The BBC really need a reality check. If they were expecting the much-heralded return of Walford's original Princess to kick back to the good times, it didn't work. Whilst it wasn't an epic fail, it was rather underwhelming. Coronation Street still pulled more viewers.
There are several reasons for this. First, Eastenders hyped Sharon's return like the Second Coming (in her case, the Third). Never before has so much hope been invested in the return of one character; even I was caught up in it, and I'm the worst cynic when it comes to soaps in general. After such hype - the trailer, the interviews and the Sharon quizzes and memorabilia on the Eastenders' website, it was bound to be a let-down.
Secondly, the return storyline, itself, was too forced, too brief and too sensationalist. It centred around Sharon's escape from a wedding to a man we'd never met before, his all-too-brief "kidnapping" of her son (more about him later), the ubiquitous chase scene in Phil's SUV (which at times resembled the infamous O J Simpson car chase - i.e. slow) ...
Phil got to punch the jilted bridegroom in the end, and in the build-up, the wicked sister was also "kidnapped." The problem about this is that these people - John and Nina - were strangers to the viewers. We didn't know them, therefore we couldn't invest in any feeling for them. They kept calling Sharon "scum," implying she was an awful mother, reminding her that she was "no one" and that John had lifted her up "from the gutter," all cryptic hints that something wasn't right about Sharon and the past few years.
Of course, this has led to all sorts of speculation regarding Sharon's "big secret." Letitia Dean, herself, has admitted in interviews that "something bad" happened in the US and that Sharon has been back in the UK for four years, unbeknownst to Phil, more about this as well later). This has sparked speculation from the Lowest Common Denominator on Digital Spy and elsewhere that Sharon's been into prostitution. Well, why not, since most women resident on the Square currently qualify for some degree of tart status, ranging from local bike to outright whore?
Actually, let's speculate and say Eastenders has opted to go the "realism route" with Sharon. She lived in Florida, and Florida has been one of the states hardest hit in the economic downturn, suffering greatly from a burst housing bubble. Four years ago, things were at their bleakest. Perfectly reasonable that Sharon should have lost her home and whatever employment she had and returned to the UK with her young son ... to suffer. That could be the "something bad" because, believe me, for some people, losing your home and your livelihood is a nightmare. And, Sharon, being a proud person, wouldn't have liked her familiars to see her on her uppers.
But that sort of realism is boring, so I would say perhaps Sharon was involved in the illegal sex trade in the US - not active prostitution, but more the management end of providing high class call girls and escorts. In short, maybe she was a madam. As prostitution and soliciting is illegal in Florida, she could have been discovered and arrested. Her Green Card would have been forfeited and she would have been deported. Other than that, she's been an alky. Like her mother.
Of course, the plus side of Sharon's return has been the chemistry between Letitia Dean and Steve McFadden, and in hindsight, maybe "Sharon Week" deserved a week-long saga in and of itself and unconnected with Ben's reveal. The search for the annoying child could have been a little longer, resulting in more dialogue between Sharon and Phil, more of a chance for her to tell us what happened and what went on in the US, rather than yet another big reveal of a secret. (Has Eastenders ever heard of desensitisation?)
And this leads me to two other "big" criticisms I have of her return - the retconning and "Denny."
The Big Retcon Error. I know this storyline is Kirkwood's swansong; and true to form, he seems to have fucked up Sharon, just like he fucked up Kat and Bianca. (More, later; this is just to remind me). However, Kirkwood loved retconning. If he needed to change an established fact in order to accommodate his idea of Eastenders' reality, he did so without compunction. David's and Carol's juvenile bonk-up behind the bike sheds became the stuff of Romeo and Juliet; Pat, who'd stood up to real hard men like Jonnie Allen, became a quivering mass of jelly when faced with Derek Branning. One of Bianca's many nameless one night stands post-Nathan Dean became Ray Dixon, with whom she'd had a lengthy relationship and from whom she'd nicked five hundred pounds. You get the picture.
In 2009, both Ian and Sharon turned forty. In March, to celebrate his birthday, Ian bought himself a ridiculous leather biker's jacket and a set of drums. He tried to reconnect with Kelvin Carpenter via a social network site. Then in October 2009, he announced to Jane that he was flying out to Florida for Sharon's fortieth, which he did, leaving a very annoyed Jane behind to cope with his business empire and three stroppy kids. He returned, wearing a cheesy stars'n stripes teeshirt (and the biker jacker), bragging about the size of Sharon's home in Florida (on scale with Southfork). Fact: In the Gospel according to Diederick Santer, Sharon was still in Florida, and prosperous, in 2009.
Now, according to Letitia Dean, she's been back in the UK for four years, down on her luck, working in a succession of divey pubs and moving from place to place. Four years ... since 2008.
Go figure.
Denny: I remember a time when Eastenders' child characters were seen and rarely heard. Amy harkens back to that era. Martin Fowler never spoke a word before he went upstairs one night and came down the next morning as 12 year-old James Alexandriou - and even then he didn't speak much. The original Vicky Fowler didn't have hair, much less a vocabulary when she emigrated with Michelle to Alabama at the age of ten. The original Janine got by on merely looking like a demon; her successor, Greek Janine said even less, and she was older. Sonia was the first child character with a reasonable amount of dialogue, but her trumpet carried her;and Chloe-Rebecca came straight from a church nativity play.
I blame Coronation Street. Corrie gave us Chesney (pronounced Ches-NEH). Chesney was the cutest kid, and he could deliver dialogue naturally; but cute kids often don't grow up to be cute adults, and Chesney now, still clinging to Corrie, is neither cute nor a kid. In the wake of Chesney, Corrie gave us the obnoxious manchild Simon Barlow (who, I'm convinced, is a midget). Eastenders countered with the equally obnoxious Tiffany Butcher - so winsome at six, so pukeworthy at ten (and she's losing the cuteness too). Now, in her wake, we have "the amazing Harry Hickles" (see below) as Dennis Jnr.
Yet another midget in disguise. Like Tiffany and like Simon, we're in for a veritable overdose of cuteness, dressed up like Little Lord Fauntleroy, just in time to bond with Phil. This kid has been on screen for a total of five minutes and already the obnoxious barometer is rising.
It's surprising, but I'm uncomfortable with Sharon as a mother, and I don't know why. Oh, yes, I do ... it was because I was always uncomfortable both with her relationship with Dennis Rickman Snr and with the assumption by many who were too young or too unwilling to remember Grant Mitchell that Dennis was the love of Sharon's life and that "Shannis" ruled.
Shannis sucked. Dennis and Sharon never rocked the way Grant and Sharon did. In the beginning there was Sharon and the Mitchell brothers, complete with Sharongate plot, were developed for her. Dennis Rickman was the first of many heretofore unknown relatives popping up like rabbits from a magician's hat, and he was a glorified plot device introduced in the wake of Steve McFadden bowing out on a year's sabbatical in order to accommodate the return from the grave of Leslie Grantham. It was yet another sensationalist aspect to Sharon's life - she was the first in British soap history to sleep with her husband's brother, let's have her fall in love with her "adopted" brother, the natural son of her adopted father, sleep with him and get pregnant by him. After all, vice may be nice, but incest is best.
The Sharon dynamic changed completely with Dennis and Big Den. The Sharon of the Nineties, Sharon Watts Mitchell, was a survivor, someone who emerged from a spate of bother as a stand-alone character and one with dignity. Grant and Sharon crackled and burned brightly; even though she betrayed him, even though he was both physically and emotionally abusive, Sharon left Walford the first time, loving Grant, and Grant still loved her.
In fact, Grant's love for Sharon effectively ruined his marriage to Tiffany. Sharon was like the third person in that marriage, sight unseen. She hovered like Banquo's ghost over the 1997 Paris trip taken by Grant, Tiffany, Phil and Kathy, which saw Grant and Tiffany bond romantically only to have a drunken Phil remind Grant (and Tiff) that she was no Sharon.
I never bought into the Shannis dynamic. Dennis was too pretty a boy - a boy - for Sharon's tastes. Yes, he was younger, but - and I don't mean this in an unkind way - he looked much younger. As for being the son of the iconic Den "Barjumper" Watts, Simon Wicks had more of the Den about him than fey Dennis. As Sharon Marshall once remarked, whilst narrating an Eastenders Revealed episode about exits, Dennis spent most of his time stomping around the Square looking angry, which in Nigel Harman's case, meant looking beetle-browed.
Even before Dennis arrived on the scene, Milennium Sharon was a different creature from Sharongate Sharon. Hot off her immediate affair with Phil, in the early part of this past decade, Sharon quickly became close and engaged to Fireman Tom, a heretofore unmentioned friend from her youth - Irish, no less - who was ensconced as the "love of her life" to whom she got engaged on Hallowe'en after finding out he was dying of a brain tumour and who subsequently went onto die in a fire that very evening. Milennium Sharon was the beginning of Sharon as the tragic heroine, a woman who held the very kiss of death for anything and anyone in her vicinity. Dennis was the next "love of her life," who met his karma and died, hours after discovering he was to become a father.
Recapping, between 2001 and 2006, these things befell Sharon:-
But there was something else about Milennium Sharon, and it had nothing to do with sweet Dennis and everything to do with her dad. The relationship between Den and Sharon this time around was nothing less than creepy. Anyone recall that lengthy scene in the Watts' household between Den and Sharon, clad only in a silk nightshirt, where she steps on a broken wineglass and Den erotically removes a shard of glass from her foot? Shades of Archie and Ronnie (who inherited the mantle of daddy-daughter erotica conflict from Den and Milennium Sharon with the added pizzazz of paedophilia)!
Even Leslie Grantham in a subsequent Eastenders Revealed stated that Zombie Den's attitude toward his "daughter" was that no one but himself was good enough for her, and suggested that her attraction to Dennis was a projection of her attraction to her old man. Den even got inside Dennis's head with that one.
So here we are with Hurricane Sharon, a woman with a deep, dark secret, so fraught and caught in what appears to be a midlife crisis that she'd walk away from a wedding at the last minute leaving her supposedly much-loved only child at the mercy of strangers - well, strangers to the viewer, at least. And where does she turn for sustenance? Why, to the only source who's been a constant in her life for the past 20 years - Phil Mitchell.
It was Phil who comforted and sustained her when Grant was beating her up. It was Phil who shacked up with her upon her return to Walford. Phil, who found out who really killed and buried her old man; and Phil who effected Jonnie Allen's surrender and subsequent death. And whilst we're on the subject, let's shut up about the myth that Phil was "responsible" for the death of sweet Dennis. Dennis was 32 years old - a married man with a child on the way, who really should have had better common sense than to beat the shit out of Jonnie Allen and then throw him his cellphone to call for help. Dennis was responsible for his own death.
Sharon will depend on Phil but shag Jack. She'll manage the R and R and be best mates with Tanya, organising play dates for their sons, one of whom is rarely seen downstairs. At the moment, she's yet another iconic character being used as a vehicle by which an ever-increasing and increasingly unpopular family might be validated.
It's early days, but I'm apprehensive that Sharon's third return will see her in full Kirkwood mode - a trembling shell of her former self, lacking in common sense, impulsive to the end, absconding from any sort of responsiblity for her actions, clinging to Jack Branning as if he were the coolest thing since iced water, and saddled with an annoying brat of a child, whom we're supposed to consider adorable.
If this is the case, we need Grant.
There are several reasons for this. First, Eastenders hyped Sharon's return like the Second Coming (in her case, the Third). Never before has so much hope been invested in the return of one character; even I was caught up in it, and I'm the worst cynic when it comes to soaps in general. After such hype - the trailer, the interviews and the Sharon quizzes and memorabilia on the Eastenders' website, it was bound to be a let-down.
Secondly, the return storyline, itself, was too forced, too brief and too sensationalist. It centred around Sharon's escape from a wedding to a man we'd never met before, his all-too-brief "kidnapping" of her son (more about him later), the ubiquitous chase scene in Phil's SUV (which at times resembled the infamous O J Simpson car chase - i.e. slow) ...
Phil got to punch the jilted bridegroom in the end, and in the build-up, the wicked sister was also "kidnapped." The problem about this is that these people - John and Nina - were strangers to the viewers. We didn't know them, therefore we couldn't invest in any feeling for them. They kept calling Sharon "scum," implying she was an awful mother, reminding her that she was "no one" and that John had lifted her up "from the gutter," all cryptic hints that something wasn't right about Sharon and the past few years.
Of course, this has led to all sorts of speculation regarding Sharon's "big secret." Letitia Dean, herself, has admitted in interviews that "something bad" happened in the US and that Sharon has been back in the UK for four years, unbeknownst to Phil, more about this as well later). This has sparked speculation from the Lowest Common Denominator on Digital Spy and elsewhere that Sharon's been into prostitution. Well, why not, since most women resident on the Square currently qualify for some degree of tart status, ranging from local bike to outright whore?
Actually, let's speculate and say Eastenders has opted to go the "realism route" with Sharon. She lived in Florida, and Florida has been one of the states hardest hit in the economic downturn, suffering greatly from a burst housing bubble. Four years ago, things were at their bleakest. Perfectly reasonable that Sharon should have lost her home and whatever employment she had and returned to the UK with her young son ... to suffer. That could be the "something bad" because, believe me, for some people, losing your home and your livelihood is a nightmare. And, Sharon, being a proud person, wouldn't have liked her familiars to see her on her uppers.
But that sort of realism is boring, so I would say perhaps Sharon was involved in the illegal sex trade in the US - not active prostitution, but more the management end of providing high class call girls and escorts. In short, maybe she was a madam. As prostitution and soliciting is illegal in Florida, she could have been discovered and arrested. Her Green Card would have been forfeited and she would have been deported. Other than that, she's been an alky. Like her mother.
Of course, the plus side of Sharon's return has been the chemistry between Letitia Dean and Steve McFadden, and in hindsight, maybe "Sharon Week" deserved a week-long saga in and of itself and unconnected with Ben's reveal. The search for the annoying child could have been a little longer, resulting in more dialogue between Sharon and Phil, more of a chance for her to tell us what happened and what went on in the US, rather than yet another big reveal of a secret. (Has Eastenders ever heard of desensitisation?)
And this leads me to two other "big" criticisms I have of her return - the retconning and "Denny."
The Big Retcon Error. I know this storyline is Kirkwood's swansong; and true to form, he seems to have fucked up Sharon, just like he fucked up Kat and Bianca. (More, later; this is just to remind me). However, Kirkwood loved retconning. If he needed to change an established fact in order to accommodate his idea of Eastenders' reality, he did so without compunction. David's and Carol's juvenile bonk-up behind the bike sheds became the stuff of Romeo and Juliet; Pat, who'd stood up to real hard men like Jonnie Allen, became a quivering mass of jelly when faced with Derek Branning. One of Bianca's many nameless one night stands post-Nathan Dean became Ray Dixon, with whom she'd had a lengthy relationship and from whom she'd nicked five hundred pounds. You get the picture.
In 2009, both Ian and Sharon turned forty. In March, to celebrate his birthday, Ian bought himself a ridiculous leather biker's jacket and a set of drums. He tried to reconnect with Kelvin Carpenter via a social network site. Then in October 2009, he announced to Jane that he was flying out to Florida for Sharon's fortieth, which he did, leaving a very annoyed Jane behind to cope with his business empire and three stroppy kids. He returned, wearing a cheesy stars'n stripes teeshirt (and the biker jacker), bragging about the size of Sharon's home in Florida (on scale with Southfork). Fact: In the Gospel according to Diederick Santer, Sharon was still in Florida, and prosperous, in 2009.
Now, according to Letitia Dean, she's been back in the UK for four years, down on her luck, working in a succession of divey pubs and moving from place to place. Four years ... since 2008.
Go figure.
Denny: I remember a time when Eastenders' child characters were seen and rarely heard. Amy harkens back to that era. Martin Fowler never spoke a word before he went upstairs one night and came down the next morning as 12 year-old James Alexandriou - and even then he didn't speak much. The original Vicky Fowler didn't have hair, much less a vocabulary when she emigrated with Michelle to Alabama at the age of ten. The original Janine got by on merely looking like a demon; her successor, Greek Janine said even less, and she was older. Sonia was the first child character with a reasonable amount of dialogue, but her trumpet carried her;and Chloe-Rebecca came straight from a church nativity play.
I blame Coronation Street. Corrie gave us Chesney (pronounced Ches-NEH). Chesney was the cutest kid, and he could deliver dialogue naturally; but cute kids often don't grow up to be cute adults, and Chesney now, still clinging to Corrie, is neither cute nor a kid. In the wake of Chesney, Corrie gave us the obnoxious manchild Simon Barlow (who, I'm convinced, is a midget). Eastenders countered with the equally obnoxious Tiffany Butcher - so winsome at six, so pukeworthy at ten (and she's losing the cuteness too). Now, in her wake, we have "the amazing Harry Hickles" (see below) as Dennis Jnr.
Yet another midget in disguise. Like Tiffany and like Simon, we're in for a veritable overdose of cuteness, dressed up like Little Lord Fauntleroy, just in time to bond with Phil. This kid has been on screen for a total of five minutes and already the obnoxious barometer is rising.
It's surprising, but I'm uncomfortable with Sharon as a mother, and I don't know why. Oh, yes, I do ... it was because I was always uncomfortable both with her relationship with Dennis Rickman Snr and with the assumption by many who were too young or too unwilling to remember Grant Mitchell that Dennis was the love of Sharon's life and that "Shannis" ruled.
Shannis sucked. Dennis and Sharon never rocked the way Grant and Sharon did. In the beginning there was Sharon and the Mitchell brothers, complete with Sharongate plot, were developed for her. Dennis Rickman was the first of many heretofore unknown relatives popping up like rabbits from a magician's hat, and he was a glorified plot device introduced in the wake of Steve McFadden bowing out on a year's sabbatical in order to accommodate the return from the grave of Leslie Grantham. It was yet another sensationalist aspect to Sharon's life - she was the first in British soap history to sleep with her husband's brother, let's have her fall in love with her "adopted" brother, the natural son of her adopted father, sleep with him and get pregnant by him. After all, vice may be nice, but incest is best.
The Sharon dynamic changed completely with Dennis and Big Den. The Sharon of the Nineties, Sharon Watts Mitchell, was a survivor, someone who emerged from a spate of bother as a stand-alone character and one with dignity. Grant and Sharon crackled and burned brightly; even though she betrayed him, even though he was both physically and emotionally abusive, Sharon left Walford the first time, loving Grant, and Grant still loved her.
In fact, Grant's love for Sharon effectively ruined his marriage to Tiffany. Sharon was like the third person in that marriage, sight unseen. She hovered like Banquo's ghost over the 1997 Paris trip taken by Grant, Tiffany, Phil and Kathy, which saw Grant and Tiffany bond romantically only to have a drunken Phil remind Grant (and Tiff) that she was no Sharon.
I never bought into the Shannis dynamic. Dennis was too pretty a boy - a boy - for Sharon's tastes. Yes, he was younger, but - and I don't mean this in an unkind way - he looked much younger. As for being the son of the iconic Den "Barjumper" Watts, Simon Wicks had more of the Den about him than fey Dennis. As Sharon Marshall once remarked, whilst narrating an Eastenders Revealed episode about exits, Dennis spent most of his time stomping around the Square looking angry, which in Nigel Harman's case, meant looking beetle-browed.
Even before Dennis arrived on the scene, Milennium Sharon was a different creature from Sharongate Sharon. Hot off her immediate affair with Phil, in the early part of this past decade, Sharon quickly became close and engaged to Fireman Tom, a heretofore unmentioned friend from her youth - Irish, no less - who was ensconced as the "love of her life" to whom she got engaged on Hallowe'en after finding out he was dying of a brain tumour and who subsequently went onto die in a fire that very evening. Milennium Sharon was the beginning of Sharon as the tragic heroine, a woman who held the very kiss of death for anything and anyone in her vicinity. Dennis was the next "love of her life," who met his karma and died, hours after discovering he was to become a father.
Recapping, between 2001 and 2006, these things befell Sharon:-
- Angie died, a pauper and a drunk
- She reconnected with Tom, fell in love, found out he was dying, got engaged to him and he was killed in a fire that very evening
- Mark Fowler told her he was dying
- She met, fell in love with, slept with and married her "brother."
- Sharon found out her father really was a cad
- Den returned from the grave, got killed again, dug up and re-buried
- Dennis got killed after finding out Sharon was pregnant
But there was something else about Milennium Sharon, and it had nothing to do with sweet Dennis and everything to do with her dad. The relationship between Den and Sharon this time around was nothing less than creepy. Anyone recall that lengthy scene in the Watts' household between Den and Sharon, clad only in a silk nightshirt, where she steps on a broken wineglass and Den erotically removes a shard of glass from her foot? Shades of Archie and Ronnie (who inherited the mantle of daddy-daughter erotica conflict from Den and Milennium Sharon with the added pizzazz of paedophilia)!
Even Leslie Grantham in a subsequent Eastenders Revealed stated that Zombie Den's attitude toward his "daughter" was that no one but himself was good enough for her, and suggested that her attraction to Dennis was a projection of her attraction to her old man. Den even got inside Dennis's head with that one.
So here we are with Hurricane Sharon, a woman with a deep, dark secret, so fraught and caught in what appears to be a midlife crisis that she'd walk away from a wedding at the last minute leaving her supposedly much-loved only child at the mercy of strangers - well, strangers to the viewer, at least. And where does she turn for sustenance? Why, to the only source who's been a constant in her life for the past 20 years - Phil Mitchell.
It was Phil who comforted and sustained her when Grant was beating her up. It was Phil who shacked up with her upon her return to Walford. Phil, who found out who really killed and buried her old man; and Phil who effected Jonnie Allen's surrender and subsequent death. And whilst we're on the subject, let's shut up about the myth that Phil was "responsible" for the death of sweet Dennis. Dennis was 32 years old - a married man with a child on the way, who really should have had better common sense than to beat the shit out of Jonnie Allen and then throw him his cellphone to call for help. Dennis was responsible for his own death.
Sharon will depend on Phil but shag Jack. She'll manage the R and R and be best mates with Tanya, organising play dates for their sons, one of whom is rarely seen downstairs. At the moment, she's yet another iconic character being used as a vehicle by which an ever-increasing and increasingly unpopular family might be validated.
It's early days, but I'm apprehensive that Sharon's third return will see her in full Kirkwood mode - a trembling shell of her former self, lacking in common sense, impulsive to the end, absconding from any sort of responsiblity for her actions, clinging to Jack Branning as if he were the coolest thing since iced water, and saddled with an annoying brat of a child, whom we're supposed to consider adorable.
If this is the case, we need Grant.
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