Ugly Shirley

Now that we know that Sharon helps Phil obtain custody of Lexi and now that we've seen the remarkably natural and beautiful pictures of a happy Letitia Dean leaving the courtroom arm-in-arm with an equally happy Steve McFadden, let's all laugh at poor Moaning Lisa's warped logic in trying to justify the fallacy of Shirley and Phil being EastEnders' single biggest love affair ... All together now, one big guffaw for Moaning Lisa ...

And let's have some music for those star-crossed EastEnders' lovers, Phil and Shirley ...

Let's put paid this myth of Phil and Shirley's undying love right now. Listen up, Moaning Lisa, because you're in serious danger of becoming a troll ...

And you really wouldn't want to rival vald, now, would you?

Here's the truth: Phil was never ever really attracted to Shirley sexually. Shirley was more of a mate - like Minty with tits and minus his dingle. Let's face it, Phil likes soft, fluffy, feminine women - strong women, yes - but decidedly feminine: Sharon, Kathy, Kate, Glenda - all pretty and all soft and feminine with steel backbones. That's Phil's comfort zone.

Shirley was the total antithesis of these women - raw-boned, not feminine in the least, hard-edged and hard-bitten. She wore either jeans or skirts which were designed for women twenty years younger than she. She was, at best, mutton dressed as lamb - at worst, just mutton.

Shirley was a man's woman in the worst senseof the word. She's the sort of woman who would dump her best friend in a New York minute whenever she found a man who was interested in her. This, she did to Heather repeatedly. In fact, Heather often whined about Shirley having deserted her to marry Kevin and start a family. She deserted Heather for Vinnie Monks. And for Phil.

But Heather served as Shirley's crutch, because Shirley quickly got bored with various relationships and bailed out. When Shirley got bored with Kevin, she slept around - first getting pregnant with Carly by a one-night stand and then getting pregnant with Dean by another. On each occasion, Kevin took her back - Kevin was really the original Alfie.

When Shirley got bored with the kids, she walked without compunction, leaving behind a disabled child, a toddler and a baby. She left Kevin and the kids to go party out the 80s with Heather, ever the eternal adolescent and a surrogate child for Shirley.

Phil wasn't even attracted to Shirley sexually when Ben, for some weird reason known only to Ben, strangely bonded with Shirley, hardly the most maternal of women. In fact, the first time Phil bedded Shirley, he was drunk. The actual truth is this: a lot of tweenie and low-information viewers latched onto the original idea that Phil and Shirley would make a good pair running the pub, and Diederich Santer obliged (except for the pub bit).

Phil was drunk when he first slept with Shirley, who secretly loved him, and Shirl was savvy enough to know she was never Phil's type, and that the only way he would ever sleep with her would be if he were drunk. So what did Shirley do? She made sure Phil stayed drunk, even knowing that such behaviour could possibly result in Phil's death, being an alcoholic. She even drank with him, and it's an underestimation to say that Shirley has drink issues.

Phil never even thought of cohabiting with Shirley until Shirley expediently moved herself in with him in order to allow him to have custody of Louise. Even then, Phil didn't think of Shirley as part and parcel of the Mitchell brood, excluding her from a family photo.

Shirley never entered the sphere of Mitchelldom properly, if at all, until Peggy had departed and Phil had resolved his addiction issues (for the time being). Then she inhabited a cobbled-together mishmash of faux Mitchells, consisting of Phil, Ben, the runts of the Mitchell litter (Billy and Roxy), a faux Mitchell (Jay) and herself. Her brief was, basically, look after Ben and Jay, clean the house and sleep with Phil. Her chief perk in the Mitchell empire was sleeping with the boss.

When Shirley was the Mitchell consort, she was worse than a bully. She totally abandoned Heather - even leaving her homeless with her baby on a park bench whilst she moved in with an alcoholic Phil to tend to his addiction crisis. She reveled in her status as the faux Mitchell matriarch, her signature line being "Do you know who I am?"

During her time by Phil's side, she stole from a single mother (who was a relative of Phil's), she endeavoured to try to get a woman with a drug addiction re-addicted to drugs, she gave Heather the desireable job of cleaning for her and only "allowed" Heather to inhabit the Mitchell abode when she almost killed herself and George through carbon monoxide poisoning.

Shirley is not a nice person. She was brought down to earth with a mighty bump twice during her Mitchell cohabitation - the first time was when she returned after Peggy's departure and questioned Phil about whether or not he would have resorted to alcohol and drug addiction if Sharon had been around. Phil's silent answer aroused her insecurities. And when she caught Phil cheating on her, on the eve of their planned wedding, with Glenda, she couldn't secure a promise from him that he wouldn't cheat again. At all. Phil just shrugged and said that was the way he was.

Shirley then knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Phil didn't love her. He may have liked her as a person and a friend, but he didn't love her. She knew, as she reminded Jay, that they were only living in Phil's house dependent on Phil's good nature. Although she told Phil she would walk if he cheated on her again, she really wouldn't. She lived for the day when Phil told her he loved her. He did that twice - both after Heather's death. The first time, he told her he loved her in order to get her to move back to his house; the second time, he told her in order to stop her from grassing him to the police.

Phil's ultimate betrayal of Shirley, however, was the part he played in Heather's death - his cover-up for Ben. As someone on Digital Spy points out, Phil never flinched in this cover-up and would have carried the cover-up on forever, even if it meant tying himself in marriage to Shirley (which, in fact, he was preparing to do when Sharon reappeared). Shirley would never have suspected. It was Ben and Jay, who inadvertantly revealed the truth to Shirley.

Even then, after months of screaming for justice for Heather, she still covered for Phil. She refused to tell the police of Phil's involvement in covering for Ben's guilt. And that was sick. Sick, because she was using it to force Phil to keep her, taunting and snarling, by his side forever, thinking that her knowledge would bend him to her will, yet craving his sincere declaration of love for her incessantly, even moreso since Sharon returned; because Shirley knows that Sharon is the love of Phil's life.

Shirley returning now wouldn't mean a rat's ass to Phil. Yes, he's alone, but it's Ben he's missing and Ben he's grieving and feeling guilty for - because he feels he failed him. Days after Shirley, in a welter of drunken self-pity, wafted off to live with Carly, he was calling Sharon for emotional support and had wiped Shirley's name from his telephone directory. Phil's moved on. Shirley is yesterday's news and totally isolated from everyone else in Walford:- Heather is dead, Denise is loved up with Arthur, Jay is being ostracised; Phil will soon be with Sharon.

There will be no place and nothing for Shirl but to stand, snarling and ugly, on the periphery. She  won't be able to help Lola, except to warn Lola that she's headed for a future which will end with her being and looking like Shirley eventually. Shirley's lost her power, which was Phil. As Phil told Billy and Lola, he's got the deepest pockets and the best brief in the area - what does Shirley have? She may like and feel for Lola, but she'll never be able to confront and win something over Phil Mitchell.

Shirley is now surplus to requirements, and I don't think it will be long before she slinks out of Walford, back to some gutter from whence she crawled.

I hope she takes Kat with her.

Update: Please, Moaning Lisa, stop with the "Shirley was in shock" shit and saying she dumped Phil. She did anything but. She had enough command and nous about her to hide the picture frame when the police came calling around. It took DCS Crisp to guilt-trip her into handing that single piece of evidence over, which was vital to the case; and she wasn't in shock when she decided not to shop Phil's involvement to the bizzies.

Shirley preserved that single piece of evidence as a sword of Damocles to dangle over Phil's head. She thought that by fishing that out, accompanied by the threat to take this to the police, would make Phil feel acutely the sense of loss she felt with Heather's death and at the same time would give her leverage to make Phil jump to her tune.

Make no mistake. She still loves Phil, and this was her chance to make Phil suffer as much as he had made her suffer - begging at his pool table for crumbs. Every time Phil begged her to return to the house - not because he loved her, but because he needed to control her and keep her close to keep her from grassing him up - she moved the goalposts. Her object, I think, was to guilt-trip Phil into committing to her, however warped that might be, because that was the only way she could ever have him. Even then, with her friend cold, she denied her justice, instead whining questions to Phil about whether or not he loved her or had ever loved her.

Still, you don't play a player, and Shirley got played in the end, when Phil got the shits of her guilt games and packed her off to Carly.

Also, when Shirley left Kevin, James was six, Carly was three and Dean was a baby in arms. Other than Shirley saying that James was "so needy" (well, being disabled, he would be), there was no sufficient reason for her leaving. I used to think maybe she, like Janine, had post-partum depression; but on certain occasions when she was with Heather, she intimated that she left because she was simply bored with being a mother at home with three young kids. She, effectively, left her own children to be a party friend and surrogate mother to Heather.