Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Snorfest - Review:- Tuesday 11.04.2017

+umming up the action? Michelle. Denise and Kush sucking each other's faces. Michelle. Rebecca busking. The bullies. Michelle. Denise and Kush sucking each other's faces. Rebecca quivering. Jay and Ben cadging tea and sympathy off Kathy. Michelle. Denise and Kush sucking each other's faces. Rebecca and the 25 year-old bullies. Michelle (with Ben and Jay). Denise and Kush sucking each other's faces. Rebecca getting bullied and crying. Michelle drinking. Denise and Kush sucking each other's faces. Bits of Lauren, Peter, Max, Carmel, Vincent and Kim.

That's EastEnders these days.

The Adventures of Sniggle and Snaggle. This is a never-ending storyline,which should have been done and dusted ages ago. It's really a BOGOF storyline, because at the dismal price of one bullying storyline, you get yet another, more subtle, one. 

Rebecca is the consistent object of Sniggle and Snaggle's bullying - the more I look at these two, the more their real ages (25 and 23) show; Snaggle has crow's feet, and Sniggle's voice sounds like a grown woman who's trying to wean herself off a 40-a-day habit -whilst Louise is their more subtle object. Basically, they tell Louise to jump, and she asks how high should she. They call for her to come, and she follows. I imagine she pays for their drinks and the junk food they consume. Whenever they're taunting Rebecca, Louise is always standing nearby, silently, looking as if she wants the ground to open up and swallow her, but not daring - out of fear, herself - to say a word.

There are several aspects of this never ending yawnfest of a saga, which should really be sub-titled "Fifty Ways to Bully Rebecca Fowler, or How Many Times Must We Suffer Watching Her Cry?"- which I don't understand.

First, Louise is a Mitchell. Mitchells are the biggest bullies in the world, themselves, but the Mitchell women have an ingrained sense of compassion and an inherent sense of duty toward defending someone deemed to be an underdog. Suffice it to say that the likes of Peggy, Ronnie or Roxy would have stood by and watched Rebecca tormented without saying or doing anything. 

Secondly, Rebecca is surrounded by supportive adults who could make mincemeat out of these little pieces of shit. Kathy, if she'd only tell her, would make short shrift out of both of them with the gob she used to have; or certainly, Stacey. These people came to the Fowler house, into Rebecca's room and wantonly destroyed her property. She should have screamed for Stacey, who would have certainly handed them their arses. As for them calling Stacey a chav? Really, idiots?

The strangest moment occurred in the café where Rebecca's and Kathy's feet got tangled up and Kathy tripped, spilling soup all over Sniggle's hoodie. Both girls seemed suddenly alarmed at what happened and quick to leave the café. Rather than standing around crying all the time, Rebecca should just bitch slap them.

I know, also, that Martin is now overly protective of Rebecca in view of everything that's happened, so he's bound to take a dim view of Shakil, who needs to dig deep and find enough balls to tell Martin exactly what's going on with these girls and Rebecca.

This is getting singularly boring and seemingly never-ending,this awful teen bullying storyline. It's appalling to see how off-kilter EastEnders is with its balance structure these days. Storylines are either circular and too long (like this one,which has degenerated into different scenes of Rebecca getting bullied and crying) or abruptly too short, for no reason at all.

And one piece of advice for SOC & co ... Please don't let Jasmine Armfield sing anymore. Right now, I'm watching a girl on Later with Jools Holland, sing and play an acoustic guitar, who is a real singer, and makes Armfield's much-touted talent look, quite simply, plebeian.

Continuous Life Support. Tonight's episode was more than proof positive that Denise's and Kush's relationship is about sex first, sex second and sex third. Never before have I seen a couple eat each other's faces continuously the way these two did. It's not as if they're in the first throes of young love either. Denise is 48 years old. Kush never sucked tongues this much with either Shabnam, or in either of his one night stands with Stacey and Nancy. I'll bet he never tongued his dead wife as much.

It's continuous sex hour after hour, which is unreal in itself because no man on earth would have that much sexual sustainability.

Sex is nice. It's bloody brilliant when you truly love someone, but after the afterglow, you have to have something in common, and it would seem the only thing Kush and Denise actually have in common is Carmel.

I'd like to know what Donna owes Kush that he expects her to watch his stall (her stall, being his competition, by the way) all day whilst he fucks Denise, goes for a run, has a shower, fucks Denise, has a drink in the pub and fucks Denise some more.

He is his mother's son, however, and whilst he seems to have gotten off playing the naughty boy by fucking her best friend, he's more concerned about the sight of Carmel having a giggle with Max over coffee in the café and Max's indulgently fond little gaze in her direction. Max is a good dissimulator, but that situation is enough to make Kush more than a bit concerned and a tad jealous that he's not 100 per cent top notch in his mother's thoughts. I honestly think Kush is that immature that part of the attraction to Denise may have been to thumb his nose in the direction of his mother as an act of rebellion.

Now he's concerned for a variety of reasons, and Denise is more than a little put out, enough to remind him in no uncertain terms that Carmel is a big girl, who can look out for herself, although Max does have a bit of a reputation. If Denise weren't so much up herself and concerned with boning Kush, she'd have realised that a woman like Carmel would never in a million years attract Max. Max likes younger women.

Watching Max charm Kush so easily - inviting him and Denise to join Max and Carmel for drinks, even buying a round for him and Denise. That was enough for Max to believe Max wasn't as bad as people made out, and enough for the shallow Denise to believe he'd changed.

You have to wonder, when the novelty of 24-hour sex wears off, what is there left in the relationship between these two? Once again, it's evidence of O'Connor's overkill. It's enough that we've seen Denise in almost every episode recently, with a plethora of storylines; but he reinforces the fact that she's involved with Kush now, simply by having them suck and fuck and suck and fuck ad nauseam.

WTF with the Carters? The most amazing piece of backtracking cover-your-arse inanity came from Daran Little on Twitter when someone wondered how the Vic could carry on as a licenced bar when there was no licencee on the premises. One would have thought that licencee would have been Sharon, who showed up tonight to do a shift.

But no.... according to Little, Johnny Carter has a licence. If that's so, why is he the hapless gofer in the newly established realm of Queen Whitney? If that's so, why was Lee, who - it was revealed - did, indeed, have a personal licence, called to man the Vic during the evening where Mick and Shirley were locked in the cells? Johnny was there, and if Johnny had a licence, there was no need for Lee.

Just lies. EastEnders is beginning to rival the Trump Administration.

The Carter remnants, all except Tina, are gratuitously stupid. The dog is ill. Rather than take her to the vet - because, according to Brain of Britain and Soulless Personalityphobe Johnny, that would be far too expensive. Instead,it seems that a top-of-the-range designer dog crate is just what the doctor didn't order, and Whitney's used Vincent's credit card for just that.

I gather her needless trip to The Albert for change was to try to put Vincent's credit card back into his wallet, conveniently on display on the top of the bar- something you don't do in normal life, but Vincent is distracted by Kim,who's brought poor Pearl in dressed like an Easter chicken. Once again, as ever with Kim, Pearl looks terrified. So Whitney is left with the credit card, and we all know what that means.

Now, she's left with the credit card, and that begs the question: Will she use it again? You'd think Vincent would be savvy enough, once he realises that the card is well and truly lost and just might be appropriated by someone unscrupulous enough to go shopping online, to ring his bank immediately, declare the card stolen. void it and wait for a new one. But since everyone in the show now possesses more than a modicum of stupidity (bar Max), you sorta kinda think that this isn't going to happen. Let's see, just what, exactly, could Whitney use that card to purchase? I think the Cokers have a website. Would it not be considered too outré for Whitney to pay for a slap-up funeral for Silvie, courtesy of Vincent?

The Carters' perpetual money woes is another continuous, circular storyline on the show. Financial "feed-mah-kids" sagas are all too frequent and utterly boring, but it's kind of ironic, after all these years, that the Vic now seems to be coming a cropper under the Carters. You really have to wonder if Danny Dyer is planning on quitting once his contract is up in the autumn. The one thing I definitely think is wrong with this situation is planting Whitney front and centre.

She's hit the nadir for unpopularity, in my opinion, although she's never been a favourite of mine. The hint of an incipient affair with Mick was cut off - ostensibly by Dyer's sudden break - and who knows if that thread will ever surface again? She needs to be firmly put in her place by Linda, who can't return too soon, and Ted Reilly is one actor whose services should be deemed surplus to requirements.

Johnny has a licence ... my arse! A licence to bore.

Meee-chelle. Here we go again. I get the impression that one of Sean O'Connor's visions is for us all to watch NuMichelle veer from crisis to crisis, all of her own making. This time, knocked back in yet another job search - either she's over-qualified for shelf-stocking or her seriously creepy references follow her around or both, the gist is, she's unemployable - we are being asked to watch her slowly descend into the ubiquitous Walford disease of alcoholism, taking the 20 quid Sharon loaned her for her phone and treating herself to a bottle of wine at the Vic in order to drown her sorrows.

Here's another example of how EastEnders just doesn't get it: All through the Michelle portion of this episode, we heard her talking about finally visiting Pauline's grave. NuMichelle or not, a scene like that would have been powerful - Michelle, finally, acknowledging Pauline's death and confronting her mother's influence in her own life. 

Instead of getting this by the graveside - and she'd never ever visited Arthur's and Pauline's grave - we got that soliloquy over the ratty photo in the deserted launderette, the one which led to Michelle's epiphany about Walford being "the fabric of her life". The Michelle-Pauline relationship was just as fraught, in its time, as the Ben-Phil dynamic of current times, but one estimation TPTB got wrong. Rebecca assessed that Pauline would have understood why Michelle had done what she did with an underaged child. Pauline would never have stopped loving Michelle - she was her child, after all - but she would simply not have accepted or understood why her middle-aged daughter had allowed her head to be turned by a precocious child so much that she entered into a sexual relationship with him.

Much has been made of Jay's reaching out to Michelle, and the similarities of their situation. They both got involved with underaged people with a sexual slant in mind. That's it. That's where it started and stopped. Jay entered into a relationship with Star/Linzi without ever bothering to learn her true age, or - for that matter - anything about her. They didn't have sex, but they sexted; and once Jay discovered her real age, he backed away from all contact, albeit too late.

Michelle knew the age of the person pursuing her. Like Star/Linzi, Preston was sexually precocious, but Michelle forgot that she was the adult, and the onus was on her to assess the wrongness and the sheer illegality of such an association. Even now, she cannot let go of Preston, and she refuses to acknowledge that she's done anything wrong. I don't understand that. She's clearly not stupid, so this must be extreme arrogance on her part. Arrogance to the point that nothing else matters - not her family, not the few people left who care about her and certainly not Sharon, whom she's using appallingly.

With the prospect of Michelle drifting into alcoholism, that would make a hattrick of alcoholics for whom Sharon had to act in a carer capacity - Angie, Phil and Michelle. The drink she'd consumed certainly brought out her true feelings about Sharon, what she's actually felt about her since they were kids.

In vino veritas. You always tell the truth when you're in your cups, and it didn't take long for the jealousy to surface. The same jealousy she's concealed all her life, because I always said that the Sharon-Michelle dynamic was based on jealousy on both parts. Sharon envied the seemingly close-knit family surrounding Michelle. Michelle envied Sharon's affluence. Even now, she's still whining about Sharon being subbed by Phil (for Daddy Den, read Phil) and digging the knife in about the car lot fire over 20 years ago,which killed a homeless lad - the lot, then being owned by one Frank Butcher.

Sharon's reaction was priceless - cold, taciturn and disdainful. Yet Michelle is still there, and she'll continue to be there, being subbed by Sharon, who acknowledged that as she tried to make a cup of tea. Sharon's tired and she's seen too much of what the bottle can do for a person. It took Phil's liver,and it took Angie's life.

When Sharon leaves, Michelle, misguidedly, thinks she can reach out to Preston again, and she's desperate enough to ring Preston's mother, who gives her short shrift. She did say something interesting, however, that American voice at the other end of the phone. When Michelle asked to speak with him, the mother replied ... He isn't allowed to talk to you.

Now that could have been Ma Prestonovich laying down the law, but Preston was so much of a spoiled prick, that he probably wouldn't listen to anything either of his parents said. He refused to speak to them before, remember, when he was loved up with MIchelle? I wonder if they've obtained a court order, barring him from speaking to her. Even though Michelle isn't in the UK, that is enforceable to a degree here.

However, as concerns Jay, he felt compassion for Michelle, but again, this was misguided. Their situations aren't that similar at all, except in another way: Jay still hasn't learned the art of learning about a person in whom he's interested instead of allowing his dick to lead. At their housewarming party, he was cosying up to the atrocious Sniggle, even intimating that he thought she was a university student, until Star told him the truth, ascertaining that he'd learned nothing from his escapades with her; and it was also true with the German girls, who scammed and robbed them. Jay was distracted by one using a sexual ploy in the bathroom, whilst the other robbed them blind.

I don't get why he's become so socially gauche at the moment. He was mature enough to wait around, sometimes ungraciously, for Abi to be ready to take their relationship to the next level, but now all he seems to want to do is meet someone and bed them right away ...in that regard, he's not that different from the pathetic likes of Denise and Kush.

I do wonder about this programme.

Finally ... Steven and Lauren again, with Lauren managing to enter a reluctant Steven in the "Mr Walford" contest, whilst making it all about her, entering herself for "Miss Walford". Haven't we been there, done that, read the book, seen the movie and bought the teeshirt for this?

Who wants to bet Photocopier Man shows up?

No comments:

Post a Comment