Kirsty Branning

There's a thread hotting up on Digital Spy soaps forum pitting Kirsty against Tanya and asking people whom they support in the Battle for Max's Arse.

I'm surprised and yet not surprised at the level of support for Tanya's predicament and the vitriol  for Kirsty. The reason I'm not surprised is that the normal level of critical thinking, in the wake of the end of the Christmas period, is back to its usual substandard amongst the Luddites debating, or attempting to debate this.

Here are some basic facts about Max's and Tanya's history:-

• Max was married with a child when he met Tanya.
• Tanya was 18 years old, with a druggie history and seriously drinking, when she met Max. Suffice it to say, she was not a blushing virgin.
• The fact that Max was married met absolutely nothing to Tanya. Most women, out of decency, back off a married man when he comes onto them.
• Max is a serial cheat. He was unfaithful to Rachel, and he's been seriously unfaithful to Tanya.
• Max's and Tanya's relationship is based entirely on sexual attraction, lying and secrecy.

Let's look at that last point.

Max and Tanya don't talk, they just throw words at each other and fuck. Their solution to any problem they have is to have a quick fuck and then it's remedied. That usually occurs after they've hurt each other (and their children) to the extreme. Max kept secrets from Tanya from day one, and she kept secrets from him as well. They both lie like dogs to one another.

She's with him and keeps taking him back, most likely because he's the best lay she's had. That's why she took him back after fucking about with Sean Slater and with Jack for a year. Actually, a big part of her taking him back then was due to the fact that she'd just been released from prison, and Tanya doesn't function at all unless she's got a man paving a way for her. Everything she's ever achieved in her life, she's got through sleeping with a man. Max, Jack, Greg - they all provided her with things most women work for and attain through their own competence and graft.

Max got her off a sink estate and an alcoholic hag of a mother. He gave the the semblance of a middle class lifestyle. Jack promised her a villa in France. Greg had a fat wallet and bought her a house and a business and sent her skanky daughter to school in the States, losing the money when she got expelled for smoking weed.

We've seen Tanya's performances when there isn't a man on the horizon - she foists all sorts of heavy responsibilities on her children, putting them under undue pressure and treating them like shit. With Tanya, everything is all about Tanya first and foremost.

For Max, Tanya is easy stability. He bores easily and - because he is such a nuanced individual - he's clearly bored by her shallowness and lack of depth. Face it, Tanya is not a stand-alone character. She was introduced in 2006 as Max's put-upon wife, and she didn't even have a proper backstory until last year, and we didn't hear that sensationalist tripe until Branning Week 2011.

Max strays and gets found out. Tanya gets angry, he gives her an expensive present or takes her on an expensive holiday, they have make-up sex and everything's back to normal until Max strays again.

This is the classic co-dependent couple. Their behaviour and their foibles feed each others' needs. Both are as amoral as the other - the difference being that Max owns his amorality and Tanya cloaks hers in middle class aspirations. Example? For the life of her, Tanya cannot accept the fact that she was the original other woman. She broke up Max's marriage.

Max, curiously, is an old-fashioned soul. When he gets a woman up the duff, as his father did before him, he marries her. Rachel was pregnant when he married her. When Tanya fell pregnant, it was logical to Max that he would have to abandon Rachel and marry Tanya, which he did. In Tanya's narrow, social-climbing mind, that validated their relationship. 

She is blind to her own faults and actions. On the eve of Bradley's wedding, she took umbrage that his mother chose to attend and help with the organisation of it, thinking Rachel had no right, when Rachel was Bradley's mother. When Rachel told her, point-blank, that she would suffer what Rachel suffered at Max's hands one day, she ignored her arrogantly. She even refused to acknowledge that Stacey's affair with Max was the same slap in the face she'd administered to Rachel when she, herself, was eighteen.

Even now, she refuses to see that.

Ah, but consider this: Tanya abandoned Max when he went tits-up financially. She took his children and left, horning in on a younger, more affluent man, moving in with him after knowing him only two months - Tanya left Max at Christmas 2009 and was living with Greg by the time Bradley died at the end of February 2010. In 2011, a divorced and single woman, she married Greg, in a preposterous assumption of self-perpetuating virginity symbolised by a kitsch white wedding.

Get that? Tanya married Greg, which she was entitled to do as she was single. (Ne'mind that within weeks, she was sleeping with Max again, lolling about on an illicit bed in a rented flat and  laughing about Greg - dubbed "Bob the Builder" - babysitting Oscar.)

Please realise that throughout 2011, Max Branning was a single man. At one point, he even got engaged to Vanessa Gold, with whom he was living at the time. So Max, like Tanya, could have and would have been able to marry anyone he wanted, provided they were unattached as well.

In August when Tanya discovered she had cervical cancer, she did her usual lying trick and told Max she wanted nothing to do with him, ordering him to leave Walford after accusing him of breaking up her marriage to Greg. She told him succinctly that she wanted nothing more to do with him and never wanted to see him again.

Max, as Max is wont to do when asked by Tanya, left town. 

More importantly, he left town foot-loose and fancy free.

Sometime between August and November, Max met Kirsty. They bonded, initiated a relationship and married. Quick? Maybe, but then remember, Tanya was serious enough about Greg to be living with him two months after leaving Max. Suffice it to say that both Max and Tanya could have been vulnerable at that point and looking for love and/or affection after a let-down.

Whatever.

But Max certainly felt strongly enough for Kirsty to marry her, and Kirsty loved Max. She married him on trust. Another thing - Max certainly talked to Kirsty - more than he ever did Tanya. Kirsty knew Max's children's names, knew their interests; so it's even safe to say that until they married, Max was as honest with Kirsty as Max could be.

As Kirsty, herself, they were married, and were planning a new life together in Manchester. They were in love, and Kirsty was in the early stages of pregnancy.

She married Max, legally, in good faith and had every reason to believe he loved her. She did nothing wrong.

Then, suddenly, out of the blue, she receives a phonecall from Max in November, telling her the marriage was over. No explanation, no nothing, Max was even too cowardly to face her with this confession - instead, he stuffed a wodge of money and the divorce papers through Kirsty's letterbox - ostensibly because Max (who's capable of feeling guilt) still harboured feelings for his lawfully wedded wife.

I want the Digital Spy Luddites to disabuse themselves of the notion that Kirsty is in any way desperate or clinging to Max. I can assure them that if the shoe were on the other foot and Max had done this to the fragrant Tanya, they would have been howling in Tanya's favour. Well, cop this! Kirsty is Max's wife and Tanya is, once again, the other woman.

Kirsty is Max's wife, who married him in good faith, thinking he loved her, and who was callously and suddenly abandoned by him. She's not seen or heard from him in a year. Any woman in those same circumstances, of course, would seek a face-to-face encounter with the man who'd abandoned her, if only to know why. Kirsty is, at least, entitled to an explanation.

Also, I don't think Kirsty is the type to hang onto something that's over. She makes no pretensions about herself. She was honest enough to tell Tanya that she had formerly been an exotic dancer - whatever that is - that she'd left that and now did barwork. No middle class vapours for this woman. This is a woman who's taken whatever life offered and dealt with it. When she was succinctly told by Derek that Max had left her, never to return, she aborted their child rather than raise it alone, not knowing that a child would have conflicted Max even more and would have ensured her that Max would return to her.

If Kirsty had truly received a negative vibe from Max when she turned up on his doorstep, she would have signed the divorce papers and left in a trice. But she knows, deep down, that Max still has feelings for her. He's even admitted as such, before he backed down in Tanya's presence and told Kirsty to leave. What Max is doing now is cowardly and low and proof positive that the Brannings are white trash losers.

Jack drops kids on various women all around Europe and fulfills his parental duties by sending cheques each month. Max collects women but is afraid to veer from the reliable security Tanya somehow affords him.

Kirsty is fighting for her marriage. She isn't desperate or deluded or clinging to something that isn't there. In fact, she probably reads Max better than Tanya does. She sees that Tanya, with her faux mumsy ways and the kids is a security blanket for Max; but she also sees through Tanya's veneer of middle class respectability also. Believe me, if there were nothing there for Kirsty to claim, she'd be gone.

But there is, and she's about to claim it. She knows Max loves her, and she's not about to give him an easy option by sacrificing a marriage she made in good faith just so he can feel comfortable. She knows that the more she's around and in his face and space, he won't be able to mask his feelings for her. At this moment in time, Max is living with Tanya and has abandoned his wife, for no reason. 

Kirsty is the victim here, and Tanya is in the wrong. For one brief shining moment, Tanya even admitted that she was just as guilty of this situation as Max, because she lied to him and sent him away. Max, as such, didn't lie to Tanya about Kirsty. He just neglected to tell her, initially because she was so ill and had to concentrate on getting well. Then, by the time she had regained her health, Max had made the mistake of trusting DelBoy to sort out the necessaries in order for him to obtain a divorce from Kirsty - which he couldn't do until he'd been married to her for a year.

So when you're throwing your weight behind Team Tanya, you're really rooting for a skank with experience in pursuing married men and plenty of form in assuming a faux moral high ground.

Kirsty may look rough and have a degee from the college of hard knocks, but she doesn't pretend to be something she isn't, and she is, for the time being, Mrs Max Branning.