We're one month into Lucy's death saga and a week away from Corrie's Tina meeting her maker. One thing for certain, the afterlife is going to be a lot more orange and fashion-conscious now that those two are winging away on designer clouds.
Last night's episode covered two varieties of a pity party and a hen party that will all end in tears.
Crying for His Mummy.
The more the Lucy saga doesn't unfold, the more I'm convinced that this is all a story of Ian focused on his own self-pity.
Ian's so fucked up psychologically. All he's ever wanted is a Yummy Mummy to mollycoddle him and a trophy bird in his bed to fuck. Captain Beale at the helm.
Over-egging isn't the word to describe one entire month of Adam Woodyatt honing his party piece of crying. One wonders if this is included in his panto performance. But then, this producer - he whom viewers must never criticise - was always one to go one bridge too far in presentation.
Yes, Ian's lost a daughter. Yes. Ian's sad. But, no, this isn't all about Ian except to show what a cravenly awful little man he was, and a creepy one at that. Weaselly isn't the word to describe him. For weeks, he's milled about the Square - first telling his youngest and unwanted child that he didn't matter to him because "he wasn't Lucy." Then he's brushed aside his oldest son's grief as insignificant. Inbetween that, he was caught blubbering and running after a fourteen year-old pregnant girl, who was no blood relation.
He's told everyone from Phil Mitchell to Max Branning how nothing matters anymore and how he's lost everything, and many times he's said this within earshot of Peter.
The real truth of the matter is that Ian's lost a female member of his family who bore the blood of Cindy. And he ran after yet another female, underaged this time, who was no relation at all to him, simply because she, too, bore the blood of Cindy.
And that's more than just a little creepy, dontcha think?
In Ian's perfect world, he'd have Jane in the kitchen ...
As for Denise, well, she's just "the help," good only for cleaning toilets, but secondary to Miss Scarlett Jane when she's about issuing orders.
And certainly not white enough to go in the Beale family album.
Here's another hard bit of truth: If DTC really wanted to go for realism, instead of sensationalism and maudlin sentimentality, Ian and Peter would be the prize suspects here.
The police always go on the premise that a murder victim knew his or her assailant, and they immediately start looking close to home before they fan out into the neighbourhood.
Ian and Lucy's relationship was fraught with tension. In a nutshell, Lucy neither loved nor respected Ian, and she was egged on in her behaviour a lot by Christian when she was younger. Lucy's relationship with her twin brother wasn't the easiest either. They had fallen out when she left for Devon and were cold to each other when she returned.
Ian admitted to the police in their initial questioning of the family that he and Lucy quarrelled before she left the house. Had they questioned Peter, they would have found that there was tension between him and Lucy as well. It would have taken no more than a brief questioning of Lauren Branning about the state of Lucy's relationship with her dad to land Ian a position as Prime Suspect in the murder of his daughter.
And maybe he did just that. Who knows?
One thing for certain was that Ian was chomping at the bit for Mummy Jane last night - so much so that he left Peter, Lauren the LipGirl and "the help" to look after last-minute arrangements for the funeral.
Here's something strange ... Denise spoke of having received RSVPs for the funeral. WTF? Are the Beales so damned grand that they hold a funeral by-invitation-only or is that the only way they can be sure of people showing up to mourn a prissy, dishonest, unlikeable walking skeleton who treated everyone as if they were a piece of shit?
So desperate was Ian to see Jane that he fairly flew by magic carpet to Birmingham, where, it seems, that Jane the Bovine is mooching off Christian. Seeing Christian again only reminded me of how awful an actor John Partridge is. Nice man, can't act. It looks as though Christian's and Syed's roles have been reversed now and that they seem to have Yasmine living with them.
Syed actually has a job, probably in the financial services industry, conning people out of their hard-earned cash, whilst Christian is a house-husband.
Jane's moral cowardice has increased tenfold since fleeing Walford. She can breeze into Walford, use Masood as some sort of sexual toy, appropriate his home as "hers," horn in on his family whilst trying to assume a leadership role in a family from whom she divorced herself, only to have sex, yet again, under guilt-ridden circumstances, and then run from the fact.
Christian was right to hand her her arse. Jane doesn't give a shit about Denise, whom she conveniently used as an excuse. In fact, she's jealous of Denise and jealous of the fact that it would be Denise at the bosom of the Beale family on funeral day and not Jane, on whom all eyes would be pealed ... or Bealed, I should say. What a bitch!
As for Ian, he seeks solace in, of all people, Max Branning, and that's an obvious incongruent irony, considering Max was sleeping with Lucy almost at the time of her death. Still, Max has lost a child,and when Ian was whining, yet again, about not being able to go on, it was Max who stepped up to the plate and gave him a pep talk.
I was hoping for a repeat performance of that beautiful dialogue and reminiscence of Bradley in the wake of Billie's death in October 2010, with Carol. Instead, we got hardcore "man" truths (risible, really, since all male characters on the programme are moral weaklings) about carrying on for your kids, which is what Max did.
Of course, we know that this scene was a set-up contrivance - and it worked. It gave Ian the amoral courage to go home, decide to pick out his daughter's burial outfit, and to lie to Denise about where he'd been - until his mobile rang and Denise found out the truth.
As for Max, this was a double-whammy of a duff-duff, with Abi revealing that she knew Max had been sleeping with Lucy.
But how did she know? Did she send the ubiquitous e-mail, having spotted Max snogging Skeletor? Doubt it. She's got a mouth bigger than her rapidly expanding arse. But know she did - and that makes a change from Lauren finding something out, and it made for the best duff-duff of the year.
It's Five O'Clock Somewhere.
Five o'clock is not Shirley's Happy Hour. No hour is a happy hour for Shirl, especially when she's drowning her sorrows in a self-pity pool party of vodka.
Line of the night goes to Mick:- Shirley's on the sauce again.
Again? When is she ever off the sauce? This time in a welter of self-pity at Dean's home truths. Stuff like that can hit hard at someone who's never taken responsibility for their worst actions.
As much as I like Mick, the one moment I didn't like him was when he attempted to talk to Dean, and came across as the passive-aggressive uncle with the veiled threat of anyone disrespecting his sister. Well, Mick, what about your sister and the way she disrespects your wife? You stand by and allow it, make excuses for it. And the other condescending remark about every story having two sides? Hypocrisy much? Dean was the bigger man for not responding to his jibes. Mick made it abundantly clear that whatever Dean's side of the story was, he was backing Shirley's ... but we've never been told why Shirley left her children.
Here's another thing to consider: Dean was the child who accepted Shirley when she returned, who reconciled with her and bonded with her. I still am at a loss as to why he was so angry with her when he returned in his last episode in 2008, but there was an oblique reference to the fact that he may have been raped inside. But Shirley certainly wasn't the cause of Dean's imprisonment. That was his own fault.
However, his anger suits him toward her, because we simply have to have the issue of her abandoning her children addressed, just as her alcoholism has to be addressed.
Nice to see Dean's delight at seeing Denise and his rememberance of Pat. That was sweet.
Then there's the continuing saga of the drowning of Mick. Tina tells a different story, and this further confuses the facts, but not in the way that you think, and I'm confused. It was originally inferred that Mick was a baby when he was put into care and Tina slightly older. There's two years' age difference, it seems. Later we learned that they were back home with Stan by the time they were in school, because Shirley took them to school in the brief time between their returning from care and her marrying Kevin.
All of the above colours into the drowning story. According to Stan, Mick was a baby. According to Tina, she was a small girl, helping with the painting. So how old is a "small girl?" Tina said Mick "slipped" in the bath, which at least meant he was able to stand ... but who leaves a one- or two-year-old alone in the bath? If he were three, then Tina was five and in school.
Of course, as a very young girl, her memory could be suspect, just as Stan's could be deliberately manipulative; considering Shirley's face when Stan told the tale originally, I'd say Tina, being small, was caught up in the confusion, and the story of Mick slipping was one porky pie told to a small child in order to hide the awful truth.
And Sylvie had left when all this took place? Do I sense a pattern here?
Final Observations.
Just get Sharon right. You got the impression that, had that been anyone else pushing a comedy night, Ian would have gone ballistic. Carol's ambivalent about a hen night, Sharon wants to cancel a comedy night. Life does go on. The awful truth is that, had this been any other person's child on the Square, Ian Beale would barely have batted an eyelid.
And David Beale Wicks is eating far too much.
Good episode.
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