word, Tanya was a homewrecker, a selfish teenaged slut who didn't give a rat's arse about breaking up a family and separating a child from his father, as long as Tanya got what she wanted - which was faux middle-class respectability. However, as is reiterated in Gone With the Wind (you really should read that book, Jark darling, you'd absolutely adore Scarlett O'Hara), like marries like, and Max is as much scrubbed-up white trash as Tanya is, except he doesn't proclaim or pretend to be otherwise.
Tanya, however, gets great pleasure wiggling her rounded bum around Walford, looking down her nose at the natives. She only befriends those people whom she reckons aspire to her social status. That meant Jane, but also Jane was involved in a trying enough marriage to a petty, little man, and craved companionship, herself. Jane would be useful to Tanya - useful because Tanya, like Cora, has an alcohol dependency.
Early in her adolescence, she learned from Cora's acquired behaviour that the best remedy for a stressful situation is a bottle of gin. It also helps make you happier when you want to celebrate and provides companionship when you're lonely, but you don't want to drink alone too much or people will start to talk, so you rope in your BFF and you polish off about five bottles of wine. Ne'mind if she's unaccustomed to that and pukes all over the place - you can clean that up in the morning.
Tanya is also an abysmal parent. She undermines Max. She's the sort of parent who wants to be thought of as a friend, so she plays the good cop to Max's bad one. When the kids do wrong, and Max instils discipline, Tanya goes behind his back and tells the offending party that everything's all right and that the old man is in the wrong.
Remember the infamous camcorder that revealed Stax? Remember how it was obtained? Lauren stole Max's credit card and bought it online. Max went ballistic, understandably, and punished Lauren; but then Mummy rounded on Max, told him how terrible he was, probably threatened to withold sex, and Max jumped back in line. He even apologised to Lauren and lifted her punishment. Recently, when Max confined Lauren to her room for bad behaviour and drunkennes, he returned to find that Tanya had allowed her to go out because "she needed some air, darlin."
Not only that, but both she and Max are incredibly selfish as parents. Neither of them put their children's needs or interests before their own. And when the chips are down, Tanya's quick to blame Max for everything.
When Tanya started cheating on Greg with Max, she proved beyond a doubt that she is no better morally than he is. She lost the fabled high ground, so all the fanboys who argued strenuously that Tanya hadn't cheated since marrying Max, lost that one. She showed all her mean commonness when she lay with Max in that rented flat and they laughed about "Bob the Builder" babysitting their child. Even worse, when - months later - they strolled through Walford on the anniversary of their first date, reminiscing and laughing about how they had to go to a place which served cheap drinks, because Max had a wife and child at home.
Har-dee-har-har.
However, when Tanya's infidelity was discovered, she allowed her spoiled-rotten children to believe that Max had seduced her, that Max had forced her into an affair. That wasn't the first time either.
In the wake of Stax, there was a classic confrontational scene with Stacey when, for a smidgeon of a minute, you thought Tanya was going to have an epiphany, when you thought that she was going to see that Stacey did exactly to her what she had done to Rachel ... but it never happened. Instead, she and Stacey agreed that the fault for Stax, just as the fault for Tanya's pursuit of Max as an eighteen year-old, was Max.
Always blame the man.
But always use the man ... because Tanya is a man's woman. She's the girl who was your best friend for life, until she got a boyfriend, then she didn't want to know you. Like Shirley with Heather, only prettier. Everything Tanya has ever achieved in her life, she's achieved through sleeping with a man.
Now, there's a name for a woman like that. Prostitute. Horizontale. Slut. Kept woman.
She married Max as a way out of a sink estate existence and left her harridan of a mother and drug-and-drink-addled sister behind. We didn't even know about a sister until she'd been one year into the programme - then it was an older sister; Kirkwood made her younger. Through Max, she got her own business, the trappings of the middle class and snobbishness. Shame she never learned proper grammar or good diction, however.
When she kicked Max out after the Stax reveal, instead of squaring her shoulders, comforting her children and concentrating on making her business a success, she prostituted herself to the local psycho in order to get him to help her murder Max - by burying him alive, no less - with an end plan to jetting off quickly and leaving Sean Slater to take the murder rap.
Later, she played the damsel in distress to garner Jack. The classic moment there was a scene when Tanya got Jack away from Ronnie's side because her torch wouldn't turn on. Turns out it needed batteries ... teeheehee. In fact, it was bonnie Jane who convinced Tanya, still married to Max, that she was entitled (there's that word again) to bed Jack, because ... well, because he was there and why not? (Probably because Jane fancied a pop at Jack but was too afraid of losing her status when Ian found out and kicked her arse into the street).
Through Jack, she was well on her way to gaining a villa in France, until Max intervened to stop her from breaking the law by taking his kids out of the country without his consent.
When she split from Max once more - because of Max's financial problems - she was gone three months before she had shacked up with gormless Greg, a successful builder with a big pay packet (the only big packet he had) and more money than common sense. She made him buy her a house on the Square - because Max had moved on and acquired a love interest, of whom she was jealous - and when she committed a huge crime by robbing Roxy blind, she enticed Greg to buy her the salon. Again. And she repaid him by sleeping with Max.
All of what occurred was just an elaborate kabuki dance in order to get Max and Tanya back together again, even the cancer cold was a part of the plan. The yo-yo couple, because Tanya cannot exist without a man by her side.
I would have loved her affair with Max to have ended by him returning to Vanessa and repudiating Tanya. Let's forget the abysmal cancer plot - that was only a device to get people to feel sympathy for the poor yummy mummy again. If Greg had rejected her, we could have watched her descend into alcoholism, because she's only a hop, skip and a jump away at this moment.
It's still not too late. We can have a drinking problem arise, possibly from discovering what Max was up to in Manchester - although, *Betty*, Jarkie and others of their ilk are hankering for a storyline discovery retconned to reveal that Derek raped Tanya even before he met her and fathered Lauren. Gee, just four years ago, Lauren was rumoured to have been Jack's daughter. How long before we find that she actually came out of a whiskey bottle, fully grown?
Shortly, we're going to find out that Tanya will discover that Cora has another older daughter and Tanya has a half-sister. (Dear, God, the Brannings and their satellites are cancer!). I was hoping the discovery would have been that Cora had had an affair with Jim Branning and that Jim had fathered Tanya, who had unknowingly married and had kids by her brother.
That would appropriately add to the dysfunctionalism of the Brannings and the sensationalism that wraps itself around the otherwise fragrant Tanya like a big, bad smell.
"Madam" is the operative word. Folks who hail from whence I came would call her jumped-up white trash or trailer trash scrubbed-up well. No matter how hard she or her satellites try, she's strictly tradesman's entrance. And I suppose "entrance" would be the operative word there as well.
Tanya is suffering from a terminal illness, and before widdle *Betty* at the creche stomps his pwetty widdle foot and says I'm being mean, it might interest him to know that her terminal illness is headuparseitis. Put succinctly, she's a flaming hypocrite and as amoral as the man from whom she cannot stay away.
There's a link between Tanya and Cora, and it isn't the link that exists between mother and daughter, although the traits Tanya shares with Cora are, indubitably, inherited. Cora, historically, has always put herself before her children - even before her dying husband. All well and good to say whimsically that she only loved one man in her life, her "Cross" to bear, but truth is, she spent the majority of his illness propping up a bar someplace, gambling and flirting. I can't believe there are people who hunger for Cora to take over the Vic. She is neither matriarch nor wise woman and certainly not landlady material. She's just another failed old lag who's latched onto the Brannings' rising star, courtesy of Bryan Kirkwood's god complex in his quest to remake Eastenders in his own shallow image.
Tanya, however, is something else.
When we first met Tanya, it didn't take us long to realise that she was the wife of Max Branning and the mother of his two children - but also the wife on whom Max had regularly cheated. Scratch the surface, and one found out that Tanya was Max's second wife, that Tanya was a teenaged hairdresser who had an affair with a married Max Branning. Once she found out he was married, she doubled-down her pursuit of him, becoming pregnant and holding out for him to abandon Wife Number One and his son, Bradley, to set up home with Tanya and their child.
So, in a word, Tanya was a homewrecker, a selfish teenaged slut who didn't give a rat's arse about breaking up a family and separating a child from his father, as long as Tanya got what she wanted - which was faux middle-class respectability. However, as is reiterated in Gone With the Wind (you really should read that book, Jark darling, you'd absolutely adore Scarlett O'Hara), like marries like, and Max is as much scrubbed-up white trash as Tanya is, except he doesn't proclaim or pretend to be otherwise.
Tanya, however, gets great pleasure wiggling her rounded bum around Walford, looking down her nose at the natives. She only befriends those people whom she reckons aspire to her social status. That meant Jane, but also Jane was involved in a trying enough marriage to a petty, little man, and craved companionship, herself. Jane would be useful to Tanya - useful because Tanya, like Cora, has an alcohol dependency.
Early in her adolescence, she learned from Cora's acquired behaviour that the best remedy for a stressful situation is a bottle of gin. It also helps make you happier when you want to celebrate and provides companionship when you're lonely, but you don't want to drink alone too much or people will start to talk, so you rope in your BFF and you polish off about five bottles of wine. Ne'mind if she's unaccustomed to that and pukes all over the place - you can clean that up in the morning.
Tanya is also an abysmal parent. She undermines Max. She's the sort of parent who wants to be thought of as a friend, so she plays the good cop to Max's bad one. When the kids do wrong, and Max instils discipline, Tanya goes behind his back and tells the offending party that everything's all right and that the old man is in the wrong.
Remember the infamous camcorder that revealed Stax? Remember how it was obtained? Lauren stole Max's credit card and bought it online. Max went ballistic, understandably, and punished Lauren; but then Mummy rounded on Max, told him how terrible he was, probably threatened to withold sex, and Max jumped back in line. He even apologised to Lauren and lifted her punishment. Recently, when Max confined Lauren to her room for bad behaviour and drunkennes, he returned to find that Tanya had allowed her to go out because "she needed some air, darlin."
Not only that, but both she and Max are incredibly selfish as parents. Neither of them put their children's needs or interests before their own. And when the chips are down, Tanya's quick to blame Max for everything.
When Tanya started cheating on Greg with Max, she proved beyond a doubt that she is no better morally than he is. She lost the fabled high ground, so all the fanboys who argued strenuously that Tanya hadn't cheated since marrying Max, lost that one. She showed all her mean commonness when she lay with Max in that rented flat and they laughed about "Bob the Builder" babysitting their child. Even worse, when - months later - they strolled through Walford on the anniversary of their first date, reminiscing and laughing about how they had to go to a place which served cheap drinks, because Max had a wife and child at home.
Har-dee-har-har.
However, when Tanya's infidelity was discovered, she allowed her spoiled-rotten children to believe that Max had seduced her, that Max had forced her into an affair. That wasn't the first time either.
In the wake of Stax, there was a classic confrontational scene with Stacey when, for a smidgeon of a minute, you thought Tanya was going to have an epiphany, when you thought that she was going to see that Stacey did exactly to her what she had done to Rachel ... but it never happened. Instead, she and Stacey agreed that the fault for Stax, just as the fault for Tanya's pursuit of Max as an eighteen year-old, was Max.
Always blame the man.
But always use the man ... because Tanya is a man's woman. She's the girl who was your best friend for life, until she got a boyfriend, then she didn't want to know you. Like Shirley with Heather, only prettier. Everything Tanya has ever achieved in her life, she's achieved through sleeping with a man.
Now, there's a name for a woman like that. Prostitute. Horizontale. Slut. Kept woman.
She married Max as a way out of a sink estate existence and left her harridan of a mother and drug-and-drink-addled sister behind. We didn't even know about a sister until she'd been one year into the programme - then it was an older sister; Kirkwood made her younger. Through Max, she got her own business, the trappings of the middle class and snobbishness. Shame she never learned proper grammar or good diction, however.
When she kicked Max out after the Stax reveal, instead of squaring her shoulders, comforting her children and concentrating on making her business a success, she prostituted herself to the local psycho in order to get him to help her murder Max - by burying him alive, no less - with an end plan to jetting off quickly and leaving Sean Slater to take the murder rap.
Later, she played the damsel in distress to garner Jack. The classic moment there was a scene when Tanya got Jack away from Ronnie's side because her torch wouldn't turn on. Turns out it needed batteries ... teeheehee. In fact, it was bonnie Jane who convinced Tanya, still married to Max, that she was entitled (there's that word again) to bed Jack, because ... well, because he was there and why not? (Probably because Jane fancied a pop at Jack but was too afraid of losing her status when Ian found out and kicked her arse into the street).
Through Jack, she was well on her way to gaining a villa in France, until Max intervened to stop her from breaking the law by taking his kids out of the country without his consent.
When she split from Max once more - because of Max's financial problems - she was gone three months before she had shacked up with gormless Greg, a successful builder with a big pay packet (the only big packet he had) and more money than common sense. She made him buy her a house on the Square - because Max had moved on and acquired a love interest, of whom she was jealous - and when she committed a huge crime by robbing Roxy blind, she enticed Greg to buy her the salon. Again. And she repaid him by sleeping with Max.
All of what occurred was just an elaborate kabuki dance in order to get Max and Tanya back together again, even the cancer cold was a part of the plan. The yo-yo couple, because Tanya cannot exist without a man by her side.
I would have loved her affair with Max to have ended by him returning to Vanessa and repudiating Tanya. Let's forget the abysmal cancer plot - that was only a device to get people to feel sympathy for the poor yummy mummy again. If Greg had rejected her, we could have watched her descend into alcoholism, because she's only a hop, skip and a jump away at this moment.
It's still not too late. We can have a drinking problem arise, possibly from discovering what Max was up to in Manchester - although, *Betty*, Jarkie and others of their ilk are hankering for a storyline discovery retconned to reveal that Derek raped Tanya even before he met her and fathered Lauren. Gee, just four years ago, Lauren was rumoured to have been Jack's daughter. How long before we find that she actually came out of a whiskey bottle, fully grown?
Shortly, we're going to find out that Tanya will discover that Cora has another older daughter and Tanya has a half-sister. (Dear, God, the Brannings and their satellites are cancer!). I was hoping the discovery would have been that Cora had had an affair with Jim Branning and that Jim had fathered Tanya, who had unknowingly married and had kids by her brother.
That would appropriately add to the dysfunctionalism of the Brannings and the sensationalism that wraps itself around the otherwise fragrant Tanya like a big, bad smell.
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