That ITV Commercial ...

Update: Based on this recent thread found on the Digital Spy forum, I'm bumping this for educational purposes.

Some people, including the perpetual EastEnders' paid plant The Queen Vic, find the advert pretentious. Some others think the actors don't appreciate what they are saying.

I would say that many who populate Digital Spy's fora are the ones who don't appreciate the context of the advertisement. Firstly, as one of the few who appreciated the meaning behind the making of the advert pointed out, these are, indeed, trained actors, most of whom would have come into contact with Shakespeare either during their education or their training.

Barbara Knox certainly would have, and her line is given in probably what is the most expert reading of them all.

Looking at EastEnders at the moment, let's consider how many of that current cast would be familiar with Shakespeare's works.

Certainly Daniel Coonan, because he's part of the RSC; Ben Hardy, who plays Peter Beale, most certainly would have also. Like Coonan, he's a graduate of LAMDA and is a public schoolboy. Add Steve McFadden to that list - he's a RADA grad. And Lindsey Coulson, Ann Mitchell and Gillian Wright, who have a strong background in theatre. Ditto June Brown - most people her age in Britain would certainly have had Shakespeare exposure. Letitia Dean, most definitely, and Adam Woodyatt. Certainly Rudolph Walker. And, of course, the Honourable Rita Simons, niece of a peer of the realm - goes without saying. Nitin Ganatra is another, and - surprisingly - Shane Richie. Returnees Michael French, Sam Womack and Barbara Windsor would certainly be familiar with the bard. Add Steve John Shepherd and Charlie Brooks to that list also, as well as Cornell S John, another actor with a theatrical background. Also Jasmyn Banks, who has a drama school pedigree. Linda Henry.

That's fairly impressive, but then those people are probably the strengths of the show, many of whom aren't used sufficiently. 

But then, look at those people on the show who wouldn't be familiar with anything Shakespearian to the extent that they either wouldn't understand the works or would find them boring because they simply wouldn't understand the language. People like:

• Jake Wood: good actor, but I would imagine he wouldn't give a monkey's about Shakespeare, reckoning he'd got this far without the Bard's recommendation.
• Scott Maslen, whose background was catalogue modeling
• Claire Perkins
• Hetti Bywater
• Shona McGarty
• Danielle Harold
• Khali Best
• Jamie Borthwick
• Lorna Fitzgerald
• Diane Parish
• David Witts
• Jacqueline Jossa

Perkins and Parish are total television babes. The rest, the 'yoof" element, are a mishmash of catalogue models, youth club amateur dramatics, reality television shows and people who've come through "fame" academies, which teach acting "techniques" and red carpet interview behaviours (but little of important dramatic works), sprinkled with an assortment from semi-literate settled traveler big fat gypsy backgrounds.

So for all of the naysayers dissing this advert because EastEnders is firmly planted in the doldrums at the moment, I'd say Get over it. (And hope this time that the Messiah really is who you hope he is).

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I mean, this one ...

Everybody's talking about it. 

Someone at ITV came up with the brilliant idea to have various cast members from Coronation Street and Emmerdale, each, recite a line from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 - otherwise known by its first line "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?"

I think this works a treat. The byline at the end of the commercial points out that ITV is pushing drama, and drama on a daily basis as emphasized by its two premier soaps.

Notice, they left out the word "soap." And here's the reason.

Soap operas traditionally aim at a broad spectrum of audience, but their core target audience is ordinary folk. Just like Shakespeare did.

Sure, one studies Shakespeare now, and one also probably has an idea of some actor with plummy vowels standing on stage at the Barbican reciting lines a lot of people watching EastEnders or Corrie or Emmerdale wouldn't understand. But Shakespeare's plays were performed before noblemen and kings, as well as the great unwashed and toothless section of society who populated the fleapit at various Renaissance theatres.

A few hundred years later, we had Charles Dickens present some of his greatest literary masterpieces as weekly or monthly instalments of various magazines, leaving each segment at a significant cliffhanging moment so that people who bought the fare would return the next week and buy the same. In the 19th Century world without television, Dickens gave us the first literary soap opera.

The great irony to the advert above is that the drama presented daily on ITV is just that: drama; and it shouldn't matter that the voices speaking the lines have the flat-vowelled Northern intonation. After all, Shakespeare, himself, was practically a Brummie.

Shakespearian actors have even appeared on soaps. Corrie hosted Sir Ian McKellan for six weeks a few years back as he played a con artist. Ian Reddington, who played Richard Cole, the Walford Market inspector, back in the Nineties (and a Northerner), and Daniel Coonan, who plays Carl White on EastEnders, are both RSC.

Kudos to ITV's brilliant advertising campaign on this move. It's something EastEnders would have thought of years back. 

It could still be done, you know, as a clever advert for their up-and-coming action-filled autumn.

I'd use Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, simply because it fits in so well with Newman's romance-fest and love triangles rampant at the moment on Albert Square.

Imagine the following actors, declaiming a line apiece (and notice, no gurners or mumblers):-

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds

Or bends with the remover to remove:

Oh no! It is an ever fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken

It is the star to every wandering bark

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks

But bears it out, even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Can you imagine EastEnders doing this?

No. Neither can I.