If EastEnders were a Premiership football club, it would be hovering precariously just above the relegation zone. This week would have seen them score a 1-0 defeat of - oh, say Arsenal, only to fall at the final hurdle and have their arses wiped by Fulham.
It's the inconsistency, as well as the assembly line mentality. Yep, that's Janine done and dusted, and Stacey's away for six weeks or so, what's next? Oh yeah, kill Lucy.
The character of Lucy Beale has done jack shit on a stick insect for the past two years. I know that there are actors who've been cast who haven't had any previous professional experience (Jessie Wallace, the actress who plays Nikki Spraggan) or any real professional dramatic training (Danielle Harold, Lacey Turner), but mostly these characters, if they're worth their salt, absorb from the talent around them and actually improve to a certain degree.
This is exactly why the likes of the Moon Goons and David Witts failed epically. They were hired on the basis of their looks, with no professional experience, and didn't improve with time. And because of this, no matter how hard TPTB tried to accommodate them in their general scheme of things, they failed.
Remember Anthony Moon was supposed to be the smart brother? Yeah, sure.
Tyler went from ladies' man to a very embarrassing bad-tempered lout to the forced issue of him and Whitney being the next ingenue couple, and people hated that and him. And Whitney.
And who can forget that Joey and Lucy Beale were billed as this generation's Sharon and Grant, the next power couple on the Square. That failed. They tried the forbidden love with Lauren, and for Witts, that failed also.
As for Bywater, a catalogue model who clearly has eating issues because she looks like a reject from Auschwitz when she isn't looking like a spoiled and sullen child trying to grow up too quickly, the less said about her the better.
She's going. She's toast. Guess she'll have to move out of the flat she shares with that other eminent thespian and daughter of an embezzler ...
THE. WORST. ACTRESS. EVER. TO. APPEAR. IN. EASTENDERS.
EastEnders' biggest problems are its inconsistency, its weak writing room and the ego of its executive producer. Friday's episode showed all those loser traits. Friday night is a difficult nut to crack in SoapLand, and 6.6 million viewers isn't saying much at the end of what was touted as a big week.
Why this episode failed ...
Bar Wars.
I make no bones about the fact that I don't trust Dominic Treadwell-Collins as far as I can throw a stick, and I don't give a rat's arse how much he'll big up his intentions to restore Sharon to her so-called rightful glory days or how much he says she's his favourite character, that's bullshit.
If he meant what he said, then Sharon would be back in the Vic and Mick would be the older of the two younger Hanley brothers and her brother. Instead, we get the Carters, fronted by arguably the most divisive female character in the show's history, and we've got a man with whom Sharon's had a romantic entanglement on and off for the better part of twenty years, cosying up to that stinking old leather-skinned alcoholic fart on the sly.
We've got Sharon's new up-market establishment already primed to fail and fall alongside the Vic, especially with one of the Carters infiltrating the workforce there in order to sabotage the establishment. Hell, at this point in time, I believe Phil will even be in on the swindle also. Because of Shirley, you know.
And that sucks.
Of course, in this Bar Wars analogy, you know that the Carters will win, and that means Shirley. In DTC's very own Walford kingdom, Shirley is set to be Queen of the Square. She's already pushed Mick aside as head of his immediate family, she's got her name above the door of the Vic, she appropriated the position of guardian of Dot's grief, shared a scene with that other putrid piece of pseudo-omniscience, Jane, when she had nothing to do with her ever before, and now she's dictating the odds against Sharon.
Shirley is a drink-sodden, sour-faced, old scrote who needs her alcoholism addressed.
I hate was the previous two producers did to the character of Sharon, and I hate the fact that this one isn't doing much better.
Under Treadwell-Collins, Sharon is the sly bitch, who accidentally on purpose arranged for her bar staff interviews to be held in the Vic, right under Linda's jealous nose and rubbing her nose in it. She's also a snobby cow who looks down the clientele, many of whom she knew as children, and she's a bitch. Far be it ever for Linda to be identified as such, even though we know she's a homophobe and a racist.
But this is Treadwell-Collins's Walford, where no one and nothing existed pre-Shirley.
The only thing I can see happening for the good is Johnny Carter, the mole, bonding with Sharon and feeling guilty about fleecing her. (A re-hash of Alice spying on Janine for Michael?) Something will happen to Sharon's pub, and my bet is that Shirley will burn it down. She has form, having destroyed Mick's pub and Ian's restaurant, but that won't be Shirley's fault. Nothing ever is. Another entitled bitch.
And as much as I like Mick and Linda, their bedroom antics, grunting and giggling beneath the covers is yet another version of Kat and Alfie doing much the same thing. How long before Linda's telling people about Mick snoring and farting?
Jane the Ignorant Slut.
Or rather ...
Please, can someone kill her too? I want her to fall into a swamp-like cowpile someplace and disappear. The Wise Woman of Walford, with all the right words to say about everything, goes crying to Dot, someone with whom she shared scant screen-time in a previous existence, where this time she's told by Dot to "take charge" of Ian and show him who's in charge. Really, Dot? And you think Jane has more brains than any of Ian's previous wives? Jane's still hanging around Ian, and I find it difficult to believe that Dot would tell Jane to go in and lord it over the son, grandson and nephew of Dot's closest friends.
All of a sudden, we're supposed to believe Jane gained a myriad of business experience and gainful taste, playing sous-chef in a glorified pie-and-mash shop in a provincial British town, that her business plan and her ideas are far superior to Ian's and that she's suddenly become sexually desireable to three men. She is and always was a self-serving, smug, hypocritical, judgemental bitch, and I hope she buggers on out of Walford.
Some months ago, she's telling the Beale kids, including her son, that she's no longer a part of their family dynamic, and that they should be turning to Denise, and now she's undermining Denise. As for her son, she seems to revel in the title of "mother" with precious little of the responsibility, but then, this is the woman, who stood by goggle-eyed as a four-year-old demolished the house with a bottle of ketchup.
The idea that this bovine, self-righteous bitch has single-handedly returned to Walford to right the world's wrongs and to be ravished by three different men, is a joke; but again, this is Treadwell-Collins, who does nothing by half and who seems incapable, in some instances of showing that characters bear elements of light and dark, some of which show grey at times.
Jane was always a greedy, snobby bitch who wasn't really above conniving with Ian to cheat Sharon out of the pub she inherited from her father's death. She wasn't above cheating on Ian as well.
Jane is still treating Ian as if he were a recalcitrant adolescent, and we're being asked to believe that these two people love each other? Ian admitted as much to his gay punter that, whilst he was fond of Jane, he didn't love her. He even told Glenda Mitchell that Jane wasn't up to much, and Jane, herself, wept and wailed and bared her soul to a roomful of women, including Glenda, Ian's niece and the woman to whom he's currently engaged about how awful a man and a husband Ian was.
Send this bitch to the abbotoir.
Mutton Dressed as Lamb ... or Roxy and Tina.
Roxy and Tina, grow the fuck up. There's nothing more pathetic than two women in their late thirties acting and dressing like children. Woxy wants a birfday par'hy to celebrate the fact that she doesn't look thirty-six. She wants to stay out and drink all night long, especially since Jack, in some unseen place close enough to Walford, has Amy for the night. She's forgotten that she'll be hungover tomorrow morning when Jack returns Amy, so the psychopath will have to step in and cream her knickers at the prospect of playing Mommy.
Last night, Roxy looked like mutton dressed as lamb, and Tina looked like a New Age version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. It amazes me how their families mollycoddle both of them, as if they were children, themselves. Ronnie uses a creepy-sounding babytalk voice to speak to Roxy, as if Roxy were child-like, and Mick does the same thing with Tina.
Seriously, are both these women retarded?
Roxy reckons she's thirty-six and has nothing to show for her life, so that's how much she rates her daughter. Tina thinks more of her hard-to-get Kelly Holmes clone girlfriend than she does helping out her family.
Even more bizarre is the fact that both these childwomen live with and are in thrall emotionally and psychologically to an older sister. Really, how many siblings in their thirties, forties and fifties still live together?
Albert Square, the land of perpetual childhood.
So the Bitchell Blisters walk into an empty Vic that's soon filled up with extras we've never seen, and Aleks, who's clearly interested in Woxy enough to put his hand on her waist, which doesn't please Wonnie, who's jealous, more of the fact that someone's touching up her "her" property than by the fact that Woxy's got a fella and Wonnie's without. Aleks's life card just got marked, but he doesn't know it. I reckon the three isolated men in the programme now are being lined up as Ronnie-fodder - one as a victim (Jake), one as a culprit (Aleks) and one who'll discover exactly what she's been up to (Charlie, or whoever he is). I noticed neither Phil, Sharon nor Jay put in an appearance at Woxy's party. That's certainly telling.
Kill Beale and The Gurning Girl.
So now the storyline about the atrocious Lucy Beale's death has begun in earnest, and the line-up of potential killers is forming. Last night we were presented with Billy Mitchell. Tonight, three more suspects entered the frame - Jake Stone, Max and Lauren Branning.
Lucy is so incredibly rude, and Lauren is so incredibly thick, I can only imagine the writing room has been told to dispense with Lauren's one brain cell, because certainly Abi, who's barely seen these days, wouldn't stand by and allow a mate to speak to her father like that and in her father's home as well. And Max should have called her out on her insouciance, as well as Lauren being well aware that Max was too concerned about more important matters than how Lauren looked for a joke of an interview. His mind is on Stacey (still), but also Bradley, in the wake of Nick's death, and the fact that he's being tested for the BRCA2 gene - something which might hit Lauren for six if she tests positive for it.
And they can talk to Max like a piece of shit one instant and ask him for a grand the next is simply gobsmacking. Especially Lucy's remark about a father not wanting to invest in his daughter's business. Well, I didn't notice Ian giving Lucy any money. The throwaway line of Cross my heart and hope to die was too obvious to the point of cheesiness. We know she's going to die; in fact, we can't wait. Because the other obvious thing is that the delayed identity of the killer will be the clincher for this storyline. The big questions for tonight are: what did Lucy "do" to get Max to contribute a grand to her business venture, and who was sending her the text message about Lauren not needing to know?
Jake Stone, chef, is now also a webpage designer, and Lucy's association with him is irking Lauren. Why? He's no longer married, and if Lucy wants to link up with a perv who fancies very young women who look younger, that's not her problem anymore, unless she's jealous. Jake Stone is a red herring, but someone posited to me today the real possibility of Max being the killer, but in an accidental way and not realising he'd done that. Or even if he did, Max is the type who'd let that sort of incident eat away at his soul. He couldn't look at Ian, having lost a child, himself; although the way Lucy's panning out, whoever does kill her deserves to be given the Freedom of Walford for freeing the show of such an awful character.
Was there anything I did like? Yes, Mick's trip to check on Stan and finding the intruder who whacked him. I'm betting Mr Hoodie is the second fleeting sighting of Dean, and so we have yet another long hello. Bet Dean won't get as many duff-duffs as Stacey did though. Still, can't be long. EastEnders, you blew it with this episode.
It's the inconsistency, as well as the assembly line mentality. Yep, that's Janine done and dusted, and Stacey's away for six weeks or so, what's next? Oh yeah, kill Lucy.
The character of Lucy Beale has done jack shit on a stick insect for the past two years. I know that there are actors who've been cast who haven't had any previous professional experience (Jessie Wallace, the actress who plays Nikki Spraggan) or any real professional dramatic training (Danielle Harold, Lacey Turner), but mostly these characters, if they're worth their salt, absorb from the talent around them and actually improve to a certain degree.
This is exactly why the likes of the Moon Goons and David Witts failed epically. They were hired on the basis of their looks, with no professional experience, and didn't improve with time. And because of this, no matter how hard TPTB tried to accommodate them in their general scheme of things, they failed.
Remember Anthony Moon was supposed to be the smart brother? Yeah, sure.
Tyler went from ladies' man to a very embarrassing bad-tempered lout to the forced issue of him and Whitney being the next ingenue couple, and people hated that and him. And Whitney.
And who can forget that Joey and Lucy Beale were billed as this generation's Sharon and Grant, the next power couple on the Square. That failed. They tried the forbidden love with Lauren, and for Witts, that failed also.
As for Bywater, a catalogue model who clearly has eating issues because she looks like a reject from Auschwitz when she isn't looking like a spoiled and sullen child trying to grow up too quickly, the less said about her the better.
She's going. She's toast. Guess she'll have to move out of the flat she shares with that other eminent thespian and daughter of an embezzler ...
THE. WORST. ACTRESS. EVER. TO. APPEAR. IN. EASTENDERS.
EastEnders' biggest problems are its inconsistency, its weak writing room and the ego of its executive producer. Friday's episode showed all those loser traits. Friday night is a difficult nut to crack in SoapLand, and 6.6 million viewers isn't saying much at the end of what was touted as a big week.
Why this episode failed ...
Bar Wars.
If he meant what he said, then Sharon would be back in the Vic and Mick would be the older of the two younger Hanley brothers and her brother. Instead, we get the Carters, fronted by arguably the most divisive female character in the show's history, and we've got a man with whom Sharon's had a romantic entanglement on and off for the better part of twenty years, cosying up to that stinking old leather-skinned alcoholic fart on the sly.
We've got Sharon's new up-market establishment already primed to fail and fall alongside the Vic, especially with one of the Carters infiltrating the workforce there in order to sabotage the establishment. Hell, at this point in time, I believe Phil will even be in on the swindle also. Because of Shirley, you know.
And that sucks.
Of course, in this Bar Wars analogy, you know that the Carters will win, and that means Shirley. In DTC's very own Walford kingdom, Shirley is set to be Queen of the Square. She's already pushed Mick aside as head of his immediate family, she's got her name above the door of the Vic, she appropriated the position of guardian of Dot's grief, shared a scene with that other putrid piece of pseudo-omniscience, Jane, when she had nothing to do with her ever before, and now she's dictating the odds against Sharon.
Shirley is a drink-sodden, sour-faced, old scrote who needs her alcoholism addressed.
I hate was the previous two producers did to the character of Sharon, and I hate the fact that this one isn't doing much better.
Under Treadwell-Collins, Sharon is the sly bitch, who accidentally on purpose arranged for her bar staff interviews to be held in the Vic, right under Linda's jealous nose and rubbing her nose in it. She's also a snobby cow who looks down the clientele, many of whom she knew as children, and she's a bitch. Far be it ever for Linda to be identified as such, even though we know she's a homophobe and a racist.
But this is Treadwell-Collins's Walford, where no one and nothing existed pre-Shirley.
The only thing I can see happening for the good is Johnny Carter, the mole, bonding with Sharon and feeling guilty about fleecing her. (A re-hash of Alice spying on Janine for Michael?) Something will happen to Sharon's pub, and my bet is that Shirley will burn it down. She has form, having destroyed Mick's pub and Ian's restaurant, but that won't be Shirley's fault. Nothing ever is. Another entitled bitch.
And as much as I like Mick and Linda, their bedroom antics, grunting and giggling beneath the covers is yet another version of Kat and Alfie doing much the same thing. How long before Linda's telling people about Mick snoring and farting?
Jane the Ignorant Slut.
Or rather ...
Please, can someone kill her too? I want her to fall into a swamp-like cowpile someplace and disappear. The Wise Woman of Walford, with all the right words to say about everything, goes crying to Dot, someone with whom she shared scant screen-time in a previous existence, where this time she's told by Dot to "take charge" of Ian and show him who's in charge. Really, Dot? And you think Jane has more brains than any of Ian's previous wives? Jane's still hanging around Ian, and I find it difficult to believe that Dot would tell Jane to go in and lord it over the son, grandson and nephew of Dot's closest friends.
All of a sudden, we're supposed to believe Jane gained a myriad of business experience and gainful taste, playing sous-chef in a glorified pie-and-mash shop in a provincial British town, that her business plan and her ideas are far superior to Ian's and that she's suddenly become sexually desireable to three men. She is and always was a self-serving, smug, hypocritical, judgemental bitch, and I hope she buggers on out of Walford.
Some months ago, she's telling the Beale kids, including her son, that she's no longer a part of their family dynamic, and that they should be turning to Denise, and now she's undermining Denise. As for her son, she seems to revel in the title of "mother" with precious little of the responsibility, but then, this is the woman, who stood by goggle-eyed as a four-year-old demolished the house with a bottle of ketchup.
The idea that this bovine, self-righteous bitch has single-handedly returned to Walford to right the world's wrongs and to be ravished by three different men, is a joke; but again, this is Treadwell-Collins, who does nothing by half and who seems incapable, in some instances of showing that characters bear elements of light and dark, some of which show grey at times.
Jane was always a greedy, snobby bitch who wasn't really above conniving with Ian to cheat Sharon out of the pub she inherited from her father's death. She wasn't above cheating on Ian as well.
Jane is still treating Ian as if he were a recalcitrant adolescent, and we're being asked to believe that these two people love each other? Ian admitted as much to his gay punter that, whilst he was fond of Jane, he didn't love her. He even told Glenda Mitchell that Jane wasn't up to much, and Jane, herself, wept and wailed and bared her soul to a roomful of women, including Glenda, Ian's niece and the woman to whom he's currently engaged about how awful a man and a husband Ian was.
Send this bitch to the abbotoir.
Mutton Dressed as Lamb ... or Roxy and Tina.
Roxy and Tina, grow the fuck up. There's nothing more pathetic than two women in their late thirties acting and dressing like children. Woxy wants a birfday par'hy to celebrate the fact that she doesn't look thirty-six. She wants to stay out and drink all night long, especially since Jack, in some unseen place close enough to Walford, has Amy for the night. She's forgotten that she'll be hungover tomorrow morning when Jack returns Amy, so the psychopath will have to step in and cream her knickers at the prospect of playing Mommy.
Last night, Roxy looked like mutton dressed as lamb, and Tina looked like a New Age version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. It amazes me how their families mollycoddle both of them, as if they were children, themselves. Ronnie uses a creepy-sounding babytalk voice to speak to Roxy, as if Roxy were child-like, and Mick does the same thing with Tina.
Seriously, are both these women retarded?
Roxy reckons she's thirty-six and has nothing to show for her life, so that's how much she rates her daughter. Tina thinks more of her hard-to-get Kelly Holmes clone girlfriend than she does helping out her family.
Even more bizarre is the fact that both these childwomen live with and are in thrall emotionally and psychologically to an older sister. Really, how many siblings in their thirties, forties and fifties still live together?
Albert Square, the land of perpetual childhood.
So the Bitchell Blisters walk into an empty Vic that's soon filled up with extras we've never seen, and Aleks, who's clearly interested in Woxy enough to put his hand on her waist, which doesn't please Wonnie, who's jealous, more of the fact that someone's touching up her "her" property than by the fact that Woxy's got a fella and Wonnie's without. Aleks's life card just got marked, but he doesn't know it. I reckon the three isolated men in the programme now are being lined up as Ronnie-fodder - one as a victim (Jake), one as a culprit (Aleks) and one who'll discover exactly what she's been up to (Charlie, or whoever he is). I noticed neither Phil, Sharon nor Jay put in an appearance at Woxy's party. That's certainly telling.
Kill Beale and The Gurning Girl.
So now the storyline about the atrocious Lucy Beale's death has begun in earnest, and the line-up of potential killers is forming. Last night we were presented with Billy Mitchell. Tonight, three more suspects entered the frame - Jake Stone, Max and Lauren Branning.
Lucy is so incredibly rude, and Lauren is so incredibly thick, I can only imagine the writing room has been told to dispense with Lauren's one brain cell, because certainly Abi, who's barely seen these days, wouldn't stand by and allow a mate to speak to her father like that and in her father's home as well. And Max should have called her out on her insouciance, as well as Lauren being well aware that Max was too concerned about more important matters than how Lauren looked for a joke of an interview. His mind is on Stacey (still), but also Bradley, in the wake of Nick's death, and the fact that he's being tested for the BRCA2 gene - something which might hit Lauren for six if she tests positive for it.
And they can talk to Max like a piece of shit one instant and ask him for a grand the next is simply gobsmacking. Especially Lucy's remark about a father not wanting to invest in his daughter's business. Well, I didn't notice Ian giving Lucy any money. The throwaway line of Cross my heart and hope to die was too obvious to the point of cheesiness. We know she's going to die; in fact, we can't wait. Because the other obvious thing is that the delayed identity of the killer will be the clincher for this storyline. The big questions for tonight are: what did Lucy "do" to get Max to contribute a grand to her business venture, and who was sending her the text message about Lauren not needing to know?
Jake Stone, chef, is now also a webpage designer, and Lucy's association with him is irking Lauren. Why? He's no longer married, and if Lucy wants to link up with a perv who fancies very young women who look younger, that's not her problem anymore, unless she's jealous. Jake Stone is a red herring, but someone posited to me today the real possibility of Max being the killer, but in an accidental way and not realising he'd done that. Or even if he did, Max is the type who'd let that sort of incident eat away at his soul. He couldn't look at Ian, having lost a child, himself; although the way Lucy's panning out, whoever does kill her deserves to be given the Freedom of Walford for freeing the show of such an awful character.
Was there anything I did like? Yes, Mick's trip to check on Stan and finding the intruder who whacked him. I'm betting Mr Hoodie is the second fleeting sighting of Dean, and so we have yet another long hello. Bet Dean won't get as many duff-duffs as Stacey did though. Still, can't be long. EastEnders, you blew it with this episode.
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