OK, peeps, this blog is back ... and with a vengeance. Boy, there's nothing to make one appreciate freedom of speech and thought more than having to tread on eggshells at the risk of offending sensitive souls who see themselves as the beacon of intellectual thought and open-mindedness, but who really come across as mean-spirited, patronising, intolerant, petty, spoiled children when something doesn't go their way.
That could be a divergence of opinion, and it could even be the show taking a course different from something they've painstakingly laid out in great detail as a product of their imagination.
Anyway, in case one of them happens to read (for comprehension) this blog and takes umbrage at one of the words in the title, the word is "niggle", sunshine. It means "to annoy" - you know, the way your presumption annoys a lot more people than are afraid to say - which brings me to the first of my observations.
1. Denise and All the Shit That Goes with Her. I've never been a fan of this character, and I'm at a loss to see that she's really nothing more than an adequate soap actress. Nothing more, nothing less. Linda Henry, Lindsey Coulsen - now those two are strong actresses, but Parish is nothing special.
Let it be acknowledged that sometimes, a character reaches the end of an arc. Sometimes the actor recognises this and leaves - like Nitin Ganatra, most recently. Sometimes, they don't, and in that case, the ax must fall. Parish is like a lot of other actors on the show at the moment - they've been there a long time, the various producers struggle with storylines for them, so they are content to hang around in the background, taking the licence-fee payers' money at a handsome wage, and do, literally, nothing. until the odd crumb is thrown from the producer's table. Most of these people, like Parish, have children and need the inflated wage from EastEnders to pay for au pairs and nannies and school fees; others, like Jamie Borthwick, just figure they're onto a good thing that will keep them in flash cars and special entries into exclusive nightclubs.
These characters have their fans, enough to want to see their favourites front and centre of the show. One particularly persnickety passive agressive male viewer recently stated decisively that Denise should have been front and centre of the show ages ago. As many say the same about Borthwick's Jay.
Neither should or could ever be.
Jay's another story for another day, but Denise will never be the focal point of EastEnders. She simply won't for the simple reason that she is an ethnic character.
I know EastEnders prides itself on its "diversity," but that diversity is insulting when most of the token ethnics become insulting racial stereotypes - or even nationalistic stereotypes.
Who, amongst the long-term viewers, remembers the Irish Beales from the 1990s? Pauline's long-lost Irish relatives, who lived in a mud-laden village, lay drunk in the streets, surrounded by pig and, accordingly, were rough-hewn, pigshit thick and pigshit ignorant.
The Irish Embassy rightly complained, but EastEnders didn't learn its lesson. Once, years ago, an Afro-Caribbean commentator on an EastEnders forum pointed out that not only were the ethnic characters depicted on the show token characters, their depiction was stereotypical.
Recent insulting racial stereotypes on the show have included Dexter and, currently, Kim Fox-Hubbard. Tamwar was the typical Asian geek, and lovely jubbly Patrick is the quintessential fun-loving laid-back "yeah mon" West Indian. In real life, Patrick would reminisce about smoking ganja, but the BBC can't be seen to promote that, so he likes his rum instead.
At the same time that Denise's race means she won't be front and centre of the show, this aspect is probably also saving Diane Parish's arse from being served with a P45, which is a shame because her character arc ended in 2010, when Lucas left for prison and her daughters were given the boot by Bryan Kirkwood.
Ah, now someone is going to raise the spectre of Shabnam, another ethnic character who was the focal point last year of a powerful story about stillbirth. This is true, but Rakhee Thakrar left the show in the wake of this storyline. Where would her character be now and what would she be doing if Shabnam were still in the show? My estimation is not much. Just take a look at Davood Ghademi, who plays Kush. After being handed his arse and told off for being a sexual predator by Tamwar (of all people), he's been relegated to hanging about the market, being ogled by his horny mother, slut-shaming Roxy and literally telling his odious younger brother that he's entitled to sent naked pictures of himself to the girl with whom he wants to pop his cherry. Nothing more or less.
Denise, like Shabnam, worked well as a character with a finite storyline. First, she had the storyline of her abusive marriage to Owen, and that ended. Then she married Kevin and spent two years of her life promoting the interests of her two worthless kids over the interests of his own two worthless kids. Then Kevin died, and soon she was married to Lucas, a God-spouting serial killer.
After Lucas's departure, the show struggled with finding something for her to do for a good few years. Mostly, she hung around The Minute Mart with a face like a smacked bum and looking as if Walford stank and she couldn't bear it.
She kissed her sister's boyfriend, had a fling with a much younger man to satisfy her urges and dropped him at the earliest convenience ... then someone thought of the bright idea of pairing her up with Ian Beale.
That's it. Take a spent character and link her to one of the original and most important Walford family and give her relevance.
It tanked. In the midst of all of this and Lucy's subsequent murder, Ian treated Denise like "the help," and the Beales came across as being as vaguely racist as the oven gloves Ian gave Denise for a Christmas present. (Actually, they weren't racist; it was Ian's cack-handed way of honouring Denise's Guyanan heritage, and in the end, it only exhibited her ignorance). What was racist was Ian nudging her from the "family" picture meant to publicise Beales', choosing Jane to represent the mother figure in the Beale dynamic, and also bumping Denise, Patrick and Libby from accompanying the family to Lucy's funeral.
However, so stumped were TPTB (headed this time by DTC) that they couldn't even finish a storyline begun for the character. The potential storyline about Denise physically abusing a disabled Patrick was dropped like the proverbial hot potato.
Now, it seems Sean O'Connor has decided to make the character relevant by picking up a little bombshell left by Treadwell-Collins and running with it. DTC had a drunken, self-pitying Denise bed an equally drunken Phil Mitchell. Drunken, unprotected sex between a grandfather and a woman approaching menopause. A recipe for disaster.
There were other little bits Treadwell-Collins left with which O'Connor might have played - a budding relationship with Kush, another much younger man, who was also the son of her one-time best friend Carmel, who was, herself, going through a midlife crisis. Endeavouring to forge a romantic relationship in the face of that adversity would have been provocative enough.
That storyline was dropped.
And so it was decided by O'Connor to run with the fact that Denise is pregnant by an unknowing Phil Mitchell, a man she disdains and hates. It's also cognitive dissonance that such a secular non-believer like Denise would choose to be Pro-Life and abhor the act of abortion to the point that she viciously bullied her daughter who accidentally got pregnant - there are no accidents these days, and that was evidence that the priggish Libby has no common sense or foresight - by a man whom she didn't love and chose to abort the child, more because it would be an inconvenience to Libby's studies and ambitions than anything else.
Now Denise is ensconced in getting her GCSE in English Literature, spurred on by the hot feelings in her loin for a handsome Scandinavian tutor than any real passion for literature, itself; although the way the great unwashed of Walford are treating her efforts to re-write A Christmas Carol without ever having read the book, makes her ego swell disproportionately against the size of her belly, which holds the embryonic blessed Mitchell Christ child.
So really, the only way Sean O'Connor could see that this character could be made relevant is by linking her indelibly to yet another established Walford family, the Mitchells. Ne'mind that Phil has a wife. And whether or not she gives this child up for adoption (she probably won't) is moot. If she does, she'll suddenly get broody and get Phil onside to "rescue" their "baybee"; and if that doesn't happen, there'll be yet another Mitchell secret son lurking about by the time Phil's in his dotage.
If that's the only thing that can establish Denise's relevance, then maybe it's time the character were "rested."
2. Over the Rainbow: A Lesson in Semantics and Euphemism. Some sensitive soul, who, ironically, happens to be gay, objected to my use of the term "rainbow" in describing the holy Mitchell Christ child.
He inferred that this was racist.
It's not, and if you're gay and don't understand the meaning of the descriptive adjective "rainbow" in its connotation of diversity, then you're a disgrace to the LGBT community, and you're ignorant.
What do you think the political Rainbow Coalition denotes? It's not a gaggle of white supremacists. Instead, it's a diverse coalition of genders, sexual orientations and racists, joiined together to achieve a positive purpose. Why do you think the LGBT movement has adopted a rainbow flag. Are you familiar with this image?
If you aren't, then get familiar with it. It has all the colours of the rainbow. Back in the day - 2008, to be precise - Santer's PR department described the returning Jackson-Butcher family as a "rainbow family." Nothing derogatory in that.
The term "rainbow" denotes diversity. It's known in the US, but it's also known here.
Learn it. And stop the fuck trying to tag me as a racist because that is something I am not. I will say, however, something that you are - intolerant, jealous and petty. Grow up.
3. Teenaged Angst Not. I understand why the show hired two adults and an older teen who looks like a middle-aged spinster ...
... to portray a fifteen year-old and two sixteen year-olds. The show obviously wanted to promote a storyline depicting how an emotionally ill-prepared and unready teen allows herself to be manipulated into having sex with a Turdheaded nincompoop anyone can peg as being horny. This is supposed to be educational.
It's not.
It doesn't help that the youngest of the trio is played by a woman who'll turn twenty this year and who looks twenty-five. The writing for Louise is all over the place. Most of the time, the writers give Louise the sort of lines the likes of Lauren Branning would get if she had another brain cell, but Lauren is supposed to be twenty-one or thereabouts, and Louise is fifteen. Still, you can forgive the hacks this, because they are distracted by the fact that, even scrubbed of make-up and clad in a gymslip, Tilly Keeper looks like a hooker on the make looking for an old man with a schoolgirl fetish.
As for the girl who plays Rebecca, she's simply bad. This is arguably the worst case of chin-acting I've ever seen in my life. In fact, it's the only case of chin-acting I've seen.
Chin-acting, you say?
Yes, the actress playing Rebecca delivers all her lines with her head thrown back, tossing her hair and jutting her chin forward. Most of the time, it comes across as insufferably smug. She even manages to do this when she's uncertain of herself or upset, and it does nothing toward making the character sympathetic. Rather, it makes her somewhat arrogant, even when she's upset and her nose gets bloody red. All of her lines are given with an intensity that is neither justified nor needed. I gather the actress has never been to drama school. Someone's told her this is the way to deliver a line. Yes, deliver your lines as though you believe in them and what the character promotes, but not as if you're trying to drive the character's ethos through us with a mack truck.
At the other end of the scale, we have the dolt who plays Shakil, speaking as if he's got a mouthful of shit.
None of the three are even remotely likable. On the odd occasion that Louise remembers her character is fifteen years old, she sounds exactly like a twentysomething woman trying to be what some dimwit writer thinks a fifteen year-old would sound like. And I'm sorry, but the thought that a fifteen year-old - someone recently turned fifteen - would be advising her sixteen year-old mate actively planning to lose her virginity that evening (oh, my god, that these things are just planned goes to show how no one has either the perspicacity nor the ingenuity to be spontaneous, no wonder the act was less than stupid Rebecca anticipated), that she must remember "to shave because he'll really like that."
You what?
Are these people two prostitutes about to con a john? Not only that, but I had a cyber finger waved in my face by a petulant drama queen who presumed to lecture me that most teens these days get their sexual techniques from studying porn videos online. Not only is that sorta kinda illegal in the first instance, it also speaks volumes of the prig who presumed to lecture me about this.
The entire storyline about horny Shakil and desperate and plain Rebecca sucks shit. The actors are inadequate, the characterisation is pejorative, and these are the worst set of adolescent characters ever to set foot in Walford.
Louise and Rebecca both should be dispatched immediately to their respective mothers, and Shakil should slope off, again, with his putrid mother.
Freedom of speech is wonderful. I feel much better now.
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