OK, long-time viewers, who can dare forget this scene, one of the most iconic scenes ever in the history of EastEnders?
30,000,000 people tuned in for that scene aired on Christmas Day 1986. Thirty million people.
There's a battle waging on the playgrounds of Walford Web Kindergarten about Alpha families in the Square's history.
The war erupts during the last few and latest pages of a interminably long and repetitive thread about Max and Tanya Branning, started by a poster who's arguably the biggest Branning shipper in the world.
Inevitably, however, it brings most of the Branning shippers crawling from the woodwork to defend the biggest, most dysfunctional, most inbred and annoying bunch of jumped up white trash ever to rampage through Walford. And, again inevitably, the thread invariably traipses into Den and Ange territory.
Now, remember when Max and (Fa)Tanya first arrived on the Square, they were hailed by Kate Harwood's PR people as the second coming of Den and Angie; and whilst I can see a soupcon of similarity in Max to Den, Tanya isn't fit to wipe Angie's stilettos. Although she was introduced with the de rigueur adjective meant to denote a strong woman ("feisty"), truth was, Tanya was little more than Max Branning's much put-upon wife. She upon whom he must cheat and cheat repeatedly. We were supposed to sympathise with her.
But as the years progressed, we learned little unsavoury snippets about Lady Madonna Tanya:-
Sorry to dispel your idea of strength, Willie, but these women are not strong women. Strength is not measured in decibels unless you're Maria Callas.
The Brannings get a lot of stick because they're scrubbed-up white trash with middle class aspirations. The majority of them are hypocrites. Jack Branning is emblematic of white trash, considering he's dropped kids in three countries and sees precious little of any of them, except when he's forced to do so. They sleep with each other's wives, cousins copulate and they drink like the proverbial fish. They could even be travellers who've settled down with the odd scam in mind. They are not an alpha family, and even if they were, they'd be the wrong sort of family that the programme should promote.
As dodgy as either the Watts family and the Mitchell family ever were, they possessed something at their very centre which is totally alien to the Brannings: a moral core.
And, I'm sorry, but dropping Dot in their midst as their made-up matriarch or re-inventing Sharon Watts Mitchell Rickman as one of their satellites-cum-sleeping partners does not validate them in any way. In fact, it's craven; and Simon Ashdown should be taken out and slapped repeatedly.
Well, someone does step forth and smack the living shit from the botoxed face of Will Slater-Mitchell's avatar. Enter Professor Plum, a long-time viewer and the voice of reason from the Antipodes:-
The middle paragraph epitomises the Branning family of Max and Tanya in a nutshell. Professor Plum is right: The Brannings have no class, and that is why they can never be entertained seriously as Walford's Alpha family. Anyone thinking this just doesn't understand EastEnders. It's not about retconning and sensationalism. Really. How and why? I'll show you, courtesy of the aptly avatared NeverMindMe, who proves a point he doesn't really mean to prove, and, in doing so, shoots himself in the foot.
Please, allow me to break up his rejoinder and refute it, point by point.
He begins:
No, Den and Angie were no saints, but you know what? Everything they did to each other in their relationship was believeable. It was the stuff you heard of in gossip at the office place, if you didn't read about it in the newspapers. How many storylines have there been about people lying about their health or their children's health to obtain certain favours or benefits?
Den cheated on Angie. Max cheats on Tanya. Den slept with and impregnated the sixteen year-old best friend of his daughter. It was a one nighter, which didn't happen again. Through the birth of his daughter, which was a well-guarded secret by him and by the Fowlers, both the Beales and Fowlers became a de facto part of the extended Watts family. When Den was raised from the dead in the early part of this century, his family was larger, consisting of himself, his new wife (Chrissie), Sharon, a grown-up Vicky, and his newly-found son, Dennis Rickman. And, we all know, that Dennis and Sharon fell in love and married.
Shock, horror!
Here's the difference in the Branning version: Max was seduced by and slept with the teenaged ex-girlfriend of his son, whom his son went onto marry. This was not a one-off occurrence. It was a full-on affair, lasting the better part of a year. Max led Stacey on, making her believe they had a future, even showing her a flat he'd "rented" for their rendezvous, with a view to getting her to believe they'd one day live there.
However, he continued to sleep with Tanya and got her pregnant. Stacey issued an ultimatum, giving Max thirty minutes to tell Tanya that he was leaving her for Stacey or she'd tell her. Max bolted and took the family to Spain.
As for the vice-is-nice-but-incest-is-best element, Sharon Watts knew nothing of Dennis Rickman's existence until 2003. She was the adopted daughter of Den; he was his natural son. Neither had been raised together, so for all intents and purposes, they are not siblings.
GurnGirl and Tadpole are first cousins, related by blood and sharing the same paternal grandparents. Not knowing each other has nothing to do with the actual situation that they are really related by blood.
NeverMindMe either hates Sharon or has been watching an alternative univers EastEnders. Sharon without class? Sharon was the much spoiled, much doted-upon daughter of Den and Angie Watts. They may have hated each other, but they loved the bones of Sharon.
And whilst Sharon may have wanted to pop that cherry at sixteen like her BFF, but the fact remained that she didn't. She didn't lose her virginity until she'd long left school and that was with Simon Wicks, her first serious boyfriend. Her next lover, after Simon, was the man she subsequently married, Grant Mitchell. Until this reincarnation, made solely and utterly by Simon Ashdown in the image of Branningery, Sharon has had and has always had more class in her little finger than most women on that show have in their entire bodies.
She deserves more than sitting at a table listening to Tanya witter on about herself interminably, whilst downing bottles of wine. In the real world of EastEnders (the show created by Julia Smith and Tony Holland), Sharon would have nothing but disdain for a shallow, egotistical, selfish hypocrite like Tanya.
Sharon was many things, but in her youth, she was never promiscuous - unlike Lauren, who follows a pattern of behaviour enforced upon her by her mother and grandmother. Lauren is a drunk, who's not only sleeping with her first cousin, but who's shared Tyler Moon with her best friends, and who's fucked around with people whose names she doesn't even know.
They are the Alpha family only because the show's chief writer worships at their altar. Take Simon Ashdown out of the equation and you have a completely different ballgame. One only has to look at the contrast recently in the quality of episodes from the recent Branning week of two weeks ago (dire) and the watchable Mitchel-centric episodes from this past week. Or further, look at the difference in acting and writing for Sharon. When Letitia Dean has to interact with Jack or Tanya, she's unrecogniseable, morphing into a bad impersonation of Miss Piggy. When she's with Phil Mitchell or Ian Beale, all pretense is dropped and she becomes theh Sharon everyone knows and loves, not some pitiful Branning satellite.
To the Brannings, Bianca is an embarrassment, someone to whom they throw the scraps of food and drink from their table. She'd be better off steered in the direction of the Beales, especially now that Ian has re-evaluated his life and is in a more benevolent state of mind. Dot deserves better as well. And Carol never interacted in that dynamic prior to this. The rest are superfluous and pejorative, many played by actors with no previous experience or training, and by actors whose characters have been moulded to fit their personalities and not vice versa.
Also, consider this ... the worst Angie ever did to Den was lie to him and tell him she had six months to live. The worst Tanya did to Max was to drug him and try to bury him alive, this after prostituting herself to a psycologically vulnerable young man who was obsessed with her, with an aim to leaving him to cop the rap for Max's eventual death.
Jack, who moved in and shacked up with Tanya for a year, even planned on absconding the country illegally with Max's children, knew about this and thought Tanya should have gone all the way with the killing. Now, it's a private family joke, which Max raises from time to time, but which goes way over the alcohol-drenched brains of Cora the Bora and GurnGirl, even though it does make Tanya shit her already dirty designer underwear.
Angie's act got her a divorce she didn't want. She was already halfway down the road to alcoholism; Tanya's act should have seen her locked away for a long time. And Lauren, who tried to kill her dad, should be shitting herself in some juvy place, afraid to go into the communal shower with a bar of soap.
The gist is that the Watts, as Alpha family, were believeable in everything they did or every storyline which concerned them. They Brannings are built on dysfunctionality and sensationalism ... and lots of retconning to suit a storyline. They aren't even likeable.
Best to heed NeverMindMe's avatar ... never mind him and move on. Nothing new here.
There's a battle waging on the playgrounds of Walford Web Kindergarten about Alpha families in the Square's history.
The war erupts during the last few and latest pages of a interminably long and repetitive thread about Max and Tanya Branning, started by a poster who's arguably the biggest Branning shipper in the world.
Inevitably, however, it brings most of the Branning shippers crawling from the woodwork to defend the biggest, most dysfunctional, most inbred and annoying bunch of jumped up white trash ever to rampage through Walford. And, again inevitably, the thread invariably traipses into Den and Ange territory.
Now, remember when Max and (Fa)Tanya first arrived on the Square, they were hailed by Kate Harwood's PR people as the second coming of Den and Angie; and whilst I can see a soupcon of similarity in Max to Den, Tanya isn't fit to wipe Angie's stilettos. Although she was introduced with the de rigueur adjective meant to denote a strong woman ("feisty"), truth was, Tanya was little more than Max Branning's much put-upon wife. She upon whom he must cheat and cheat repeatedly. We were supposed to sympathise with her.
But as the years progressed, we learned little unsavoury snippets about Lady Madonna Tanya:-
- that she was an 18 year-old kappa slappa in hot pursuit (to paraphase the Dowager Duchess of Grantham) of a married man with a child.
- that she became pregnant by that married man, which meant he left his first wife and child for her.
- that she made him promise always to put her children first
- that she came from a sink estate
- that her older sister was an academic girl who was introduced into a life of sex, drugs, drink and rock'n roll by Tanya - then the older sister was re-introduced as the younger one. Go figure.
That was in the first year alone. It wasn't until Tanya had featured in the programme for five years that she even got a backstory and a mother who was so white trashy, she made the Brannings look like the Windsors.
The actual truth is that Tanya was chickenshit to Angie, and that, although Max owns his amorality, it, too, was on the chickenshit level compared to Den Watts.
Anyway, the argument was raised with this statement from the Irish commentator Will Slater-Mitchell:-
The last sentence is one of the biggest, most steaming piles of bullshit I've ever read on a forum, but judging by Will's screen name, I'm not at all surprised. Will's a lad who wants to be an agglomeration of Stacey Slater and Ronnie Mitchell, whilst looking like Kat Moon (i.e., a man in drag). As I recall, he was one of the biggest shippers of The Stacey and Ronnie Show, so I imagine he'd like to dress up in drag a la Kat, whilst shouting his mouth off and destroying everything in sight like Stacey with a cold, hard ice maiden face like Ronnie, indulging in the odd baby-napping here and there.I'm a big fan of Jake and Jo, who have great chemistry both onscreen and in real life.I love Max and Tanya as a couple. I can't wait to see what happens at Christmas. They get a bit of stick on here but I think the Brannings are an excellent family and are deserving of their role as alpha family of the Square.
Sorry to dispel your idea of strength, Willie, but these women are not strong women. Strength is not measured in decibels unless you're Maria Callas.
The Brannings get a lot of stick because they're scrubbed-up white trash with middle class aspirations. The majority of them are hypocrites. Jack Branning is emblematic of white trash, considering he's dropped kids in three countries and sees precious little of any of them, except when he's forced to do so. They sleep with each other's wives, cousins copulate and they drink like the proverbial fish. They could even be travellers who've settled down with the odd scam in mind. They are not an alpha family, and even if they were, they'd be the wrong sort of family that the programme should promote.
As dodgy as either the Watts family and the Mitchell family ever were, they possessed something at their very centre which is totally alien to the Brannings: a moral core.
And, I'm sorry, but dropping Dot in their midst as their made-up matriarch or re-inventing Sharon Watts Mitchell Rickman as one of their satellites-cum-sleeping partners does not validate them in any way. In fact, it's craven; and Simon Ashdown should be taken out and slapped repeatedly.
Well, someone does step forth and smack the living shit from the botoxed face of Will Slater-Mitchell's avatar. Enter Professor Plum, a long-time viewer and the voice of reason from the Antipodes:-
Really???He shags around and is in love with his 20yoish daughter-in-law. He has kept a big secret from his wife-to-be, and hardly interacts with his family at all.She is nasty, manipulative and vindictive (who would really bury their husband alive?). The only thing she is interested in is white weddings and the bottle. She undermines her husbands authority (with the children) constantly and she shacked up with his brother.There is no class. They are not now, and never will an Alpha Square Family.
The middle paragraph epitomises the Branning family of Max and Tanya in a nutshell. Professor Plum is right: The Brannings have no class, and that is why they can never be entertained seriously as Walford's Alpha family. Anyone thinking this just doesn't understand EastEnders. It's not about retconning and sensationalism. Really. How and why? I'll show you, courtesy of the aptly avatared NeverMindMe, who proves a point he doesn't really mean to prove, and, in doing so, shoots himself in the foot.
Please, allow me to break up his rejoinder and refute it, point by point.
He begins:
What about the Watts family?Den and Angie were no saints, treated each other terribly with affairs and outrageous flirtation through jealousy. He served her divorce papers as a Christmas present. Sharon was a teenage girl lacking class, moving from one boy to another, desperate to be more like her friend Michelle.However, they were the alpha family of the 80's, albeit a lot smaller in numbers.
No, Den and Angie were no saints, but you know what? Everything they did to each other in their relationship was believeable. It was the stuff you heard of in gossip at the office place, if you didn't read about it in the newspapers. How many storylines have there been about people lying about their health or their children's health to obtain certain favours or benefits?
Den cheated on Angie. Max cheats on Tanya. Den slept with and impregnated the sixteen year-old best friend of his daughter. It was a one nighter, which didn't happen again. Through the birth of his daughter, which was a well-guarded secret by him and by the Fowlers, both the Beales and Fowlers became a de facto part of the extended Watts family. When Den was raised from the dead in the early part of this century, his family was larger, consisting of himself, his new wife (Chrissie), Sharon, a grown-up Vicky, and his newly-found son, Dennis Rickman. And, we all know, that Dennis and Sharon fell in love and married.
Shock, horror!
Here's the difference in the Branning version: Max was seduced by and slept with the teenaged ex-girlfriend of his son, whom his son went onto marry. This was not a one-off occurrence. It was a full-on affair, lasting the better part of a year. Max led Stacey on, making her believe they had a future, even showing her a flat he'd "rented" for their rendezvous, with a view to getting her to believe they'd one day live there.
However, he continued to sleep with Tanya and got her pregnant. Stacey issued an ultimatum, giving Max thirty minutes to tell Tanya that he was leaving her for Stacey or she'd tell her. Max bolted and took the family to Spain.
As for the vice-is-nice-but-incest-is-best element, Sharon Watts knew nothing of Dennis Rickman's existence until 2003. She was the adopted daughter of Den; he was his natural son. Neither had been raised together, so for all intents and purposes, they are not siblings.
GurnGirl and Tadpole are first cousins, related by blood and sharing the same paternal grandparents. Not knowing each other has nothing to do with the actual situation that they are really related by blood.
Sharon was a teenage girl lacking class, moving from one boy to another, desperate to be more like her friend Michelle.
NeverMindMe either hates Sharon or has been watching an alternative univers EastEnders. Sharon without class? Sharon was the much spoiled, much doted-upon daughter of Den and Angie Watts. They may have hated each other, but they loved the bones of Sharon.
And whilst Sharon may have wanted to pop that cherry at sixteen like her BFF, but the fact remained that she didn't. She didn't lose her virginity until she'd long left school and that was with Simon Wicks, her first serious boyfriend. Her next lover, after Simon, was the man she subsequently married, Grant Mitchell. Until this reincarnation, made solely and utterly by Simon Ashdown in the image of Branningery, Sharon has had and has always had more class in her little finger than most women on that show have in their entire bodies.
She deserves more than sitting at a table listening to Tanya witter on about herself interminably, whilst downing bottles of wine. In the real world of EastEnders (the show created by Julia Smith and Tony Holland), Sharon would have nothing but disdain for a shallow, egotistical, selfish hypocrite like Tanya.
Sharon was many things, but in her youth, she was never promiscuous - unlike Lauren, who follows a pattern of behaviour enforced upon her by her mother and grandmother. Lauren is a drunk, who's not only sleeping with her first cousin, but who's shared Tyler Moon with her best friends, and who's fucked around with people whose names she doesn't even know.
I would say the Brannings are definitely the alpha family of this era as most storylines evolve around them and often they're the family who get consistently high profile stories.
They are the Alpha family only because the show's chief writer worships at their altar. Take Simon Ashdown out of the equation and you have a completely different ballgame. One only has to look at the contrast recently in the quality of episodes from the recent Branning week of two weeks ago (dire) and the watchable Mitchel-centric episodes from this past week. Or further, look at the difference in acting and writing for Sharon. When Letitia Dean has to interact with Jack or Tanya, she's unrecogniseable, morphing into a bad impersonation of Miss Piggy. When she's with Phil Mitchell or Ian Beale, all pretense is dropped and she becomes theh Sharon everyone knows and loves, not some pitiful Branning satellite.
Dot, Max, Tanya, Jack, Carol, Derek, Lauren, Abi, Oscar, Bianca, Whitney, Liam, Morgan, Tiffany, Joey, MyAlice, then the latest additions of Cora, Ava and soon Dexter.Let's remember something: Bianca and her brood are Beales. They are the children of David Wicks (Beale), the nephews and nieces of Ian Beale, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Pete Beale and the great-grandchild and great-great-grandchildren of Lou Beale.
To the Brannings, Bianca is an embarrassment, someone to whom they throw the scraps of food and drink from their table. She'd be better off steered in the direction of the Beales, especially now that Ian has re-evaluated his life and is in a more benevolent state of mind. Dot deserves better as well. And Carol never interacted in that dynamic prior to this. The rest are superfluous and pejorative, many played by actors with no previous experience or training, and by actors whose characters have been moulded to fit their personalities and not vice versa.
Also, consider this ... the worst Angie ever did to Den was lie to him and tell him she had six months to live. The worst Tanya did to Max was to drug him and try to bury him alive, this after prostituting herself to a psycologically vulnerable young man who was obsessed with her, with an aim to leaving him to cop the rap for Max's eventual death.
Jack, who moved in and shacked up with Tanya for a year, even planned on absconding the country illegally with Max's children, knew about this and thought Tanya should have gone all the way with the killing. Now, it's a private family joke, which Max raises from time to time, but which goes way over the alcohol-drenched brains of Cora the Bora and GurnGirl, even though it does make Tanya shit her already dirty designer underwear.
Angie's act got her a divorce she didn't want. She was already halfway down the road to alcoholism; Tanya's act should have seen her locked away for a long time. And Lauren, who tried to kill her dad, should be shitting herself in some juvy place, afraid to go into the communal shower with a bar of soap.
The gist is that the Watts, as Alpha family, were believeable in everything they did or every storyline which concerned them. They Brannings are built on dysfunctionality and sensationalism ... and lots of retconning to suit a storyline. They aren't even likeable.
Best to heed NeverMindMe's avatar ... never mind him and move on. Nothing new here.
Anybody who thinks the Brannings even come within a 500 mile radius of the Watts needs a kick in the balls. Bitch, please. Just THREE Watts' owned the screen and became icons of British pop culture more than the twelve million Brannings could ever hope to. There is no comparison.
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