OY ... know wot terday is?
Isss Good Froiday ... INNIT?
As in The Long Good Friday - 'member vat film wot wuz abaht dem gangstas ...
'Ere ... vat woz inna East End'n all ... innit? And ... I reckon vat Bob 'Oskins geezer is wot vat Kane'll be one day ... innit? Well'ard 'e woz ... innit?
Bob 'Oskins, I mean.
Now vat Kane bro n 'is bruvvahs'n vat Liam Butcha ... well, vey Wellard is more well'ard van vey is ... 'n 'e's a dog. And dead ... like wivva fingah loik a gun loik wot vat Kane bro' did ... POW ...
Innit?
Er ... actually, no. In fact, it's ridiculous, the whole patois thing, especially when it's written by writers who wouldn't recognise their arses from their elbows regarding gang culture, who've watered it down and peeceed it up to such an extent that it actually becomes offensive - offensive to the viewers because it assumes an ignorance that's only assumed in the condescending minds of the luvvies from the leafy white suburbs who write this cack, it's offensive to the people it seeks to depict.
Yes, most gangs in the EastEnd are black or Asian in make-up, but this is a gang of ethnic idiots led by an even more idiotic Caucasian idiot portrayed by, arguably, one of the worst actors ever to be depicted in the programme. That's an insult to all Afro-Caribbean and Asian people because it portrays their underclass as so low in intellect that they have to be led by a white manchild whose intellect hasn't even reached Neanderthal level yet and who thinks it's terrifying to gurn. (Oscar Branning, take note: Keep gurning, and you're face will freeze like Kane's).
Maybe EastEnders wanted Kane to be scary, so they sought an actor with the most natural physical approximation to the mask from the film Scream, and they found Harry Rafferty. For good measure, the actor is just as intellectually stimulating as the character he portrays. He certainly talks the talk, if his Twitterfeed is anything to go by.
Life imitates art, even down to the knife.
Even worse, is the frightful grammar and syntax used by the show's new Magic Negro character, Ava the Rava - worse still, is the inveterately arrogant spammer who consistently tries to post a response to my criticism of the show's depiction of an educated professional who speaks like a guttersnipe.
The purpose of education is to uplift and enlighten. I am not talking about accents and received pronunciation. A person can come from the East End and speak with an East End accent and still speak using correct grammar and syntax. Barbara Windsor was a great example of how that was achieved. Any teacher or, indeed, any educated professional in a position of authority or trust who seeks to speak like the most ignorant and illiterate and uneducated member of society is neither relevant nor au courant. That person is a panderer and a fool, and the people he seeks to inspire know that.
Furthermore, any person who believes in such pop sociological claptrap is a bigger fool.
As far as that watered-down mother's meeting depiction of a gangabanga designed to scare adolescents away from such a culture, it probably made them laugh derisively, because this is what they see as the inspiration for Liam's "bruvvahs" (and it's probably where the EastEnders' writers got their inspiration):-
Innit?
Actually, this was a very meh episode, with bits of even more mediocrities than normal, apart from yet another random pairing (which Lorraine Newman seems to love, especially of the rainbow variety) surrounding what was supposed to be a dramatic moment of high tension - Liam's stabbing ...
Wait a moment, didn't that happen to Jay a few years ago?
Liam wiv de Feds'n in da House ... Innit?
Liam has a head shaped like a raindrop with a flat back and a pointed top. He can't help it, but it does aid in the general air of gormlessness surrounding the character, who also looks to be tremendously embarrassed to be a 17 year-old portraying a 14 year-old.
Ne'mind, Liam ... Mary Pickford was playing 11 year-old girls when she was twenty-seven ...
And the actor who plays Little Cock, your avenging angel and Magic Negro-in-Training, is actually 26 and has to hang out with the younger adolescents and act as if he finds sixteen-going-on-eleven Abi interesting.
Still, Liam has to look at Kane's face and that's enough to scare anyone into submission.
The "Feds" have Liam and his newly-adopted bruvs, and Mother of the Year Bianca has to sit in on the police interview with her son, who isn't talking ... innit? Because he doesn't want to grass his bruvs, innit? And that means Mommie Dearest plays her usual party piece - shouting the odds about Liam's innocence to the police (when Liam's supposed to be the one who's talking) until she gets on everyone's nerves so much that even Liam the Lunk asks her to leave.
Poor Bianca ... so misunderstood. Nothing is ever her fault, especially as people like Carol and Ava the Rava, Magic Negro Class A, keep telling her she's a wonderful mum. Well, maybe she is, by Carol's standards, which - as a mother - are woefully low. I mean, this is the mother who cut off all contact with her eldest son because he traced his birth father and found out that Carol kicked him out of her life on the day of Robbie's second birthday and her youngest daughter because she chose to give her baby up for adoption because she wanted the child to have a better life than she could give her. But Ava doesn't know jack shite about Bianca's parenting skills.
She doesn't know how she egged her children on to be rude to neighbours, how her anger got the better of her through a lie told by Whitney and how she assaulted a man and injured him badly. She doesn't know how she summarily exiled her husband from his home and forbade him unlimited access to his children. And next week, when Liam wants to go live with Ricky, Bianca talks him out of it.
Of course, we all know why Ava the Rava, Magic Negro Class A's, man is out of Little Cock's life. He's too busy experiencing the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, boldly going where no man has gone before ... or no Klingon ...
So now we know Ava the Rava's secret. She lost her heart to a starship trooper, and Little Cock is half-Klingon ...
Maybe she could explain this to Billy Mitchell ...
Because silly Liam wants to protect his bruvvahs, who seem to be up to all sorts - robberies, assaults, you name it, all of the little wankspittles go free; and Liam runs right off to find hisboyfriend BFF Kane and put things right with him.
Just an observation but: does anyone recall that Liam was selling Derek's knock-off gear and for whom? His very own Uncle Michael Moon. (Please don't forget that Michael is the Butcher kids' uncle and that Scarlett is their cousin, a fact which has been conveniently forgotten by the writers). Michael had him selling knock-offs, and he would have had him getting rid of the dodgy cash too, if he could have done so.
Anyway, Liam runs off, Bianca follows, and there's a fight ... where? In a flaming kids' playground on the Byron Estate. That's right. They fight amongst the swings and the sliding board and the roundabout ... The Magic Roundabout ... innit?
Just like the West Side story gang, the Jets. They start out on a playground ...
... and it all escalates into a brilliant ballet routine. Shit, Carol and Bianca spoil it all, and the iconic shriek of
RICK-AAAAAAAAYYYYYY
has been replaced with
LIAMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!
Instead of a brilliant series of Kane's arabesques, Liam's plies and Little Chris's pirouettes, Liam getsscratched stabbed. Just like Jay back in 2008 or so. So off we go to the hospital, where (assumes serious demeanor) it's very touch and go, they stopped the bleeding, and Liam's young (harumph harumph) ... all the bog-standard, common-and-garden fucking cliches one hears in the worst sort of amateur soap operas. The sort of medical lines that make you cringe in embarrassment for the writer and moreso for the poor asshole who has to utter these lines.
As Jamie Foreman said, very easy to write tripe, very difficult to perform it.
Liam's epiphany comes when the investigating CID blokedelivers a public service method about gives a nice message to Bianca about the police wanting to help her and her family but only if Liam helps them.
Cheesiest lines of the night:-
Carol (tentatively): Then ... you'll ... protect us.
DS Plod (seriously): We're the only one who can.
Why was I immediately transported back to the days of my childhood? Because DS Plod reminded me of that incorruptible straight-as-die classic detective from the Dragnet of my childhood.
Sgt Joe Friday, assuring the nervous lady that only the police can protect them and then hushing her doubts by saying tersely, "Just the facts, ma'am."
Well, Liam the Lunk wanted to be treated like an adult, so the screaming banshee, in a reflective moment, hands the game to him. He got himself into this mess, now he can get himself out. Just call her Pass-the-Buck-Bianca. Liam told two weeks ago that she was the reason he'd turned out the way he had - no structure, no discipline, no guidance, regular incarcerations in prison whilst the kids are left with their equally feckless grandmother and their put-upon and now-absent father.
No, none of this is Bianca's fault, because she's always the sodding victim.
Hit's a bleedin' melodrama ... innit?
The Magic Negro Meets The Village Idiot ... Innit?
Ava the Rava, Walford's Magic Negro, Christ-figure and Pope-in-Training receives a written threat, presumably from the West Side Story gang.
Teach R I P
Sounds like a death threat - sorry, deaf fret - to me. Anyway, shit like that needs to be reported to the "Feds," cos hit's like ... illegal, innit? But when you're the Magic Negro, you stand and fight, which explains why a well-educated Deputy Head on upwards of £60k per annum doesn't move off the council estate in which she lives (even though the council should have politely suggested that she no longer qualifies for subsidised housing), because she believes in standing and fighting the urban chav oppressors who took her poor, defenceless half-alien son into the bosom of their badness.
The Magic Negro is not only a sociologist and a priest, she's also a street fighter - and as she's joined the ranks of actresses who distinctly look like drag queens on the show, it's safe to assume she may be a street-fightin' man ...
(Gee, do you think Ava might do a turn at Glastonbury? Just think what that could do for EastEnders' flagging viewing figures, now below seven million).
Anyway, Little Cock is standing out amongst his peers, because he's taken the Mummy's Boy baton from Phil Mitchell. I mean, what twenty year-old lad would want to go on holiday with his mother? I ask you.
But Ava the Rava is destined for better things ... a romance with Billy Mitchell. How to bring the mighty down to earth.
Wait a moment, Billy would be well-advised to take a leaf from Phil's book, referencing the time Phil got involved with a well-educated professional in a position of trust. Watch Ava morph into Stella - the Mitchells have that sort of effect.
However, Billy gave the absolute most hysterical line of the entire episode tonight, when he was pandering to Ava the Rava in telling her how it couldn't be easy for poor pitiful single mums like Ava the Rava or Bianca - well, Bianca made herself a single mum and then made a pig's ear of raising her kids; and Ava's partner is off partying down someplace in the universe with a Knight of the Realm (well, Captain Picard is really Sir Patrick Stewart).
Yes, Billy, single mums do have it hard. Just ask Honey the next time you see her, sometime this year. Because Billy's ex-wife, a single mum, has to make do on her own because Billy, who's unemployed but somehow had enough money to fork out for a tea for Ava, is all up the arse about looking after his granddaughter (rather than his special needs daughter and his son) and her child. So, yeah, Billy, single mums do have it hard.
And what is it with Lorraine Newman and bonding scenes? Creepy Steve and Carol bonded over a dead child. Then Carol bonded with Masood over the fact that her grandson's mates mugged Masood's son - so now she's another one who's using Masood as a spur-of-the-moment unpaid babysitter. I wonder if Tiff will sing again for Ajay?
Billy and Ava bond over the fact that Billy was brought up in care. So they're poor little lambs who were rejected by their birth families ... baaa baaa baaas. Oh, how appropos.
Hit's Easter, innit?
Hit's a Bloomin' RomCom ... Innit?
Oh, the story of the non-contest to see who bakes the cake for the non-wedding? Competition between Ian and Jean entertwined with unfunny romantic comedy.
Why, oh why does everyone lumber Denise with shit like this which does her no favours and certainly does Ian Beale no favours.
Last episode, Ian turned sneaky and weasly again in an effort to outsmart Jean (no difficult task), but this episode, it's a full-on romcom, with all the ingredients (pun intended).
There's the female romantic interest (Denise) and the gormless, blundering male (Ian Beale).
Add the snarky side-kick (Kim), the ditzy lady who means well (Jean) and the dictating figure of authority to be pleased (Fat Barbie Sharon), and you've got yourself a distinct and pathetically unfunny piece of tripe.
Ian and Denise plan a lunch date in the Vic, except Sharon wants Ian's and Jean's cake samples in the cafe by one o'clock, which distracts Ian and panics Jean (cue shrieking and arm-waving). Ian and Jean inadvertantly meet up in the Minute Mart, which sells everything anyone could ever want, and they wrangle over icing sugar or something.
Then Ian pulls out his masterpiece, and appeals to the thing which bonds him and Jean (there's that word again). Their mental health situations. They've both had it rough, and making this cake would set Ian on track again. Give him a confidence booster. Ian admits he hates being an employee of his daughter (so, doofus, get a good lawyer and get the businesses back off her). Doing this, successfully, would make Lucy proud of him again ... after all, Jean likes doing things that make Saint Stacey Slater, murderer, proud of her.
So ... surprise surprise ... Jean deliberately makes a substandard cake so Ian wins the prize, and Ian rewards her by asking her to be his second-in-command in catering the entire event, which won't happen anyway, we all know that. But in all this excitement, he's forgotten his date with Denise.
As Kim says, Denise has been stood up by Ian Beale - scraping the barrel much? Well, yes, by Denise's standards, so ... cue bog-standard comedy scene of Denise pushing cake in Ian's face, which prompts a soliloquy by Ian to Denise, with Jean and Kim witnessing him admitting that he gets things wrong, that he messes up, that he's not "good with these things." Basically, admitting that he's an inferior man, who's little more than a dummie - just like all the other ineffectual men there are on the soap - Masood, who's chasing after various women and still gets left holding someone else's babies; Alfie, who's a doormat; Billy, who's the Village Idiot; Max, who can't be without a woman in his bed and another in a lovenest; Jack, who's a control freak; Ricky, who was gormless, and who's now passed that baton to Tamwar; Ray, who's a commitment-phobe and misogynist; and Ajay, the resident Peter Pan. Add to that list Joey, Tyler and Cock, who are unintelligible and Jay, who's still wet behind his ears and elsewhere.
This is Ian Beale, we're talking about now. Newman has finally achieved what Kirkwood wanted to do: de-ball Ian Beale.
If he and Denise get together, how long before she's having an affair?
The clock starts ... now.
Innit?
Isss Good Froiday ... INNIT?
As in The Long Good Friday - 'member vat film wot wuz abaht dem gangstas ...
'Ere ... vat woz inna East End'n all ... innit? And ... I reckon vat Bob 'Oskins geezer is wot vat Kane'll be one day ... innit? Well'ard 'e woz ... innit?
Bob 'Oskins, I mean.
Now vat Kane bro n 'is bruvvahs'n vat Liam Butcha ... well, vey Wellard is more well'ard van vey is ... 'n 'e's a dog. And dead ... like wivva fingah loik a gun loik wot vat Kane bro' did ... POW ...
Innit?
Er ... actually, no. In fact, it's ridiculous, the whole patois thing, especially when it's written by writers who wouldn't recognise their arses from their elbows regarding gang culture, who've watered it down and peeceed it up to such an extent that it actually becomes offensive - offensive to the viewers because it assumes an ignorance that's only assumed in the condescending minds of the luvvies from the leafy white suburbs who write this cack, it's offensive to the people it seeks to depict.
Yes, most gangs in the EastEnd are black or Asian in make-up, but this is a gang of ethnic idiots led by an even more idiotic Caucasian idiot portrayed by, arguably, one of the worst actors ever to be depicted in the programme. That's an insult to all Afro-Caribbean and Asian people because it portrays their underclass as so low in intellect that they have to be led by a white manchild whose intellect hasn't even reached Neanderthal level yet and who thinks it's terrifying to gurn. (Oscar Branning, take note: Keep gurning, and you're face will freeze like Kane's).
Maybe EastEnders wanted Kane to be scary, so they sought an actor with the most natural physical approximation to the mask from the film Scream, and they found Harry Rafferty. For good measure, the actor is just as intellectually stimulating as the character he portrays. He certainly talks the talk, if his Twitterfeed is anything to go by.
Life imitates art, even down to the knife.
Even worse, is the frightful grammar and syntax used by the show's new Magic Negro character, Ava the Rava - worse still, is the inveterately arrogant spammer who consistently tries to post a response to my criticism of the show's depiction of an educated professional who speaks like a guttersnipe.
The purpose of education is to uplift and enlighten. I am not talking about accents and received pronunciation. A person can come from the East End and speak with an East End accent and still speak using correct grammar and syntax. Barbara Windsor was a great example of how that was achieved. Any teacher or, indeed, any educated professional in a position of authority or trust who seeks to speak like the most ignorant and illiterate and uneducated member of society is neither relevant nor au courant. That person is a panderer and a fool, and the people he seeks to inspire know that.
Furthermore, any person who believes in such pop sociological claptrap is a bigger fool.
As far as that watered-down mother's meeting depiction of a gangabanga designed to scare adolescents away from such a culture, it probably made them laugh derisively, because this is what they see as the inspiration for Liam's "bruvvahs" (and it's probably where the EastEnders' writers got their inspiration):-
Innit?
Actually, this was a very meh episode, with bits of even more mediocrities than normal, apart from yet another random pairing (which Lorraine Newman seems to love, especially of the rainbow variety) surrounding what was supposed to be a dramatic moment of high tension - Liam's stabbing ...
Wait a moment, didn't that happen to Jay a few years ago?
Liam wiv de Feds'n in da House ... Innit?
Liam has a head shaped like a raindrop with a flat back and a pointed top. He can't help it, but it does aid in the general air of gormlessness surrounding the character, who also looks to be tremendously embarrassed to be a 17 year-old portraying a 14 year-old.
Ne'mind, Liam ... Mary Pickford was playing 11 year-old girls when she was twenty-seven ...
And the actor who plays Little Cock, your avenging angel and Magic Negro-in-Training, is actually 26 and has to hang out with the younger adolescents and act as if he finds sixteen-going-on-eleven Abi interesting.
Still, Liam has to look at Kane's face and that's enough to scare anyone into submission.
The "Feds" have Liam and his newly-adopted bruvs, and Mother of the Year Bianca has to sit in on the police interview with her son, who isn't talking ... innit? Because he doesn't want to grass his bruvs, innit? And that means Mommie Dearest plays her usual party piece - shouting the odds about Liam's innocence to the police (when Liam's supposed to be the one who's talking) until she gets on everyone's nerves so much that even Liam the Lunk asks her to leave.
Poor Bianca ... so misunderstood. Nothing is ever her fault, especially as people like Carol and Ava the Rava, Magic Negro Class A, keep telling her she's a wonderful mum. Well, maybe she is, by Carol's standards, which - as a mother - are woefully low. I mean, this is the mother who cut off all contact with her eldest son because he traced his birth father and found out that Carol kicked him out of her life on the day of Robbie's second birthday and her youngest daughter because she chose to give her baby up for adoption because she wanted the child to have a better life than she could give her. But Ava doesn't know jack shite about Bianca's parenting skills.
She doesn't know how she egged her children on to be rude to neighbours, how her anger got the better of her through a lie told by Whitney and how she assaulted a man and injured him badly. She doesn't know how she summarily exiled her husband from his home and forbade him unlimited access to his children. And next week, when Liam wants to go live with Ricky, Bianca talks him out of it.
Of course, we all know why Ava the Rava, Magic Negro Class A's, man is out of Little Cock's life. He's too busy experiencing the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, boldly going where no man has gone before ... or no Klingon ...
So now we know Ava the Rava's secret. She lost her heart to a starship trooper, and Little Cock is half-Klingon ...
Maybe she could explain this to Billy Mitchell ...
Because silly Liam wants to protect his bruvvahs, who seem to be up to all sorts - robberies, assaults, you name it, all of the little wankspittles go free; and Liam runs right off to find his
Just an observation but: does anyone recall that Liam was selling Derek's knock-off gear and for whom? His very own Uncle Michael Moon. (Please don't forget that Michael is the Butcher kids' uncle and that Scarlett is their cousin, a fact which has been conveniently forgotten by the writers). Michael had him selling knock-offs, and he would have had him getting rid of the dodgy cash too, if he could have done so.
Anyway, Liam runs off, Bianca follows, and there's a fight ... where? In a flaming kids' playground on the Byron Estate. That's right. They fight amongst the swings and the sliding board and the roundabout ... The Magic Roundabout ... innit?
Just like the West Side story gang, the Jets. They start out on a playground ...
... and it all escalates into a brilliant ballet routine. Shit, Carol and Bianca spoil it all, and the iconic shriek of
RICK-AAAAAAAAYYYYYY
has been replaced with
LIAMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!
Instead of a brilliant series of Kane's arabesques, Liam's plies and Little Chris's pirouettes, Liam gets
As Jamie Foreman said, very easy to write tripe, very difficult to perform it.
Liam's epiphany comes when the investigating CID bloke
Cheesiest lines of the night:-
Carol (tentatively): Then ... you'll ... protect us.
DS Plod (seriously): We're the only one who can.
Why was I immediately transported back to the days of my childhood? Because DS Plod reminded me of that incorruptible straight-as-die classic detective from the Dragnet of my childhood.
Sgt Joe Friday, assuring the nervous lady that only the police can protect them and then hushing her doubts by saying tersely, "Just the facts, ma'am."
Well, Liam the Lunk wanted to be treated like an adult, so the screaming banshee, in a reflective moment, hands the game to him. He got himself into this mess, now he can get himself out. Just call her Pass-the-Buck-Bianca. Liam told two weeks ago that she was the reason he'd turned out the way he had - no structure, no discipline, no guidance, regular incarcerations in prison whilst the kids are left with their equally feckless grandmother and their put-upon and now-absent father.
No, none of this is Bianca's fault, because she's always the sodding victim.
Hit's a bleedin' melodrama ... innit?
The Magic Negro Meets The Village Idiot ... Innit?
Ava the Rava, Walford's Magic Negro, Christ-figure and Pope-in-Training receives a written threat, presumably from the West Side Story gang.
Teach R I P
Sounds like a death threat - sorry, deaf fret - to me. Anyway, shit like that needs to be reported to the "Feds," cos hit's like ... illegal, innit? But when you're the Magic Negro, you stand and fight, which explains why a well-educated Deputy Head on upwards of £60k per annum doesn't move off the council estate in which she lives (even though the council should have politely suggested that she no longer qualifies for subsidised housing), because she believes in standing and fighting the urban chav oppressors who took her poor, defenceless half-alien son into the bosom of their badness.
The Magic Negro is not only a sociologist and a priest, she's also a street fighter - and as she's joined the ranks of actresses who distinctly look like drag queens on the show, it's safe to assume she may be a street-fightin' man ...
(Gee, do you think Ava might do a turn at Glastonbury? Just think what that could do for EastEnders' flagging viewing figures, now below seven million).
Anyway, Little Cock is standing out amongst his peers, because he's taken the Mummy's Boy baton from Phil Mitchell. I mean, what twenty year-old lad would want to go on holiday with his mother? I ask you.
But Ava the Rava is destined for better things ... a romance with Billy Mitchell. How to bring the mighty down to earth.
Wait a moment, Billy would be well-advised to take a leaf from Phil's book, referencing the time Phil got involved with a well-educated professional in a position of trust. Watch Ava morph into Stella - the Mitchells have that sort of effect.
However, Billy gave the absolute most hysterical line of the entire episode tonight, when he was pandering to Ava the Rava in telling her how it couldn't be easy for poor pitiful single mums like Ava the Rava or Bianca - well, Bianca made herself a single mum and then made a pig's ear of raising her kids; and Ava's partner is off partying down someplace in the universe with a Knight of the Realm (well, Captain Picard is really Sir Patrick Stewart).
Yes, Billy, single mums do have it hard. Just ask Honey the next time you see her, sometime this year. Because Billy's ex-wife, a single mum, has to make do on her own because Billy, who's unemployed but somehow had enough money to fork out for a tea for Ava, is all up the arse about looking after his granddaughter (rather than his special needs daughter and his son) and her child. So, yeah, Billy, single mums do have it hard.
And what is it with Lorraine Newman and bonding scenes? Creepy Steve and Carol bonded over a dead child. Then Carol bonded with Masood over the fact that her grandson's mates mugged Masood's son - so now she's another one who's using Masood as a spur-of-the-moment unpaid babysitter. I wonder if Tiff will sing again for Ajay?
Billy and Ava bond over the fact that Billy was brought up in care. So they're poor little lambs who were rejected by their birth families ... baaa baaa baaas. Oh, how appropos.
Hit's Easter, innit?
Hit's a Bloomin' RomCom ... Innit?
Oh, the story of the non-contest to see who bakes the cake for the non-wedding? Competition between Ian and Jean entertwined with unfunny romantic comedy.
Why, oh why does everyone lumber Denise with shit like this which does her no favours and certainly does Ian Beale no favours.
Last episode, Ian turned sneaky and weasly again in an effort to outsmart Jean (no difficult task), but this episode, it's a full-on romcom, with all the ingredients (pun intended).
There's the female romantic interest (Denise) and the gormless, blundering male (Ian Beale).
Add the snarky side-kick (Kim), the ditzy lady who means well (Jean) and the dictating figure of authority to be pleased (
Ian and Denise plan a lunch date in the Vic, except Sharon wants Ian's and Jean's cake samples in the cafe by one o'clock, which distracts Ian and panics Jean (cue shrieking and arm-waving). Ian and Jean inadvertantly meet up in the Minute Mart, which sells everything anyone could ever want, and they wrangle over icing sugar or something.
Then Ian pulls out his masterpiece, and appeals to the thing which bonds him and Jean (there's that word again). Their mental health situations. They've both had it rough, and making this cake would set Ian on track again. Give him a confidence booster. Ian admits he hates being an employee of his daughter (so, doofus, get a good lawyer and get the businesses back off her). Doing this, successfully, would make Lucy proud of him again ... after all, Jean likes doing things that make Saint Stacey Slater, murderer, proud of her.
So ... surprise surprise ... Jean deliberately makes a substandard cake so Ian wins the prize, and Ian rewards her by asking her to be his second-in-command in catering the entire event, which won't happen anyway, we all know that. But in all this excitement, he's forgotten his date with Denise.
As Kim says, Denise has been stood up by Ian Beale - scraping the barrel much? Well, yes, by Denise's standards, so ... cue bog-standard comedy scene of Denise pushing cake in Ian's face, which prompts a soliloquy by Ian to Denise, with Jean and Kim witnessing him admitting that he gets things wrong, that he messes up, that he's not "good with these things." Basically, admitting that he's an inferior man, who's little more than a dummie - just like all the other ineffectual men there are on the soap - Masood, who's chasing after various women and still gets left holding someone else's babies; Alfie, who's a doormat; Billy, who's the Village Idiot; Max, who can't be without a woman in his bed and another in a lovenest; Jack, who's a control freak; Ricky, who was gormless, and who's now passed that baton to Tamwar; Ray, who's a commitment-phobe and misogynist; and Ajay, the resident Peter Pan. Add to that list Joey, Tyler and Cock, who are unintelligible and Jay, who's still wet behind his ears and elsewhere.
This is Ian Beale, we're talking about now. Newman has finally achieved what Kirkwood wanted to do: de-ball Ian Beale.
If he and Denise get together, how long before she's having an affair?
The clock starts ... now.
Innit?
First time visitor but shall return. Not sure how it is you have so few comments. This analysis of the episode I just watched is really quite good.
ReplyDeleteBetter than the show.