Another Fine Mess - Review 09.07.2013

Here's another fine mess I'm into honey
A little bit sad, it's a little bit funny
Sit and listen if you want to know the score
It's a story that you've probably heard before

Here's another fine mess I stumbled into
Sorry a state as I've ever been to
I'm a fighter but they got me on the floor
Don't believe I'm gonna take this any more

Says it all, doesn't it? Pretty much describes EastEnders for a long time now. Tonight's offering was from dire Daisy Coulam, another writer TPTB seriously ought to be thinking about terminating, contract-wise. Once again, tonight, we saw EastEnders at its utter worst - a family dominating screentime, consisting of characters about whom most viewers couldn't get a rat's arse. They're unlikeable and uninteresting, andafter the SoapSquawk tweet today, it's clear that the con of the so-called "new family" will now consist of Dexter, Ava the Rava and Sam the Sham. 

Got that? A Branning connection. Branning satellites. They made the Brannings an interracial entity. With Richard in Portugal and Penny in Paris, they're also international now as well. We got conned, early on, with Newman's gushing promise of this fabled "new family," only to find out now that there really are no plans, except what looks like pushing Ava the Rava and her brood on us, considering the fact that they've garnered every duff-duff this week, including the love and warmth duff-duff tonight. I mean, what could be more heart-warming than a father welcomed home to play football with his little boy - ne'mind, the boy is twenty years old.

At midnight, we were presented with the surprising news that Barbara Windsor is returning to the soap for one special episode in the autumn. I couldn't be more pleased. I miss Peggy. I miss her present in the Mitchell dynamic, and I appreciate that Newman is trying to re-build the Mitchells just as she's re-building the Beales. I suppose not much damage could be done to an iconic character like Peggy in 30 minutes or an hour at a stretch, not like the sort of character assassination Kirkwood managed with Kat and Bianca and Newman managed with Sharon and is still managing with Bianca.

Yes, EastEnders is a mishmash of uninspiring characters, bullies, a plethora of unfunny village idiots and an assortment of deeply unpleasant people.

We had all of that tonight, and this is a show which is bleeding viewers. Only an idiot would sit through tonight's episode and praise it to the hilt.

I guess there's always xTonix, who doesn't realise that she can't vote "for" David Cameron unless she lives in his constituency. That's the least of her intelligence problems ... like the show's.

The Newman Negroes Part Deux.

Yes, here we are again, folks, for our second visit of the week to the Walford Ghetto.

I have some questions about Ava the Rava and her associates.

First of all, does she work? This is the proverbial sixty-four thousand dollar question. Yesterday, she mentioned going to work, grabbed her laptop bag and attempted to go out the door wearing tatty old jeans and a casual top. She didn't get far, needless to say, and ended up in the pub at lunchtime, as you do.

Today, she was dressed more professionally, and again, she grabbed the laptop, but she was distracted by her spoiled rotten immature son's latest temper tantrum. Dex-TAAAAAAA had packed his bags and was outside, basically, acting like a seven year-old sulky child, kicking a football against the wall of the house.

Within minutes of her confrontation with him, the laptop bag has done a runner, and Ava the Rava is detouring by the cafe for a private moment with Sam the Sham ... before she heads off to the pub, again at lunchtime. 

So I'm waiting for Ava the Rava to get the push from Walford Primary. Because every teacher, ex-teacher, administrator and would-be teacher has noticed how she does nothing but skulk around the Square, snog and fuck Sam, hide from Dexter and whine.

Here are some samples of the tarnished Magic Negro on the whine tonight:-

Dex-TAAAAA ... you're mah baby, Dex-TAAAAA.

You have a right to be angry, baby. Be angry.

You cahhhhhhnn't leave, Dex-TAAAAA. We've always been togevah. We're a team. I'll never leave you.

Puke.

But after all, she is ...

THE. WORST. ACTRESS. EVAH. IN. 

EASTENDERS.

Much later, with Sam, we were treated to her special brand of public service announcement acting, in a scene with Sam the Sham.

I watched a shy and frightened little boy ... grow into a beautiful, confident man.

(Er, no you didn't. You raised a spoiled, entitled, little asshole, whom you've allowed to call the shots from day one. You haven't even encouraged him into higher education and seen that he spoke properly. You, madame, are an epic fail as a parent.)

I spent a lifetime promising that I'd never abandon him, like you did.

(Once again, no. You indulged his every whim until now he's convinced that he's the centre of your universe to the extent that in his snotty, little pea-brain, you exist for him.)

Instead of raising a positive specimen of a son, she's raised an abject little turd, who calls the shots, and is now calling the shots. He is an adult. If he wants to leave home, she should call  his bluff. She's entitled to a life, herself, and you can bet any amount of money, he wouldn't think twice about moving out on her if the right bit of skirt came along.

As for Cornell S John, to paraphrase Bianca tonight, his Sam really is all over the place. He seems to exist in a universe filled with bad imitations of acting styles of actors infinitely better and more established than himself. Last night, he wasn't James Earl Jones. Tonight, he wasn't Billy Dee Williams in Brian's Song.

My second question is this: Is Dexter retarded?

I ask that because there seems to be an epidemic of retardation running rampant through the Square at the moment, and also because I want to know just how many fucking epiphanies does one character need before he sees sense, and he still doesn't.

Dexter is so tactless, so self-absorbed and entitled, that he's made atrocious and thoughtless remarks countless numbers of times about Sam and what he'd wish on him in front of Jay, who lost his father in the worst way possible. How many times does Jay have to reference Jase Dyer and lecture Dexter on how much he wishes he could have his father back, if only for five minutes. Not just Jay, but Phil Mitchell's given him avuncular advice about giving his old man a chance, referencing his own failure with his own children.

Today, Abi the Dough-Faced Girl was brought into the equation, complete with the ubiquitous giggle after every sentence to bring home to the sulky brat that even though Max wasn't a very nice person and often mentally wasn't there for his children (trying to leave with Stacey at Christmas 2010), but he always loved his children. Why, oh why, are they trying to make Abi the Dough-Faced Girl sound wise? Especially after last night's outburst at Kirsty, over Kirsty's pregnancy lie to Max? Yes, that was awful, but Abi the Dough-Faced Girl's mother has done worse, like try to bury Abi the Dough-Faced Girl's father alive.

Still, after everyone ganging up on poor widdle Dexter, it was the sound of his mother's tears - boo-hoo, Ava has to give up the man who gave her up twenty years ago. She's almost forty-nine. Maybe she's going through menopause too. And she probably didn't make it to school again. That prompted Dexter to do a bad impression of Gumby running across the Square ...

... just to bring Sam the Sham home to tea ... and a game of football by the side of the house. Again. As you do when you're twenty. Well, I guess he and Sam the Sham have a lot of time to make up. I wonder if Daddy will tuck him in and read him a bedtime story.

Daddy's home ...

Does EastEnders Promote Bullying?

That's another question I'm asking - because it seems that they do nothing but show successive instances of women bullying other women or men and having a laugh about it, or forcing their ways onto more vulnerable people.

We had an ironic circumstance tonight, with Bianca still shadowing and passive-aggressively bullying Jean, who's feeling enormous guilt at having destroyed Ian's business as well as fear from police repercussion. Bianca watches Jean like a witch, even to the point of whisking her away from helping Ian clean up to take her forcibly to the Butcher abode in order to read her the riot act.

The irony comes with Kat. We were treated to two scenes of Kat, once again, taunting and tormenting Tamway, who's her market superior - first making him believe that his fly was open, then reckoning he wore plaid underwear. Tamwar accused her of bullying, but it didn't phase Newman's version of Mother Teresa, the defender of the helpless and the weak, when it suits her. 

Once again, Newman lied to the viewers, We were told that Kat was going on a voyage of self-discovery this year, that would atone for her atrocious behaviour of the past two years. I'm still waiting for her to admit responsibility for the break-up of her marriage and the enormous psychological and emotional abuse of her husband. She's blamed everyone for this, but herself.

And why is it deemed a comedy for Kat wantonly to bully and torment people like Tamwar, who's done no harm but to do his job, and Mr Lister, whom she blackmailed?

For what it's worth, Jean is beginning to show signs of a bipolar episode - wittering on about Ian ad nauseam, and she's still convinced that Ian was sexually harassing her that night. So disjointed were her ramblings that Kat tracked her to Bianca's abode, and that was actually one of the more watchable incidences of this episode - to see Kat round on Bianca about her treatment of Jean. 

That was a tour de force - with Bianca calling out Kat's hypocrisy when Kat was admonishing Bianca to put Jean's condition and her fragile state to the fore instead of worrying about her own skanky hide going back to prison. Kat did make a point - what Bianca and Shirley did was actually criminal damage ... even though Bianca still insisted it was an "accident."

Go figure. 

So rhetorically, I ask once again, is Bianca retarded? Because I think this Bianca is. Or maybe merely stupid, especially the way she was forced into admitting that she thought Jean was what the Italians call a deficiente because of her bi-polar syndrome. So here we have the beautifully ignorant scene of an ignorant person literally calling a person suffering from bi-polar syndrome weak and mentally stupid. Bianca should look in the mirror.

But both women were equally as ignorant, discussing Jean in the third person as if she were n ot present. That's not only rude, it's patronising and condescending, and in this respect, Kat was just as ignorant as Bianca - especially when Kat suggested that Shirley and Bianca own up (something they'd never do) and say that Jean was an innocent bystander, which prompted Jean's own confession - she wasn't an innocent bystander. She was a willing participant in criminal damage.

Are we meant to think more of Kat for this supposed selflessness? It doesn't belie the atrocious way she treated Tamwar. Or are we supposed to forgive Bianca's indiscretion by virtue of the fact that her luggish dolt of a son, Liam, is home and witness to a case where he was bullied and "criminally assaulted." You'd think a dimwit like Bianca would have learned from that, but no. She's still stupid enough to be raising Liam off a chicken nuggets diet.

That wasn't all of the bullying tonight. There was Cora the Bora with whom we had to contend.

Why TPTB don't make more of Cora's alcoholism and just utter vileness is beyond me. And what, pray tell, does Patrick see in such a shitass of a human being? Yet another lazy, entitled bitch, who belittles Dot's faith after having virtually rendered her homeless, she closes the launderette for the afternoon because she thinks she'll spend it boozing with Patrick.

The guest character, Betty Spragg, seems nice enough. Patrick likes her, but the way Cora treated her at the luncheon, for which Betty had prepared all the food, was ugly, rude and downright mean. Patrick is too good for Cora. He's a  gentleman, and if he has any common sense, after witnessing her appalling bitch of a performance and her vile treatment of Betty, he should tell this common piece of white trash where to go and how to get there.

Of course, she made a beeline for the pub, where she had to buy her own booze and share a table with her equally self-pitying and miserable Negro daughter, where they comforted each other with misplaced platitudes nurturing their own self-pity.

Poor Cora. She can't do right for doing wrong. Then she should shut the fuck up. Like Bianca, who simply can't go back to prison. Then she shouldn't commit crimes.

Stupid women. And bullies. EastEnders never promoted bullying. Why are they doing so now? And why are seemingly nice people targeted as being weak and appropriate targets for the mean girls of Walford in particular? Newman deserves a slapping for this.

My Sharona.

She's back. And so is Lord Fautleroy, complete with his little plastic blue flight case.

And she's clean. Or so she says. At least, apart from Dot, she didn't try to worm her way into staying with either Ian or Phil, although it's obvious from Phil's look in his last scene with her and his prescient knowledge of addiction, himself, that it's a one-day-at-a-time process, which Sharon acknowledged - as well as she acknowledged that she would work at the R and R, but not in a management capacity, taking orders from him and Janine.

Funny thing ... before Sharon left, it seemed that she and Shirley were forging a grudging respect for each other. And tonight, Shirley sought to bring Sharon into the "Bitter-and-Twisted-Done-Over-by-Phil-Mitchell-Haters Club.

Sharon wasn't buying. She wasn't done over by Phil. She recognises that she is in the wrong. On first impressions again, Sharon seems stronger, but this rejection is goingto be enough to set the pathetic Shirley on a hate campaign against both Sharon and her son.

Once again, a seemingly nice person is targeted.

And NO, MONA, Phil does NOT love Shirley.

The Mintless Murray Bit.

Well, of course, it was done with Kim - for comedy reasons, as in funny-ha-ha. Not. Kim fancies that ugly Celtic Tunnel-mouthed cretin otherwise known as Andy Murray. Barring him (and his putrid mother, who'd go along on the honeymoon), she wants Juan Martin del Potro.

And Kimbledon's Palace.

Piss poor, EastEnders. Better to have just had someone like Patrick or Alfie comment on a headline in the paper. 

I think this about sums up EastEnders' view of its own situation right now - they've been down so long, it looks like up for them ...

Ladies and gentlemen, Fat Elvis has left the building.