The Return of the Native - Review:- 07.02.2014

Once upon a time back before 2000, way before 2006, there was a show called EastEnders. Phil wasn't an alcoholic. Grant had just got divorced from and was mourning the end of his marriage to Sharon, Ricky and Bianca were just falling in love, and David didn't give two cahoots about Carol, his various kids or marriage. We take you back to that place and time, just so the Millennials, who aggressively think that fictitious history can be changed more readily than the real stuff in order to suit particular storyline, can see that history is history, and that EastEnders used to be a programme modelled more on reality and actual real life than it is at present. Below are presented an entire week of episodes from 1995 (when the show aired three times a week) and you'll see how David and Carol were never the silly love story they are now and that they were not, as depicted now, iconic.

For the record, they aren't this generation's Frank and Pat. If any couple is the equivalent of Frank and Pat, I would say that would be Phil and Sharon.

Love Me or Leave Me.

I actually thought this episode was the weakest offering of the week, and it was obvious at the end, why it was.

Yes, we got Carol's first chemo session, which was meant to be moving, but ended up being a lot of retconned tosh, to be brutally honest. I've heard that the show has been working with the MacMillan Organisation in trying to effect a realistic depiction of cancer and the effects of chemotherapy on a patient. I've also heard that the viewers will "see" Carol lose her hair.

Last night, we saw that she opted for the cold caps treatment with her chemo. Basically, that entails tightly strapping an ice-filled cap to the patient's head to wear during chemo, in the belief that tightening the pores of the hair follicles either prevents or reduces hair loss. It's not guaranteed, but it does work for some patients.

But even if it does work for Carol, and she didn't lose the hair on her head, she'd lose every bit of the rest of her bodily hair - her pubes, the hairs on her legs and arms, her underarm hair, the tiny fuzzlike hair on her face, her eyelashes and her eyebrows. Chemo doesn't make you pretty.

Yet all her chemo session, after a vast preparation of magazines, Liam's MP3 player, bottles of water etc as though Carol was going on a long and perilous journey, ended up entailing was an emotional retcon filled with memories by David - so saccharin that we didn't need chemo to make us puke.

This was all for the EastEnders 2.0 brigade, those who - even though they castigated him and Newman - sang from the hymnbook of Bryan Kirkwood that David and Carol were the star-crossed lovers of Walford. David and Carol were never Romeo and Juliet, and they aren't even Tony and Maria.

It was bad enough in the last days of Newman's reign that we had to hear a convoluted tale of David giving Carol a cassette tape for her birthday in 1977 and then replacing it for her birthday in 2013, when the truth was that by 1977, Carol had Bianca, and David was long gone, thinking Bianca was an aborted foetus.

Last night we had to listen to David wax sentimentally lyrical about getting drunk at some kid's fourteenth birthday party and an equally fourteen year-old Carol cleaned him up and took care of him by allowing him to lie with his head in her lap.

Now kids get increasingly more socially sophisticated as the decades roll by, but this is the third booze-infested storyline we've heard about David's and Carol's fourteenth year - and here I am blaming the Cross family for Lauren's problem. It seems to me that Carol did a fair amount of underaged drinking, herself - partying at booze fests, then getting drunk off her old man's booze. That, a sexually prolific lifestyle with a variety of sexual partners can contribute to problems that can later manifest themselves in health issues.

Get the drift?

For someone for whom EastEnders is so important, it dismays me to see DTC pandering to the EastEnders 2.0 Millennium bunch by promulgating the myth of Carol and David as the star-crossed lovers.

I actually thought his renting the flat across the street, for a fleeting moment, was really meant to be a shag-pad for him and Nikki until that butt-clenchingly embarrassing moment of Carol, fresh from chemotherapy and pumped full of bulk-enhancing steroids, sprinted across the Square in her pyjamas and into the pub in a desperate effort to propose to David.

More sickening were the puke-inducing reactions of the fanbois and girls on the fora ... oh David's face ... oh there were tears in his eyes ... oh Carol was sweet.

Not, it wasn't. It was pandering. It was the decisive de-balling of David Wicks - a character, as you can see from the above episodes, who had edge and savoir-faire. You can also note his taste in women does not run to Carol, who apparently sleeps in a fleece and who has chicken-skin.

I hope we haven't seen the last of Nikki. David and Nikki have spades more chemistry than the plan to settle David down and make him a grandad, complete with slippers, a cardigan and cups of tea.

Let's not forget that the whole of David's business was based on an illegal act, and that Janine will want revenge. Let's also not forget that neither David nor Carol can lay claim to Pat Butcher's house. 

That belongs to Janine.

Daddy's Home.

Mas is back and repentant, so it seems. And MiniZainab Shabnam has stepped into the organisational role of family commandant. Strange, how Shabnam can combine wearing a hijab and a minidress at the same time, but there you go. Not only has she sweet-talked the Post Office into giving Masood his job back on a probationary basis, she's organised payment of all the Final Demands of the utilities' bills to be paid.

She's even ironed Mas's shirt and pressed his suit. He still looks hang-dog and self-pitying, but within this storyline we get another glaring continuity error.

Cast your mind back to 2012 and Sharon introducing herself to Janine, when everyone who'd watched the show prior to 2006 and definitely prior to 2000, recognised that Sharon knew Janine when she was a child. She dated Janine's step=brother and babysat her. She shared screentime with Janine Mach III (Charlie Brooks) in 2000.

The 2.0 bunch wouldn't have twigged that and wouldn't have cared. So, last night when Shabnam, laden with enough food to feed the multitudes, entered the Vic and asked Mick (who hasn't been there more than a few weeks, himself) to point out Bianca to her. She then introduced herself to Bianca.

Nothing special about that, except that Shabnam was hanging out in Walford in 2008, during the War of Zainab's Wall, waged between Zainab and none other than Bianca, herself.

It also seems that Mas has done an off-screen apology act to all and sundry, who've forgiven him his moment of weakness - all except Tamwar the Twit, who's brought around by some brief but sage words from Mick and a talking to by Fatboy.

And now the two are friends again.

The Real Reason for This Episode.

The long-awaited return of the REAL star of Millennium EastEnders 2.0. The One-Trick Pony of television drama ... You. Know. Who.

Mediocre episode, but you couldn't have anyone steal our girl's thunder, could you? I mean, it's not as if it's supposed to be an ensemble show ...