Sharon's Only Part of the Solution

There are some very good, cogent and perspicacious members of the Digital Spy Soaps forum, but there are also some virulent trolls and outright idiots as well. All three categories of viewers are out in full force on a current thread entitled Sharon Needs to Be at the "Heart" of the Square, a thread started by the one of the more visible members of the Eastenders' cheerleading squad, vaslav37.

You can read the thread in its entirety here.

vaslav37's jumped on the Sharon bandwagon now. He wants her at the "heart" of the Square - i e, fronting the Vic. He also wants Cora to be the landlady of the Vic, up until firmly put in his place by Eastenders' dialogue, he was absolutely certain that an entire classic storyline from the 1990s should be overhauled and retconned, making Cora Sharon's birthmother and he wants the Brannings also to take over the Vic.

I can easily imagine vaslav37 chewing on the end of a cushion and going "a-huh-a-huh-a-huh-a-huh!" every time Cora or a Branning appears on the screen, then having to change his knickers at the end of each Eastenders' episode in which they figure heavily.

The posit, however, sparked some interesting debate, the gist of which seemed to be the underwhelming atmosphere of Sharon's return.

I'm a big fan of Sharon, having watched the show from its beginning. I actually "get" the character as she was created and as she's been written during her last return. Letitia Dean is one of the best actresses to appear on the programme. She stayed with the show for ten years,  virtually growing up on our screens, starting Walford life as a teenager and leaving as a young woman, with one marriage and an affair behind her. When she returned again in 2001, she stayed for five years. Despite what some of the commenters in that thread are saying, Sharon, Janine, Ian and Phil - to me - are the important characters in the programme, especially Sharon and Janine, as they represent two sides of the same coin, springing from almost the same roots - the difference  is in how they've managed their lives thus far and the direction in which those lives are now about to take.

Sharon was the daughter of Den and Angie Watts, the iconic couple who made the Vic. She grew up in the pub. She adored her flawed, but weak father; near the end of his life, she was forced to admit to his face that he had feet of clay, but she still loved him. Her father was killed and buried in the Vic. Her last husband died outside. Her first husband bought the Vic for her.

Janine was the daughter of Frank Butcher and the stepdaughter of both Pat Evans and Peggy Mitchell. She grew up in the pub. She adored her flawed, but weak father. After his death, she was forced to admit he was less than perfect, but she still loves him. He has a plaque in the Square in his memory. Sharon married into the Mitchell family; Janine is related by marriage.

I will be the first to admit that Sharon's return was underwhelming. The times she shone as a character this week were the scenes she shared with the "old reliables" - characters with whom she's inextricably linked from the past, namely Phil and Ian. Those scenes, the writers got pitch perfect. 

Here's where her character suffered:-

• She's returning this time as a mother of a small child. Sharon as a mother is going to take some acclimatisation for long-term viewers who remember both her previous stints. It's not as if we saw her give birth and followed the child's progress from infancy to the point where he is now. We've just had a six year-old introduced to us as Dennis Rickman's posthumous son. A lot of the direction for this will depend on how much and how regularly TPTB feature her son as a character. Sure, he's as cute as the proverbial button, but - like the children who play Tiffany Butcher on Eastenders and Simon Barlow on Corrie - he knows it. And that's what dampens the cute factor. The line between "cute" and "obnoxious" is very thin indeed.
• The storyline which introduced her return was pithy, sensationalist and reeked of Bryan Kirkwood. Scores of people were asking exactly how she knew where Phil lived. That was an unanswered question. Why was she bolting on her wedding? The scenes in and around that storyline were rushed and amateurish, and an insult to the likes of Jesse Birdsall. I appreciate the reason for having Sharon return this particular week - part of it was a plot device to distract Phil so the Ben reveal could occur in his absence - but I still think it may have been mete to have either done this before the reveal (which really would have meant before the Olympics, sparing us the Katshit storyline) or after the reveal.
• Almost immediately she's back on the Square, the situation is contrived to involve her intricately with the Branning family - specifically Jack and Tanya. Not only was the writing for her character all over the place in these scenes, they actually stank. I thought the viewers and Pam St Clement were cheated with Pat's death because Bryan Kirkwood and his merry writers' room had made this all about the Brannings - specifically, about the repercussions of David Wicks's and Carol Branning's bunk-up behind the bike shed thirty-odd years ago. It was a vehicle to promote the latest Branning asshole character, Derek. Now, it seems that Letitia Dean's return to the show is looking more like an exercise for the writers to prove that Scott Maslen deserved his BSA accolade as sexiest male in soaps as much as it's proving a vehicle to justify the continued presence of Jack Branning on the Square. Sharon is a very attractive woman; the reasoning behind the writing room is that she should be with Jack - when everyone with any common sense saw that there was zero chemistry between the two, whilst the screen crackled each time she was with Steve McFadden.

When Sharon hinted to Lucy Beale how she'd messed her life up since the birth of her son by putting herself about and having lonely sex, I could buy that. It seemed plausible, but Friday night's episode which saw her coo and play the damsel-in-distress getting Jack to buy her engagement ring off her, accepting the offer of staying in his flat and ending up seducing him totally straight from theatre de l'absurde. 

The line when she, after several drinks (mind you), laments the fact that this should have been her wedding night and then leans in for a long kiss from the walking wooden dick was either pisspoor writing or indicative of the fact that maybe Sharon has an addiction problem of another kind. At least when she was explaining her dilemma to Lucy Beale, she never once used the stock line of most of the characters in the programme "It wasn't mah fault."

Nope, Sharon said she'd made some bad decisions. Well, she was still making a bad decision Friday night. That was totally out of character with Sharon, and whoever wrote that episode and thought that storyline up should be taken out and slapped repeatedly.

As for Tanya's reaction, I can only hope that, as Jo Joyner's character nears the end of her six-year tenure as the seemingly blameless yummy mummy of the Square, she's now being exposed for the hypocritical bitch she is.

Tanya slates Sharon for running out on her wedding, remarking on "what a piece of work" she is, this is the woman who married her second husband because of the size of his wallet, spent his money like crazy, got him to buy back a business she'd formerly owned after stealing the present owner blind, and then repaid him by sleeping with her ex-husband behind his back. This is the woman who, by the time she was eighteen, had broken up one marriage by sleeping with a married man and getting pregnant by him. She didn't give a monkey's about the wife and child left behind in the ruins of that relationship. This is the woman who, in the wake of kicking her husband out because of his infidelity, brought a psychologically vulnerable young man, prone to violence, into her house, fucked him repeatedly on the sofa whilst her baby cried upstairs, just to get him onside in her plot to kill her husband - oh, and then she tried to bury her husband alive. Something for which she's shown no remorse.

And Sharon is "a piece of work?"

Rumours are flying about of a Tanya-Sharon friendship. That's definitely an epic fail. The real Tanya was out in force Friday night - bitchy, biting and totally deserving of the shit Max is about to cop on her fragrant head from a great height come Christmas.

Just sayin'.

But for those viewers naive enough to think that Sharon's return is going to make Eastenders' flagging ratings rise like a phoenix almost immediately, you've got another think coming.

Eastenders has been in the doldrums for the past ten years, specifically so during the past two during Kirkwood's reign of terror. Negotiations with Letitia Dean about a possible return began a year ago and were conducted by no other than John Yorke, the man responsible for her last return. They're not yanking her back, plopping her in the Square and watching her sleep with Jack or whoever. Dean is too much of a professional not to come back without a definite character arc or storyline. She's hinted at snogging Steve McFadden and he's adamant about Phil and Sharon getting together.

Believe it or not, this has always been an attraction. No, Sharon's return, alone, will not raise the viewing figures. Good, consistent writing about characters in whom the public have invested will do that. People have to start talking about the show again in a postive way, and the storylines have to be good, well-written, tight, not retconned, and believeable.

Was Sharon brought back for a purpose? Yes. I'd venture to say she was the next step on Phil Mitchell's developmental arc, as well as her own. There's too much unfinished business between both Sharon and Phil and between Sharon and Grant (cf: Sharon's reaction to the fact that Grant was in Portugal and Phil's insecurity that she was "all right" with that).

But that's only part of the solution. The rest of the solution is the resolution of at least one very unpopular storyline, the axing of various unpopular and inadequate characters - both A- and B-list ones - and the introduction of interesting and viable storylines for the future.

All that aside, some of the observations about Sharon being back have been totally ludicrous, when taken in consideration of the position the character holds on the show.

For example, the forum member los.kav, who's normally pretty astute, shows both her age and her ageism:-

 I wasn't watching for Sharon's last stint so to me she's just some blonde woman who was with the Mitchell brothers ages ago before leaving. I'm pretty sure she's just some blonde woman to quite a lot of newer viewers too. I don't think I'm happy with some random blonde piece showing up and taking over everything without earning her stripes first. I know she earned them in the past, but the past is the past and this is the present: they can't just put her to the forefront of the show and demand that everyone remember her/like her because she was in it before. It won't work and the character will flop. 

To begin with, Sharon is not "some random blonde piece". As the member bass55 points out, she's the daughter of Den Watts, the ex-wife of Grant Mitchell and the widow of Dennis Rickman. She is history in and of herself, in a similar way Janine is. Also, as the forum member Nancy Drew remarked, there simply are and have been too many Sharon wannabes swanning around the Square in the recent past and present.

Ronnie was certainly a poor man's Sharon, and her relationship with Archie was a warped version of Sharon and Den. She took Sharon's tragic heroine not to new heights, but to new, unrealistic and unlikeable depths. Tanya and her bitchery? Skinnyshanked Lucy Beale being equated to this generation's Sharon? Pull the other one, please. This is the original deal, and one of the few remaining original cast members. As for "earning her stripes," Sharon's done that from year dot. She did it when she stepped out from under the shadow of her parents' toxic marriage and took over the Vic when she married Grant. Perhaps los.kav would be the wiser for knowing that the Mitchells, themselves, were created for Sharon, not the other way about.

Now that the Mitchells are at their lowest and sparsest, maybe this is turnabout and Sharon's being introduced as part of their character arc. Sharon's earned her stripes. There are a plethora of characters, some of whom date from as far back as 2006 and before, who have yet to earn theirs - Kat, Tanya, Bianca, Zainab, Masood, all of the tweenies. In fact, apart from Ian, Phil, Dot, Janine and Sharon, the only "new" character I'd say has earned his stripes is Max Branning. The rest are strictly second-rate.

Later, in trying to defend her rather shallow assessment of Sharon, los.kav blames her youth (she's in her twenties) and relates how she asked her mother about the Sharon-Dennis relationship, only to be told Mum thought it was only "okay" - which deterred her from looking up old episodes on YouTube. It's nice to trust your parents, but sometimes, they're wrong - and sometimes, it's good to be able to form opinions for yourself.

I happen to agree with los,kav's mum. Sharon and Dennis never floated my boat, but for a lot of people, they did. For me, Dennis was a plot device to cover for the fact that Steve McFadden decided on taking a sabbatical when Leslie Grantham was paid megabucks decided to return. I always thought Dennis was too pretty to be a hard nut, too fey to be dangerous and too young to be taken seriously by a mature woman in her mid- to late-thirties. In fact, the man who played him, Nigel Harman, used to giggle on talk shows about Dennis's party piece being walking around Walford, looking beetle-browed in a tight teeshirt. He was a less beefier and less steroid-enhanced but more talented version of Tyler the Moon Goon and Joey Rod-Knee Branning.

For some people, Shannis was love's young dream. For others, like me, Sharon was never over Grant. los,kav should really try to develop the art of thinking critically and view the Dennis YouTube clips for herself. With an open mind.

And last and certainly least, the troll element of Forum Member is represented by the likes of vald and catsmeow.

Depending on the day, the latter is a gypsy/Muslim/mother/non-parent/whatever, who's only just started watching the show and doesn't give a fig about its history. So much so that she's prepared to pre-judge characters she says she doesn't know based only on seeing them in their present incarnation. Their history doesn't matter. What a dumbass judge of character. I'd put to her the fact that people who met Hitler thought him very charming. He was kind to children and loved animals. He also killed 6 million innocent people in the worst way possible and wanted to rule a world were the Aryan race dominated. But ne'mind his history, eh? This vicious, little trolling bitch has spent months slating not only the character of Sharon but the actress, herself, in the most personal of terms. The fact that she's still allowed to post on that forum is a bloody miracle, and I'm glad some posters are now challenging her. The mods should do their jobs.

As for vald, her parting shot was this:-

As a viewer who's watched since the begining I've never got into Sharon. She's had her moments, mainly through Sharongate, but that's it for me. Her last return didn't impress me, although I know there were plenty who bought into the romance of her and Dennis.

I think that people expecting her to be at the forefront of the show because of her history is like expecting Cliff Richard to top the charts because of his history. Performers have to prove themselves and go on proving themselves. I'll wait and see how she fits into the show ...right now she is the new girl in the square, let's see what happens.

vald is a sad, bitter old troll who lives under a bridge allegedly owns a pub. She's a Katapologist who pisses all over men who are either unfaithful or priapic, but thinks women should be excused this behaviour. her attitude to Sharon is one of sheer jealousy. As for the performer prooving herself, she doesn't have to do so. Lorraine Newman, who's been with Eastenders for twenty years, knows exactly what to expect from Letitia Dean. If anyone lets the public down, it's the writing, and if that's the case, Dean will call time on the situation.

In the meantime, vald should stick to what she does best - hanging out under bridges.