The Man of Constant Sorrow - Review:- 28.04.2014

Tonight's episode made me realise just why I can't muster any sympathy for the Beales right now.

They simply aren't very nice, or likeable, people.

Oedipus Beale.

Ian Beale, the man of constant sorrow and the Oedipus Rex of Albert Square. Ian has been going in circles for the past 20 years, and tonight, his entire ethos was summed up behind the meaning of three very cruel words he exclaimed to his youngest child:-

You're not Lucy.

DTC is a great con artist, and he's got the Millennials chomping at the bit and munching the carpet in eager anticipation of resolving their newest hero's dilemma. The Millennials have discovered Ian Beale, arguably the greatest weeper in the history of EastEnders. Poor Ian has replaced "Poor Dot," for whom they allow a smidgeon of sympathy each time she's allotted a storyline.

Now that the Millennials have latched onto Ian Beale, of course, they know everything there is to know about him, having watched the show since it's beginning (for them) in 2006. Seriously.

Anyone of us who've watched the show from its beginning, or at least since the late 1980s understands Ian Beale very well. He's a person who never learns from his mistakes. He's greedy, grabbing, weaselly, snobby, condescending, mean-spirited and selfish. In his entire life he's only had two friends, and one of those friends was his cousin.

Fair dos to Dominic Treadwell-Collins for unintentionally summing up Ian's greatest psychological dilemmas tonight in one fell swoop and defining the governing motivation of Ian's entire adult life, joining it with the biggest guiding factor of his childhood.

The Jesuits say Give me the child until he is seven, and I'll show you the man.

Ian and his brother David are the biggest sort of manboys on the Square, and they both suffer from terminal Oedipal complexes.

Forget Pete Beale. He was a crap dad to both his sons. Instead, look at Kathy and Pat.

Kathy spoiled Ian rotten (the way she later spoiled Ben rotten, and look how he turned out). Pat neglected David. Jane the Cow is a Kathy replica. She even sounds like Kathy and treats Ian like a recalcitrant schoolboy. Carol the Slapper, on a good day, is a no-nonsense earthmother, who thrives giving good advice to a gaggle of kids who aren't hers.

Ian wants to be mollycoddled and mildly disciplined by Kathy-Jane and then he wants to fuck her for comfort. David wants to be looked after by Carol-Pat and then he wants to fuck her for comfort.

However, there's an even more important guiding factor in Ian's adult life, which might be categorised as The Hunt for Lost Cindy.

Lost Cindy has dominated Ian's life for more than 20 years. Cindy was the absolute love of his life. It didn't matter to Ian that Cindy treated him like shit, that she cheated on him repeatedly and tried to pass another man's child on him as his. It didn't matter that she slept with his brother and paid to have Ian killed or that she kidnapped two of his children and nabbed a sugar daddy to pay for the best kind of legal advice to get her children back.

Ian simply loved her, and he would have had her back a third time, if he could have done so. Ian named Cindy's youngest child after her, and he would have taken the baby to raise, had Gina Williams not wanted to do so.

Everything connected with Cindy Ian loved best, and that included his cacky daughter Lucy. It's why he allowed Lucy to speak to him as though he were a piece of shit and to disrespect him openly. It's what her mother used to do. It's why he ran, blubbing, after hairy CindyBoy the Greek, being chauffered away in a car; and it's probably why he'll "appropriate" CindyBoy and her child as his own, and probably why, at some point past her sixteenth birthday, Ian will probably shag hairy CindyBoy the Greek. She's part of Cindy Snr and part of the legend that wasn't Lucy.

Grossed out?

Don't be. Ian Beale isn't tragic. He's horny, and his horniness lays about his shoulders like a flasher's coat. CindyBoy isn't related to him by blood, but she's the daughter of the love of his life and the mother of two of his children.

And Ian has been well-known for sleeping with women or wanting to sleep with women whom he'd watched as chilldren at play in the Square. Janine Butcher and Clare Bates will attest to that.

And as we listen to Ian lament openly the fact that he's only left with an adult son and a younger child, both of whom don't measure up to the anorexic little mouth-breather who got whacked, consider this:-

People need to realise that Ian spent the better part of 1999 emotionally blackmailing a potential trophy bride into staying with him by telling her that Lucy, who was then six years old, had cancer. That's right, he blatantly lied about the health of his only daughter in order to keep a beautiful woman in his bed.

Last night, he sat at the table and used his youngest child as bait to induce that child's adopted mother to return to him as his wife. He was quite open in telling Jane that he wanted Denise out of the house, quite blasé in suggesting that both he and Jane just casually dump Denise and Masood. After all, who cares, as long as they're together. Besides, there are Peter and Bobby, above all, Bobby, Jane's son, to consider. When Jane kept demurring, Bobby sought to comfort his father by reminding him that he, Bobby, was still there for him.

Yes, but you're not Lucy!

Aye, there's the rub.

You see, Bobby's never been big in the grand design of the Beale legacy. Even Steven was more important to Ian, and Steven isn't even a Beale. Steven and the twins were Cindy's children. Bobby was the unplanned and unwanted afterthought - the child of a plain, overweight woman who nannied for Ian and who was driven to infidelity by his passive-aggressiveness, a trait she aptly learned to acquire, herself.

So horrified at the thought of having a child with Laura was Ian, that he had a vasectomy - or at least, he thought he did. When he discovered she was pregnant, he hit her with that fact, which led to her confession of infidelity. Ian didn't want to know Bobby until he found out that he was his son, then he wrenched him from Garry Hobbs's arms forcibly.

Ian had a new toy - except that toy never issued from the loins of Saint Cindy.

Bobby is ten years old, old enough to remember that line; and even though it was spoken in grief, Bobby will feel that to be the truth, and it was.

Ian is one psychologically fucked-up dude. He lives in a fantasy welter on the one hand of longing for some idealised version of Cindy, along with his mother, whilst needing female attention and assurance on the other hand, but revelling in psychologically mistreating these women to the point where they inevitably cheat on him, and he justifies his subsequent behaviour, by telling himself that Woman A or Wife B just didn't measure up to Cindy.  

The Cow Goes Home.

How nice to see Jane reap what she had sown, and to react in typical Jane fashion, by running away.

Jane's now acting the way she did in the wake of her husband David's death -moping about, face like a smacked bum, eyes downcast.This isn't grief for Lucy, this is good old-fashioned guilt. We saw it again, in the wake of her little gymnastic work-out across the table with Grant. She does the deed and then ponders the circumstances she's caused other people.

The truth is this: Ian would never have latched onto her cowhide if she hadn't come back the second time, sidelining and patronising Denise, acting smug, passing judgement, posing herself as the Wise Woman of Walford.

And now she's faced with the responsibility of what she's done. She's cheated on Masood, after using him relentlessly and imposing upon his hospitality, leading him to think that they had a future. And at the same time, she cannot have been so obtuse not to realise how Ian would react and how much she was undermining Denise. The very fact that she knew that Ian was lying and keeping things from Denise should have sounded alarm bells in Jane's brainless, self-obsessed skull, because Ian was treating Denise the same way he treated Jane, yet Jane carried on, disregarding Denise,bragging to Masood how she thought of the Beale kids as "her babies" when that was a bare-faced lie.

She confused the issue even more at the end by telling Ian that she loved him. Ian is, in no way ever capable of understanding the nuance behind that declaration. Didn't she stand on the steps of the register office and tell him that she loved him, but wasn't in love with him?

Jane's truth is that she's a moral coward. She knows that giving into Ian's lust and her own greed at the prospect of being Mrs-Beale-Local-Businesswoman will mean that she will be living on the doorstep of the man she led to believe that she loved. She'll have to face Masood every day, and the prospect facing him is far worse than living with Ian's sulky latent adolescent hissy fits about Grant Mitchell.

She also knows that re-uniting with Ian would mean facing down Masood and Denise every day of her life she spent in Walford,and Jane can't abide the idea of anyone considering her a hypocrite or of anyone judging her, which is why Shabnam, doing a good impersonation of a Muslim Dot Cotton, refused to judge Jane the Cow and actually came out the better person for it, especially as Jane sloped  away from Walford without as much as an explanation to Masood, the man whom she's used for the past few weeks.

You deserve better.

Yes, Jane, he does. Now, back to the cowshed for you.

Peter Pecker.

I am convinced now that Lola is Peter's Denise. He's condescending towards her, tries to control her ambitions, is rude and oafish and doesn't credit her with being intelligent enough to have either a heart or a brain.

Lola took no pleasure in finding those troll comments on Lucy's social networking page, yet Peter treated the matter as if he felt that she did. Her efforts to support him by bringing together a group of Lucy's friends - including an acquaintance Johnnie Carter, to make up the numbers, was something shallow and self-obsessed beauty queen Lauren would never have thought of doing, yet Peter the prick credits Lauren with the idea, and Lauren is too dimwitted to protest otherwise.

Other Thoughts.

Good Carter/Bad Carter. I love the dynamic of Mick, Linda and the kids. I hate Tina. More trash-talking of Martin. Sonia plans a night out when Martin has already made plans. Tina interposes herself in a situation that is none of her business. I don't blame Martin. I'd hang up too, if someone called me a div. But Sonia's encouraged this. She bemoans the fact that Martin's always out doing something, but when the hell does Sonia have time for Martion or silent Rebecca, when if she isn't playing Linda Lovelace at some hospital, then she's serving at the caff in place of Carol and whining about Martin's burps offending her delicate tastes.

On the other hand, I love Linda Carter, offering to bring ready meals disguised as casseroles over to the Beales. Mick's reaction to Linda's offer was comic and classic, as was Johnny advising Peter not to go home for a meal.

Donna is DTC's newest version of Adam. I totally buy the inference that disabled people can be as snarky and generally unpleasant as anyone, but this is the second disabled character DTC's introduced who's less than likeable. I know Bianca can be hard-going, but in this altercation, I was totally Team Bianca. Donna is a gossip and a generally malicious person. She's the female version of Adam without the posh voice and Oxford education. She's such a judgemental cow, maybe she should bond with Jane.

Kat diffusing the situation, especially Donna's disrespect of a young person who's just died would have driven the point home further, if Bianca had revealed to Donna that the person she was disrespecting was, in fact, Bianca's cousin.

Tommy was too cute.

He and the Carters saved this episode. 

I want to see Ian end up miserable and alone. He deserves it.