Witless Protection

Gillian Taylforth was being pretty unprofessional and up for causing a fair amount of mischief when she made those remarks about EastEnders, upon leaving Celebrity Big Brother. To begin with, she's signed to join the cast of HollyOaks, so not only is that extremely unprofessional but it's also disrespectful to Bryan Kirkwood, who's cast her.

I know Taylforth is pissed off and has been because her character was killed off-screen, but the story behind that was, after the mass exodus in 2005-2006, TPTB (Kate Harwood and Tony Jordan) wanted to take Phil's character in a different direction. Realising that Ben would then have been ten years old, they sought bringing him in as a character.

However, they realised that there was no way his mother, Kathy, would countenance him remaining in Walford with his father unless she were living there too, TPTB made the decision to kill off Kathy Beale, off-screen. Whether or not that was a good idea is a moot point, they made the decision and Kathy died.

For everyone rationalising how and why she would return, just shut up. I'm sorry to say it, but bringing someone like that back from the grave when the character really did die, when we were shown scenes of her sons grieving, when we are asked to believe that she would have allowed her children to suffer so is beyond jumping the shark. It's inexplicably unbelieveable.

Den's death was always ambiguous. We saw the gun in the bouquet of daffs, heard the shot and the plop as his body fell in the water. Two endings were actually filmed: that one and one where we saw dead Den floating and slowly sinking into the canal. The producers chose the ambiguous ending, thus angering not only Tony Holland and Julia Smith, but also immensely angering Leslie Grantham, who was adamant about wanting to leave the show indefinitely.

It may have stretched the imagination, but Den's return was just about achieveable. Kathy's, not so.

Forget anything to do with Witness Protection. The Digital Spy commentator felixrex describes why this is patently not feasible:-

I don't think some people realise how Witness Protection actually works and how complicated and thorough a procedure it is. 

If she had gone into witness protection for whatever reason, Ben would have gone with her. If the matter she was caught up in was considered severe enough to warrant her being entered into a witness protection programme, then Ben would have been considered as much at threat as she was and would have been handled just as Kathy was. They would have been kept together. If, by some bizarre chance, they weren't, they certainly wouldn't have sent him back to his place of birth under his own identity to live with his own family under his own name. completely unprotected. He would have been a very clear link to Kathy and other people connected to her. 

If a criminal interest in a person is serious enough to warrant witness protection; it's fair to assume that the criminals would be tenacious and thorough in their pursuit of what ever problem they had with Kathy, even after her death; which would have meant their interest in Kathy would extend to Ben and anybody else related to her. That's why Ben would be in Witness Protection with his mother - and why he certainly wouldn't be living openly and unguarded under his own name and providing a clear link to other members of Kathy's family.

And how would they explain why any woman in her right mind would not only be willingly separated from her young son for six years; but actually put him through the hugely disturbing trauma of allowing him to believe she was dead, and, furthermore, died under horrific circumstances? That is not Kathy. And what about Ian? He saw the body, so did she just play dead for half-an-hour and dupe him as well, or is he in on it all and managed to keep the whole thing under wraps without ever showing any strain or any temptation to confess the truth - even when her young son was being banged up for killing a woman?

People are saying that Ian didn't have to identify Kathy's body, but it's not beyond the realms of possibility that he did see her in her coffin. There's something called "closure" that a lot of people want when comes the time to say goodbye to anyone or anything close to a person. It may have not been pleasant, although great care would have been taken to prepare her body, but it would have given Ian a sense of finality to have seen her body before burial. As odd as that might seem, this sort of thing quite often galvanises the bereaved person to move ahead and move on.

As for the theory being bandied about regarding her having been in a coma for the past seven years, again, I refer to felixrex:-

 Do you really think Eastenders would commit to accurately portraying the mental and physical degeneration a person endures during a 7-year-long coma?

A person who has been in a coma for an extended length of time suffers long-term physical and sometimes mental disabilities in recovering, some of them irreversible. The late actress Patricia Neill suffered a stroke and was in a coma for several weeks. Even to the end of her days, she walked with a slight limp and had a slurring of words - and that was after weeks being comatose. Now think about being years in a coma.

The muscles of Kathy's legs and arms would have atrophied. She couldn't walk or stand up straight unaided. Her brain would have been damaged as well, and her face would look considerably different. She may not even be able to speak, of if she were, to speak coherently. There would be other issues as well. EastEnders would be severely tasked with showing this, because people who do survive being comatose for lengthy periods are not a pretty sight.

The Reggie Perrin insurance scam and the kidnapping scenarios are too hilarious for words. Cheating insurance companies is something people like the Mitchells or the Brannings would do. Kathy was straight as die. There's no way she'd fake a death for an insurance claim - Ben or Ian would have been the beneficiaries, with a view to knowing what she was doing because they'd have to take the funds they'd "inherited" to her. Being held against her will? Kathy was in Johannesburg, not the wilds of Mongolia.

Besides, and I keep reiterating this: Kathy Mitchell is 63 years old.

She is really a contemporary of Cora the Bora. She was a younger contemporary of Pat and Pauline.

The actress now actually looks better than she did twenty years ago on the programme, when she was only in her thirties. She's now in her late fifties, in fact, she'll be 58 this year. Are they going to retcon things to say suddenly that Kathy isn't 63, but a well-preserved 58 and that she married Pete Beale when she was fourteen and had Ian at fifteen? The woman looks younger than the man who's supposed to be her son!

Will someone like that be believeable as a mother of a 43 year-old man or the grandmother of a 19 year-old girl? What is there, really, for her in Walford, besides Ian, who seems to be coping fine without her, or getting back together with Phil, catfighting Sharon for the privilege and eventually falling into bed with Jack Branning, allowing him to say he's shagged a granny?

I don't know why Taylforth sought to put the cat amongst the pidgeons, except to create mischief on the eve of her appearing in HollyOaks. If it's sour grapes that her character was killed off, then she needs to get over that and move on. And EastEnders needs to man up and show some balls and stand by the decision to axe her off-screen. They made a mistake, and they made it so that they couldn't rectify it. People are human. Shit happens. Move on. Again, I refer to felixrex:-

No. She's dead. Can we just get over it please. 

It's a shame they killed her off but what's done is done. The producers of the show need to learn to honour the show's past - even the big mistakes - whilst also creating a quality product. Explicitly contradicting the facts and crafting a ludicrously contrived storyline every time they want to renege on a balls-up; rather than own up to past mistakes and work on rectifying the damage they did to the show in a dignified manner; is not going to make the show better. It will just plunge it even further into the depths of crap it has been wallowing in for years. 

Kathy's dead. Sad but true. She isn't in a coma; she doesn't have amnesia; she isn't in witness protection and she isn't involved in a life insurance scam. The show made the stupid mistake of flippantly killing her off as a catalyst to Ben's arrival. They have to deal with and honour that decision, no matter how bad it was. Otherwise, what next? Every time they realise they've ballsed up, every time a storyline doesn't prove popular or a character loses fans, they just backtrack and find an easy way out of it all? Maybe Kat's whole affair was a bad nightmare Alfie was having and we don't all hate her even more than before, afterall? Maybe they could drop the Sharon and Jack stuff and pretend it never even happened, and that she's actually been handled brilliantly since her return and has interacted with Ian a lot and made many references to how much her former home has changed and how many people are no longer around? Never mind that everything we've seen contradicts that - we can just let it slide, eh?

A good producer trying to create a good product should take responsibility and accept that what's done is done; and work on building a TV program of good quality in spite of it's previous mistakes; rather than taking the easy way out and backtracking on past decisions - no matter how contrived and convoluted the storyline may have to be to do so - to 'fix the mistake'. You don't fix a mistake by making more mistakes. The best you can do is make up for a mistake by making sure you make as few as possible in the future.

Read that, and weep.

Yet for every measured, rational and reasoned argument against the return of a long-dead character, whose Lazarus moment would forever end this show's currently tenuous grip on reality in a terminal way ... there's always some one brain-celled sonofabitch who revels in unaware and unabashed stupidity.

To answer some of the little fruit flower pest's totally incongruous points:-

In my opinion you can bring back character that the viewers believe to be dead.

(Only in the realms of fantasy, of which EastEnders used to never want to inhabit. Someone's been watching too many ropey American soaps. Oh, and that's your opinion, sunshine; it's not a fact.)

For example,

You couldnt bring back Jamie Mitchell, Steve Owen, Tiffany Mitchell, Billy Jackson because we actually saw them die and dead.

You'd be surprised. A few years back, Martin Kemp was throwing the idea about of Steve Owen having an even more evil twin brother, and you'd be surprised the number of Shannis fans who insisted that Dennis didn't die, that the coffin was empty, that  he went into - yes! - Witness Protection - for crimes against Jonnie Allen. You could even say Tiffany faked her death - regaining consciousness on the way to the hospital, she begged a handsome and kindly doctor to help her escape from her brutal husband; so she pretends to be dead on the mortuary slab (the doc having bribed the attendant) and they fly off to Acapulco for her rest and recuperation).

Kathy Beale, Angie Watts, Andy Hunter, Johnny Allan could be brough back because in these cases we either saw them at near death or coffins or they died and were burried off screen.

Actually, Anita Dobson (Angie Watts) was asked to return for six months at the beginning of Sharon's last stint, in order to die on-screen. She refused. She wasn't bothered either about returning or Angie dying off-screen. She'd moved on. 

I'd be surprised if Andy Hunter survived the fall from a motorway bridge onto a busy carriageway of the M25. Jonnie Allen had an on-screen heart attack and died. I know he was a criminal bigwig, but there'd be no way he would allow his child to believe him dead and mourn him. Besides, she got his ashes. Kathy died off-screen. So did Cindy Beale (forgot to mention her, didn't you, hotshot?) She's another who's suffered the "Witness Protection" meme from time to time, even allowing for the fact that Ian actually did identify her body. The only thing that shut mouths up about that was her reincarnation with a Manc accent as Stella in Corrie. Let's hope Hollyoaks does the same for Kathy and her shippers.

Its all about credibility though, Dallas did it with Bobby and EE did it with Den. Soaps are supposed to be believable so they have to be as real to real life as be without losing the entertainment factor.

That's a totally incongruous and nonsensical statement. British soaps have always made a point and stood head-and-shoulder above their American counterparts, who strolled too far into the realms of fantasy and now find themselves with only four of the genre left on air in America. And those four are trying to - guess what? - become more grounded in reality. Real life situations can be entertaining and informative as well, as long as the writing is able to reflect that. EastEnders was the first of its genre to deal openly with homosexuality, teenaged pregnancy, AIDS, SIDS (not the idiotic babyswap storyline but the tragic death of Hassan Osman in the 80s), PTSD suffered by combat veterans (Grant Mitchell and Sean Slater), child abuse and bi-polar syndrome.

And do you and others not understand what "jump-the-shark" means? EastEnders bringing Kathy back from the dead wouldn't just be entertaining a "jump-the-shark" moment, which people might think viewers would forgive. When a programme jumps the shark, it goes irretrieveably beyond the realms of reality, never to return or regain its foothold which gave it a solid reputation. Jumping the shark means there's only one way to go, and that's down. When a programme jumps the shark, it usually doesn't last much longer on air after that.

EastEnders has come perilously close to jumping the shark with Den's resurrection and the endless retcons regarding the Brannings, most of which occurred during the Kirkwood era, as well as its now-shoddy research combined with a storylining/writing team either so young, so arrogant or so non-plussed that it totally disregards the history and tradition of the show, itself.

Raise Kathy from the grave, and you jump the shark and become the genre's laughing stock. At least in this country.

If you want to bring back any established iconic character, far better to entice Ross Kemp to reprise Grant Mitchell. At least he's alive, but he's probably not pretty enough for the shallow end of the viewing audience.

What future would Kathy have in Walford now though?

Shagging Jack Branning, and establishing the fact that he's heavily into nipped, tucked and botoxed geriatric grannies.

And this time, there are no so-called misquotes. You've hung yourself, the very way the show would hang itself if it brought Kathy back from the grave.

And then, there's the Stupid's stupid ... from Walford Web Kindergarten:-

Well there would be her dealing with what has happened to Ben. Plus there's potential with her sister Steph. A new relationship. Plus she'd actually be in the older category of characters and would totally fill the matriarchal role that Pats has vacated. Plus shed give the Beales a bit of stability, plus you never know what could have happened while she was away. if they can write stories for Dot, Cora etc then they can do it for Kathy. I think she'd make a good friend to Jean and Carol. 

Please, once again, get over yourselves. And I hope the little kindergarten elf who said that (and he's a frequent Kathy-shipper) has a goodly supply of tissues in his corner, because he's ejaculated for nought. Kathy isn't returning, and even if she were, he's living in an even more remote part of Cloud KooKooLand, if he thinks that this nipped, tucked, boobed-out, stretched and botoxed version of Kathy would resemble a matriarch in any way, shape or form. She'd be up for competing for Lucy's beaux. She wouldn't be having cups of tea and gossip with Dot, sitting around the kitchen table listening to Carol or exchanging recipies with Jean. She'd be shagging Jack or Joey Branning and giving her granddaughter a run for the money.

Get over yourselves.