Izzy in the House Asked It: Character Opinions I - The Brannings

Whoever Izzy in the House on Digital Spy fora is, she's got an uncool name. Please, stop the Ali G/faux gangsta nomenclature. It's not cool and neither are you. Still, she wants opinions on various - if not all - characters, so I'm going to humour her little ass. She wants opinions on the following:-

Brannings Derek - Joey - Alice - Tanya - Max - Lauren - Abi - Oscar - Cora - Jack - Dot - Masoods Zainab - Masood - Tamwar - Kamil - AJ - Syed - Christian - Mitchells Phil - Roxy - Amy- Billy - Lola - Lexi - Beales Ian - Lucy - Bobby - Moons/Slaters - Alfie - Kat - Tommy - Jean - Mo - Foxes Denise - Patrick - Kim - Ray - Butchers/Jackson/Dean Carol - Bianca - Liam - Tiffany - Morgan - Whitney - Tyler - Others Fatboy - Poppy - Tracy () - Marie (:P) - Michael - Scarlett - Jay - Sharon - Denny - Shirley - Danny Pennant -

Doesn't ask for much, does she? OK, family by family,with this first instalment being about the Brannings  ...

The Brannings

Over-populated, over-exposed, over-used and over-rated. It's time for a cull. I understand why Diederich Santer increased their number (by two, Jack and Suzy, but the latter was an epic fail), but Jack's inclusion as a character was 50 per cent spoiled before he started filming when poor John Bardon had his stroke, and his "romance"with Ronnie added nothing but splinters to her ass. Instead, Santer started writing him as the Walford sperminator and Kirkwood continued.

I halfway understand why Kirkwood increased their number even moreso. Lauren was recast when the anorexically-inclined, lollipop-headed Madeleine Duggan proved as talentless as she was weightless. Maybe the producers discovered how functionally illiterate she was, so they sacked her for an actress with a bit more meat on her bones (mostly found on her upper lip), a penchant for gurning, a daddy who couldn't keep his fingers out of the taxpayers' till and someone who still can't read or write. Or act. (Seriously, do you know that Tony Discipline, Jacqueline Jossa and Jamie Borthwick are functional illiterates? Whatever happened to school? How do they learn their lines?)

Kirkwood was shitting himself that Steve McFadden might follow Barbara Windsor's suit, so his contingency plan was to big up the Brannings, and with the help of Simon Branning Ashdown, he spread them about Walford like terminal cancer. Speaking of which, he gave Tanya - whom he revealed to all to be just as amoral as Max - a cancer cold to try to make her nice again, at the same time revealing that, at 13, she'd helped to murder her father. Can it get any worse?

The Brannings are due for a cull, so here are my opinions on the family which I feel is probably the single worst thing wrong with EastEnders at the moment. Trust me, when an original EastEnders' character, a real icon, is forced to beg attendance on the periphery of a tribe of sensationalist, scrubbed-up poor whites, you know the show has lost its way. Sharon Watts Mitchell Rickman would no sooner befriend a sink estate slut like Tanya than she would risk wood infestation by sleeping with Jack.


Derek the Toad, Joey the Turd and Alice the Goon: Derek is on his last legs, and it's our misfortune that we have to suffer a Branning Autumn and Christmas just to see him go. Jamie Foreman is a fine actor, I'm sure, and I wish him well, but Derek wasn't written well, and the character didn't gel with the audience. No matter what the writing room did, it didn't work with Derek. It was the worst kept mystery that he will end up as Shaggerman with Kat, basically because both characters are so awful they belong together, and it's actually a shame that Kat isn't leaving with him. He was touted as this big villain to rival Phil Mitchell, and he only turned out to be a big joke. DelBoy on steroids, without the humour.

As for his children, it's a pity that Jasmine Banks got lumbered with such an insipid character as Alice, because of all the younger actors in the programme, she's arguably the most experienced and the most talented. But, like everyone else hired under the auspices of Kirkwood, Ashdown and co, they've only identified that Derek had to have a daughter and plopped her in with no character direction whatsoever. She's been tagged "the plain Branning girl who's boring" with her character consisting of gushing at her father's attention, trying to reunite him and her brother and getting knocked back. Again and again. It doesn't help that she's given lines involving wanting to play I Spy with My Little Eye and having to go for a wee-wee. 

Under Kirkwood we saw two of the worst actors ever to grace the soundstage at Elstree when hired Tony Discipline and Matt Lapinskas to play the Moon Goons (after sacking the equally dire Liam Bergin - whoda thunk Danny Mitchell would rate higher than the Moons?) Newman has a lot for which to answer as well, sacking Lapinskas only to hire David Witts, who has the singular distinction of making Tony Discipline look talented. Witts needs to work on keeping his mouth shut when he's not talking (or else see a specialist about his mouth breathing problem) and stop lolling his tongue about from cheek to cheek. It's not sexy, it's just stupid. A few elocution lessions wouldn't go amiss either, but the crux of the matter is that Witts, like Discipline (another underwear model) has no talent. All actors are not exceptionally handsome men and not all exceptionally handsome men can be actors. Back to the catalogues for the boy David. Or maybe he should consider a future in porn films - you don't have to talk much in those.

Axe Toad, Turd and Alice the Goon.

Max, Tanya, Abi, Lauren and Oscar: Max is still the only Branning worth watching, portrayed by the best actor and one of the most nuanced characters ever to appear on EastEnders, ranking right up there with Phil and Janine. Jake Wood has made Max part of the fixtures and fittings. It's just a shame about the rest.

It warms the cockles of my heart that most people now realise what a scrubbed-up slapper of a hypocrite Tanya is. She and Max enjoy a co-dependent relationship that's reached the end of its tether with viewers. If the fact that she wasn't a chavvy little miscreant not above snaking a man away from his wife and child at eighteen wasn't convincing enough about her character, then the fact that she was all too willing to fuck around with Max five minutes after marrying gormless Greg should have convinced viewers that she was just as amoral as Max, but - like most women in the programme at the moment - she's the victim.

Instead of owning the fact that she pursued Max whilst he was married to another woman and had a child, she blames Max for seducing her. And when she romped the beds with Max, whilst married to Greg, and joked about Greg babysitting her child, that was Max's fault too. She's dishonest, hypocritical and a drunk. She uses people. Her friendship with Jane was based on using Jane as a crutch to prop up her own drinking problem and to make Jane feel worse in a marriage that was already crumbling. She's murdered once, attempted murder again and robbed from a single mother. She's the cheap trick prototype on which the Branning foundation is based - white trash trying to pass herself off as quality. She's selfish, always putting herself first and making everything about her. Her legacy is having raised a daughter who's going to out-drink, out-fuck, out-lie and out-hypocrite her. She can be very proud of Lauren.

I'm glad Tanya's leaving - let's cut the shit about the "break" business. Jo Joyner sucked up Kirkwood and Kath Beedles to get all the plum storylines in the wake of Sam Womack leaving and saw the writing on the wall with Lorraine Newman. People who push her break as of the six-month variety can think a bit on this: She's not renewing her contract, and - most likely - TPTB are paying her to leave six months earlier than planned in order to accommodate their storylines. That's what Joyner means when she prattles on about "getting her six months." She's talking out of her fat arse when she says other actresses have taken year-long maternity leaves. The truth is this - Laurie Brett had planned on finishing out her contract and leaving after returning from her six months' maternity leave, and Patsy Palmer originally quit during her maternity leave. 

Neither one took or is taking a year.

In fact, the last actress to take a maternity leave before Joyner took her last one was Diane Parrish and she took - guess what? - six months.

Joyner is leaving. She and her husband have bought a house further away from Elstree in the country, and her old man wants her to suffer their twins while he goes back to work. Whether or not she returns is not up to her. She's toast, and she won't be missed, in my opinion.

Lauren wasn't likeable before, and she's bloody despicable now. Spoiled, selfish, entitled, lazy and a drunk, with no concept of love or loyalty. She should be having showers with her legs crossed in some juvy detention centre now for having tried to kill her old man; instead, she's whining about being treated like an adult, but isn't willing to work of find any sort of employment when she can sub off her parents, with Mommy Dearest undermining Daddy, and when Daddy doesn't do what she wants, she orders him to leave Walford. Again.

The actress who plays her, Jacqueline Jossa, needs to seriously understand that making faces, goggling her eyes and speaking loudly doesn't mean she's a good actress. And, please, on the Facebook page she's desperately lying about having, stop, stop,stop bragging to the poor dumbasses who think the sun shines out of your Z-listed celebrity one about how much money you're making. The truth is, your pikey family produced a greedy old gut of a dad who tinkered with the tax money belonging to the citizens of Enfield council; he even arranged for your mother to be paid a council salary when she didn't set foot outside your kitchen in Bexley, Kent. The least you could do is offer part of what you think is your massive salary to the people whose council tax payments went up your father's fat arse to pay for your lujo home and holidays. Go back to school and learn to read and write.

Lauren should be killed off - possibly have her inhale her sneering upper lip. That should make a good death scene.

I used to like Abi, but since TPTB had her go off to the wilds of Costa Rica to study turtles and return with bleached hair, a faux tan and false eyelashes, I've gone right off her. It doesn't help things that Lorna Fitzgerald, since she turned sixteen, has been phoning in her lines as well. Is she expecting instantaneous celebrity status and a free entry into the EastEnders' bratpack? I hope not. 

A couple of weeks ago, we saw Granny Goodwitch Cora giving Abi the sort of advice she didn't need - like stick to supporting criminal boyfriend Jay and the equally criminal poor pitiful Pearl of a single mother Lola, rather than worry about her studies and bettering herself. As you do.

Abi, as a part of the Jay and Lola dynamic, is bad news. Abi had ambitions and wanted to further herself through education; yes, her putrid mother is only interested in seeing Abi at university so she can brag - but, really, that was the same reason we saw Zainab and Denise duke it out over Tamwar and Libby a couple of years back. And selfish as Tanya's motive might be, it was a good motive to spur Abi onward. Instead, we're expected to root for her supporting a couple of chav jailbirds and hooking her future up to their paddywagon.

The jury's out on Abi. She just might get a reprieve.

As for her grandmother, ASBO granny Cora ... please. Matriarchs don't just happen. Producers can't introduce an old woman and present her, ready-made, as the resident wise woman of Walford, especially since we've seen the sort of advice Cora's given. Cora told Lola to bang the doors of Social Services down in order to get Lexi back. That worked really well, didn't it?

Cora is a drunk. She's the mother and grandmother of drunks. She's threatened a pregnant woman and also harassed the same woman when she was in  the early stages of labour. She's breathed cigarette smoke on the woman's baby. Yet we're asked to accept this woman, who was turfed out of her sink estate flat for harassing and threatening another single mother, as the natural successor to Pat - indeed Pat, Peggy, Pauline, and Dot all rolled into one. She was an abysmal mother who spawned an abysmal daughter. She may be many things, but she is not a matriarch. She has no history nor any association with the people of Walford apart from being a peripheral Branning.

Cora can stay. But in the background.

Which leaves us with Jack. As I said, Jack was almost redundant before he started. In terms of sluttery, Jack is one of the biggest sluts to walk the streets of Walford. He's fathered kids on two sisters and their cousin - making Amy and the late James both cousins and siblings. As Scrabbler  points out on Digital Spy, a Lauren and Joey spawnfest would mean any progeny would share grandfathers who would also be the child's great-uncle. Thanks to Jack, the Brannings really are inbreds.

Jack, however, was also introduced as the resident male sex bomb ...

The only problem is that Jack has sex bombed most of the eligible women in his demographic still resident on the show. The only ones left to pork are related to him - hence, one of the reasons (no doubt) this lot of deficienti writers sought to introduce Sharon into the alternative universe of BranningVille. Because, of course, Sharon was only ever meant to return to Walford to pay homage at the court of Queen Tanya and to validate the Brannings as a force with whom one must reckon.

Yeah, uh-huh, sure. Not.

Sharon is Jack drinking in the last chance saloon, and when she kicks him to the curb with the stiletto of her Jimmy Choo, he seriously needs to think about visiting his various children dotted about the world, rather than sticking around and introducing a new type of STD known as prurient genital woodrot.

The biggest problem facing EastEnders at the moment is the proliferance of the Brannings, a sensationalist tribe of poor white inbreds ...

(Psssst ... Joey's the one with the banjo) ... whom nobody, except a few shallow-minded one brain-celled tweenie teens, likes.

And whilst we're throwing out Brannings, let's throw out another Branning spawn and the spawn she's spawned ... Bianca and her brood.

So already, that's the axe wielded on the Toad, the Turd, Alice the Goon, Yummy Mummy, Lauren the Gurner, Jack the Peg and Bianca and her minions.

Wouldn't it be nice if the Executive Producer of EastEnders had such balls?