One Person's Fantasy Is Another Person's "Gritty Realism"

I'm down with bronchitis at the moment, so I suffer fools even less than I do when I'm one hundred per cent, and I've already found a big one.

Step forward, dublintvfan, from Digital Spy, who poses this question:-

Would anyone prefer if Ee went back to the way it was from 2000 to 2006

Dark storys ect abusive husbands gansters showdowns all fast paced gritty stuff ect

EE was always about the dark side of life but i cant help feel they lost the heart of the show and just became like every other soap with love affairs ect 

Should they return to this format?

Well, I ask this: Who the fuck is this numpty and how old is he?

Look, I realise that there's a whole generation of viewers who think EastEnders began in 2000 and discount everything that went on with the show in the fifteen years before the Millennium, but they need to realise a few things about the period between 1985-2000:-

• People looked normal. I mean, you-wouldn't-notice-if-you-passed-them-on-the-street normal. Someone like Michelle Fowler, who was - by today's standards - a plain, spotty-faced girl of sixteen shagged Den Watts, who was the older sex symbol of the show at the time. People like Sonia would, today, be figures of ridicule. The sex symbols of the Square were characters like Sharon, who was frilly, and Kathy Beale, who was just one-up from dowdy. The first really attractive young girl to make an appearance was Sam Mitchell.
• Phil Mitchell was nice. He was actually the gentle brother, which was why Sharon cheated on Grant with him. Grant was an abusive husband, but we know now that he was suffering from PTSD. Phil used his brain instead of brute force.
• Before Sean Slater, there was Grant Mitchell. Sean is a poor man's Grant. Check out their back-stories. The similarities were not coincidental.
• Den actually died, even though we didn't see the body.
• The Osmans had the first cot death, way back in the 1980s before any of the Brannings were ever thought about. And that storyline was told with great poignancy.
• The first gays on the show, Colin and Barry, were two blokes who just happened to be gay; and they weren't defined by their sexuality.
• When the very first Branning set foot in Walford (Carol Jackson), it was established that Derek, Max and Jack were her three older brothers. Later, when she married Alan Jackson, Derek became a few years younger than she. This was mid-Nineties, when he was 32, never married and living at home with Jim and Reenie (yes, Jim had another wife), so technically, in the world of EastEnders, Joey and Alice simply don't exist.
• The show had guts enough to actually show a suicide - Donna Ludlow, from a heroin overdose.

• Speaking of Donna, she was the first long-lost child to come looking for her ma. But we already knew that Kathy Beale had been raped as a teenager and had given the child up for adoption.
• Oh, and people were hired for acting ability/experience, not for looks.

The period between 2000 and 2006 was nothing like creators Julia Smith and Tony Holland intended. In fact, the show began a downward spiral under Louise Berridge's tenure in 2002, from which it has yet to recover, if - indeed - it can. EastEnders was originally supposed to be a soap which reflected gritty realism - as in kitchen-sink drama. As Pam St Clement remarked when she left, who, amongst the current production crew, would even entertain a storyline about a financially strapped man who steals from the local community Christmas Club in order to finance his daughter's wedding? It simply isn't sensationalist enough, nor does it involve a Branning. 

Also, during this period, with John Yorke's introduction of and emphasis on the Slater family, there was the gradual shift away from the show being an ensemble piece, which a soap really is. The apex of this came under Diederick Santer, when he turned it into The Ronnie and Stacey Show. Thanks to the likes of Bryan Kirkwood, Simon Ashdown and (alas) Lorraine Newman, it's now in serious danger of becoming The Branning Show.

The so-called "gangster" period was an unrealistic joke. Had TPTB at that time wanted gangster realism, Jonnie Allen and Andy Hunter would have been either black or Eastern European. 

That period not only saw the show descend to its lowest viewing figures, it also showed what a shadow of itself it had become when the Mitchell family disintegrated due to Steve McFadden's sabbatical and Barbara Windsor's illness.

So, rather than talking about the "good old days" being the period between 2000 and 2006, dublintvfan needs to do some research and watch some episodes from the 1980s and 1990s - but he/she would probably be bored because the people aren't pretty. As for affairs, there were affairs aplenty during the heyday of which he speaks and before. The most iconic storyline in the show's history was the love affair between Frank Butcher and Pat, which ended, as it began - with Pat and Frank cheating on their partners. Sharongate saw the first time a woman was torn between two lovers who were siblings, and Dirty Den wasn't called that because of his personal hygiene. And don't start me on Cindy Beale.

Sometimes, people could do with a bit of history. Just because you weren't born or compos mentis during those years, doesn't mean you shouldn't be aware of them.

Dublintvfan = FOOL