Enemies of this blog will be happy to know that I'm seriously thinking of chucking this blog.
Why?
Simply this: This is not my EastEnders anymore. This is Millennial EastEnders, created by the reincarnation of Peter Pan, himself, the boy who never grew up, who now caters for Millennials and diva fanbois, who fancy themselves Johnny Carter (when they aren't fancying Johnny Carter), but they don't have the courage of their idol.
He pitches his ware at people who are affronted when a fictitious character is insulted, but who get grossly personal whenever anyone expresses an opinion divergent to their own.
Like true Millennials, they can't see past the nose on that most important part of their body, their faces. They have no self-awaress and, as such, are incapable of seeing the irony in such a situation where a fictitious character's social networking site is being overrun by trolls saying terrible things about her. They take offence at this, but think nothing of trolling real people and issuing death threats and all sorts of violent promises to real people, because their view of the world, and of EastEnders, is different from theirs.
I'm sick as the proverbial parrot at the state of the show at the moment, and I don't care if it's gained back the million or so viewers that it lost. I don't even care if it sustains that, because it won't. And I don't care if people blame ITV's cynicism, when they can't be arsed to watch ITV but can't live without the commercial products which keep ITV on the air (hypocritical much?). Because EastEnders lost every right it had to the moral high ground over Coronation Street when it put Lacey Turner, whom Dominic Treadwell-Collins states as fact is one of the best actresses in television, in the frame for a Best Actress award at the upcoming BSA function.
Turner is as much "one of the best actresses in televison" as Shirley Carter is an iconic character (yet another of Treadwell-Collins's opinions stated as fact), which is to say she's not.
Wanna see one of the best actresses in television? Look no further than the BBC's The Crimson Fields, produced by EastEnders' alumna, Sarah Phelps (who knew how to write for Sharon, Dominic) and starring Suranne Jones, ex-of Coronation Street, who's been gone from that show for some years, and who - believe me - was not playing Karen McDonald Does World War I.
Wee Dominic promised us Sharon being brought back front and centre where she belonged. He gave her a bar, which we've seen exactly once, and we have to suffer her being constantly undermined by the iconic Shirley.
Now, he's promised us a ten-month revel of the Beales' unravelling at the death of their skeletal daughter, having us believe that horny men lusting to grab feminine love handles got their rocks off reaching for Lucy Beale's protruding hip bones, when this is nothing more than a continuous con with the intention of introducing a whole new generation of Millennials to the rare and precious treat of Ian Beale crying.
And they will perceive this as original.
This is not my EastEnders anymore. I doubt it belongs to anyone who's watched it prior to the John Yorke regime, when the train started going off the rails with the Slaters.
I give up. It's tits up.
Titties and Beer.
I think this song aptly describes the impending couple known as Honker and The Court Jester.
Since the death of Skeletor, we've had Bianca, niece of Ian, express concern about her uncle. We've had David, brother of Ian, expressing sympathy with his nephew, Peter.
Sonia, whether she likes it or not, is married to Ian's cousin, and - as such - is part and parcel of the Beale dynamic. Yet Sonia hasn't mentioned Ian's plight at all. In fact, Sonia's not really that concerned about her mother, on whom, it appears, chemotherapy is finally taking a toll.
Carol no longer bops about the Square - rather she droops. She's pale and bald and wilting. Gone are the flutes of champagne and the bottles of wine. Instead, she's asking for lemon tea and dry toast to combat the nausea. And she's mentioned being on steroids.
Sonia, on the other hand, not only likes to drink from the occasional bottle of wine, she actually guzzles from a magnum of whine.
Because all of a sudden, Carol's cancer doesn't matter. Nor does the loss of her husband's cousin. Not even her husband or her daughter matters.
What do matter are Sonia's amazing atomic-powered tits. Or,rather, her rack, as the idiotic Tina describes Sonia's breasts.
Here's an ironic situation: Sonia's gadding about, giving hyperbolic soliloquies about her tits, whilst clutching them madly and alternating that witter with nonsense about a new top which looks like curtain remnants, when I remember very well when Sonia got her new tits.
They're about eight years old, and she bought them when she was on the show the last time, toward the end of her first stint. That was the winter when we watched Zoe, Sharon, Chrissy and Kat, variously, parade through the market in the dead of November, with their winter coats open and their cleavage on display. That looked ridiculous. Then Sonia (well, Natalie Cassidy, really) got her boob job,and the parade became inane. In one fell swoop, Sonia became the first woman on EastEnders to look like a man in drag.
Also, for all her air-brushed photo shoot in black underwear to herald yet another dramatic weight loss, Natalie's getting porky again. Just sayin', Millennial fanbois.
Well, now we know it's all about tits and making Martin out to be one big tit. I hate the Martin trash-talk, when all we've heard is Sonia moaning. By the way, when she's working at whatever hospital and then doing shifts at the cafe for Carol, who's looking after her kid - you know, the kid she gave up for adoption, stalked, kidnapped, stalked some more and thentotally unrealistically and impossibly got back, only to dump her with her dad to play Lipstick Lesbian with Gnomi? Rebecca is only thirteen years old. I guess she must be bringing herself up, like Zsa Zsa did when the awful Tina admitted that she was a feckless mum. And there was Saint Sonia, wondering how she was going to live without tits, whilst swigging wine from a bottle, and obsessing about herself. FFS, she's supposed to be a nurse, a trained medical professional. Odds are not on that she'll get breast cancer. She has a greater chance, yes, but she would be closely monitored, in the hopes of, if she did have abnormal cell growth, she gets the treatment she needs; but this is Sonia, doing the diva bit, shutting Martin out and blaming him for everything. Sonia's a godallmighty Branning, whilst the unseen Martin is the son of Pauline and Arthur, the grandson of Lou Beale, and the first child to be born on the show.
Tina and Shirley are the bane of the Carters, and Tina and Sonia stank up the place tonight. Team Bianca. Sonia made everything, even her mother's cancer, all about herself tonight. Please go. Just go. The sad thing is that Natalie Cassidy, unfortunately, there for the duration, doing her singular party piece of sad-eyed open-mouthed tragedy, inviting our pity. The really sad thing about it is that Sonia really is a legitimate mouth-breather. We can tell by the way shehonks talks.
Arguably, the most butt-clinchingly awful line of the night went to Cassidy, when she dramatically clutched her boobs and shrieked ...
'Owmahgonnalivwivoughvese! And wha'baht me ovvah bits? Wha'mahgonnabe?
And just as we thought there was no more puke to spew, Tina whispers in response ... Alive!
What it means, bitch, is that if DTC goes the sensationalist route and has you whack your tits and lady bits, then that means you're Tina's man and she's your bitch. Live with it.
If Newman had come up with this dialogue like that, she'd be being slated all around. This was sheer tripe from Jeff Povey, and most people recognised it as such. But because DTC's pretentious double-barrel is on the credits, it's clever and original.
Not.
The Real Victim.
The only saving grace in this episode was Denise. Diane Parish is, arguably, the strongest actress in the programme. Denise's desperation mixed with her quiet dignity and the uncertain shame at being seen to abandon Ian to his grief was one of the best performances in this programme in a long time, perfectly complimented by Patrick's presence, the real patriarch of the Square.
Denise doesn't love Ian. Jane says she does, but it isn't a romantic sort of love, and that leads one to wonder why Ian isn't loved. Every wife or girlfriend he's ever had have been unfaithful to him. One tried to have him killed, one walked away after discovering a massive lie involving his daughter. One wife, he kicked out after her infidelity, thinking her child wasn't his. He was wrong.
Jane lasted the longest, only because Jane was as bad as Ian, in her own way. He lied repeatedly to her, and the daughter who's been murdered lied and treated her with disdain.
When Jane left the first time, she left Ian alone.
I was willing Denise to have the strength to leave tonight to walk away from Ian. And you know that it was well into the day until he realised that she wasn't about. When she did return, he could have cared less. The cook and bottle-washer had returned.
Her scenes with Patrick were the highlight of the night. I love Patrick, and when he returns after a long break, I always realise how much I have missed him. People have spoken about how they've welled up at the Beales' scenes of overt grief. I found myself tearing up as Denise broke down with Patrick. Her sobs of desperation and loneliness were mingled with a relief in seeing someone she loves and can trust one hundred per cent to listen to her concerns. Her face at the beginning of the programme, when she suddenly realised that Jane had gone, was a portrait of horror and utter desolation once she realised that she had been left to cope with Ian alone.
She simply had to escape, and I don't blame her.
Her worry about being a bad person and seeming to leave Ian when people might think he needed her most, was palpable. A lot of this worry and fear came about from Peter's subtle emotional blackmail. This is the boy who didn't think twice about calling Jane back into the family dynamic, rather than approaching Denise, and now he's glad Ian "has" Denise. Why? If Ian "has" someone else, then the onus isn't on Peter to provide comfort and sustenance to the man who openly labelled him less important than the sister who died.
She's thinking of appearances, she knows how Ian can turn the screws to make her look bad, but at the same time, she doesn't know what Jane the cah and the coward has done, she doesn't know what a moral coward Jane is, so Denise shoulders the burden, herself, and decides to return to the house of hell, to be ignored or treated with disdain. Ian has no real need of Denise now, other than as another person in an empty house to speak to him so he can ignore her. He wants Denise there because everyone else has scarpered.
I loved Denise's message to Peter - that the important thing was that Ian and Peter had each other. They were family, they'd spent a fair time sidelining her and considering her an outsider and the most insignificant person in that house. She's outta there.
But she's a bigger person than any of them in her compassion. The Beales don't deserve her.
Two Tits with Four Between Them.
Whitney didn't kill Lucy, but I'll bet she was one of the people leaving rude messages on Lucy's social networking page. How sly of her to want to do something "for" Lucy by blocking all the trolls on Lucy's page, the chief one being Whitney, herself, as she deleted her profile. There was never any love lost between the two of them, and Whitney had an axe to grind with Lucy for nicking a man to whom Whitney, in her most arrogant way, thought she was entitled.
The biggest joke of the night was seeing Lauren's picture on that website listed as "Company Director". LB Lettings registered at Companies' House, is it? Does it have a profit portfolio? Is it solvent? The truth is that it's a fantasy company run from someone's front room by two dippy girls barely out of their teens, and anyone believing a London Borough Council would stoop to use an outfit like that is in Cloud CuckooLand.
Deceptive and weak.
Why?
Simply this: This is not my EastEnders anymore. This is Millennial EastEnders, created by the reincarnation of Peter Pan, himself, the boy who never grew up, who now caters for Millennials and diva fanbois, who fancy themselves Johnny Carter (when they aren't fancying Johnny Carter), but they don't have the courage of their idol.
He pitches his ware at people who are affronted when a fictitious character is insulted, but who get grossly personal whenever anyone expresses an opinion divergent to their own.
Like true Millennials, they can't see past the nose on that most important part of their body, their faces. They have no self-awaress and, as such, are incapable of seeing the irony in such a situation where a fictitious character's social networking site is being overrun by trolls saying terrible things about her. They take offence at this, but think nothing of trolling real people and issuing death threats and all sorts of violent promises to real people, because their view of the world, and of EastEnders, is different from theirs.
I'm sick as the proverbial parrot at the state of the show at the moment, and I don't care if it's gained back the million or so viewers that it lost. I don't even care if it sustains that, because it won't. And I don't care if people blame ITV's cynicism, when they can't be arsed to watch ITV but can't live without the commercial products which keep ITV on the air (hypocritical much?). Because EastEnders lost every right it had to the moral high ground over Coronation Street when it put Lacey Turner, whom Dominic Treadwell-Collins states as fact is one of the best actresses in television, in the frame for a Best Actress award at the upcoming BSA function.
Turner is as much "one of the best actresses in televison" as Shirley Carter is an iconic character (yet another of Treadwell-Collins's opinions stated as fact), which is to say she's not.
Wanna see one of the best actresses in television? Look no further than the BBC's The Crimson Fields, produced by EastEnders' alumna, Sarah Phelps (who knew how to write for Sharon, Dominic) and starring Suranne Jones, ex-of Coronation Street, who's been gone from that show for some years, and who - believe me - was not playing Karen McDonald Does World War I.
Wee Dominic promised us Sharon being brought back front and centre where she belonged. He gave her a bar, which we've seen exactly once, and we have to suffer her being constantly undermined by the iconic Shirley.
Now, he's promised us a ten-month revel of the Beales' unravelling at the death of their skeletal daughter, having us believe that horny men lusting to grab feminine love handles got their rocks off reaching for Lucy Beale's protruding hip bones, when this is nothing more than a continuous con with the intention of introducing a whole new generation of Millennials to the rare and precious treat of Ian Beale crying.
And they will perceive this as original.
This is not my EastEnders anymore. I doubt it belongs to anyone who's watched it prior to the John Yorke regime, when the train started going off the rails with the Slaters.
I give up. It's tits up.
Titties and Beer.
I think this song aptly describes the impending couple known as Honker and The Court Jester.
Since the death of Skeletor, we've had Bianca, niece of Ian, express concern about her uncle. We've had David, brother of Ian, expressing sympathy with his nephew, Peter.
Sonia, whether she likes it or not, is married to Ian's cousin, and - as such - is part and parcel of the Beale dynamic. Yet Sonia hasn't mentioned Ian's plight at all. In fact, Sonia's not really that concerned about her mother, on whom, it appears, chemotherapy is finally taking a toll.
Carol no longer bops about the Square - rather she droops. She's pale and bald and wilting. Gone are the flutes of champagne and the bottles of wine. Instead, she's asking for lemon tea and dry toast to combat the nausea. And she's mentioned being on steroids.
Sonia, on the other hand, not only likes to drink from the occasional bottle of wine, she actually guzzles from a magnum of whine.
Because all of a sudden, Carol's cancer doesn't matter. Nor does the loss of her husband's cousin. Not even her husband or her daughter matters.
What do matter are Sonia's amazing atomic-powered tits. Or,rather, her rack, as the idiotic Tina describes Sonia's breasts.
Here's an ironic situation: Sonia's gadding about, giving hyperbolic soliloquies about her tits, whilst clutching them madly and alternating that witter with nonsense about a new top which looks like curtain remnants, when I remember very well when Sonia got her new tits.
They're about eight years old, and she bought them when she was on the show the last time, toward the end of her first stint. That was the winter when we watched Zoe, Sharon, Chrissy and Kat, variously, parade through the market in the dead of November, with their winter coats open and their cleavage on display. That looked ridiculous. Then Sonia (well, Natalie Cassidy, really) got her boob job,and the parade became inane. In one fell swoop, Sonia became the first woman on EastEnders to look like a man in drag.
Also, for all her air-brushed photo shoot in black underwear to herald yet another dramatic weight loss, Natalie's getting porky again. Just sayin', Millennial fanbois.
Well, now we know it's all about tits and making Martin out to be one big tit. I hate the Martin trash-talk, when all we've heard is Sonia moaning. By the way, when she's working at whatever hospital and then doing shifts at the cafe for Carol, who's looking after her kid - you know, the kid she gave up for adoption, stalked, kidnapped, stalked some more and thentotally unrealistically and impossibly got back, only to dump her with her dad to play Lipstick Lesbian with Gnomi? Rebecca is only thirteen years old. I guess she must be bringing herself up, like Zsa Zsa did when the awful Tina admitted that she was a feckless mum. And there was Saint Sonia, wondering how she was going to live without tits, whilst swigging wine from a bottle, and obsessing about herself. FFS, she's supposed to be a nurse, a trained medical professional. Odds are not on that she'll get breast cancer. She has a greater chance, yes, but she would be closely monitored, in the hopes of, if she did have abnormal cell growth, she gets the treatment she needs; but this is Sonia, doing the diva bit, shutting Martin out and blaming him for everything. Sonia's a godallmighty Branning, whilst the unseen Martin is the son of Pauline and Arthur, the grandson of Lou Beale, and the first child to be born on the show.
Tina and Shirley are the bane of the Carters, and Tina and Sonia stank up the place tonight. Team Bianca. Sonia made everything, even her mother's cancer, all about herself tonight. Please go. Just go. The sad thing is that Natalie Cassidy, unfortunately, there for the duration, doing her singular party piece of sad-eyed open-mouthed tragedy, inviting our pity. The really sad thing about it is that Sonia really is a legitimate mouth-breather. We can tell by the way she
Arguably, the most butt-clinchingly awful line of the night went to Cassidy, when she dramatically clutched her boobs and shrieked ...
'Owmahgonnalivwivoughvese! And wha'baht me ovvah bits? Wha'mahgonnabe?
And just as we thought there was no more puke to spew, Tina whispers in response ... Alive!
What it means, bitch, is that if DTC goes the sensationalist route and has you whack your tits and lady bits, then that means you're Tina's man and she's your bitch. Live with it.
If Newman had come up with this dialogue like that, she'd be being slated all around. This was sheer tripe from Jeff Povey, and most people recognised it as such. But because DTC's pretentious double-barrel is on the credits, it's clever and original.
Not.
The Real Victim.
The only saving grace in this episode was Denise. Diane Parish is, arguably, the strongest actress in the programme. Denise's desperation mixed with her quiet dignity and the uncertain shame at being seen to abandon Ian to his grief was one of the best performances in this programme in a long time, perfectly complimented by Patrick's presence, the real patriarch of the Square.
Denise doesn't love Ian. Jane says she does, but it isn't a romantic sort of love, and that leads one to wonder why Ian isn't loved. Every wife or girlfriend he's ever had have been unfaithful to him. One tried to have him killed, one walked away after discovering a massive lie involving his daughter. One wife, he kicked out after her infidelity, thinking her child wasn't his. He was wrong.
Jane lasted the longest, only because Jane was as bad as Ian, in her own way. He lied repeatedly to her, and the daughter who's been murdered lied and treated her with disdain.
When Jane left the first time, she left Ian alone.
I was willing Denise to have the strength to leave tonight to walk away from Ian. And you know that it was well into the day until he realised that she wasn't about. When she did return, he could have cared less. The cook and bottle-washer had returned.
Her scenes with Patrick were the highlight of the night. I love Patrick, and when he returns after a long break, I always realise how much I have missed him. People have spoken about how they've welled up at the Beales' scenes of overt grief. I found myself tearing up as Denise broke down with Patrick. Her sobs of desperation and loneliness were mingled with a relief in seeing someone she loves and can trust one hundred per cent to listen to her concerns. Her face at the beginning of the programme, when she suddenly realised that Jane had gone, was a portrait of horror and utter desolation once she realised that she had been left to cope with Ian alone.
She simply had to escape, and I don't blame her.
Her worry about being a bad person and seeming to leave Ian when people might think he needed her most, was palpable. A lot of this worry and fear came about from Peter's subtle emotional blackmail. This is the boy who didn't think twice about calling Jane back into the family dynamic, rather than approaching Denise, and now he's glad Ian "has" Denise. Why? If Ian "has" someone else, then the onus isn't on Peter to provide comfort and sustenance to the man who openly labelled him less important than the sister who died.
She's thinking of appearances, she knows how Ian can turn the screws to make her look bad, but at the same time, she doesn't know what Jane the cah and the coward has done, she doesn't know what a moral coward Jane is, so Denise shoulders the burden, herself, and decides to return to the house of hell, to be ignored or treated with disdain. Ian has no real need of Denise now, other than as another person in an empty house to speak to him so he can ignore her. He wants Denise there because everyone else has scarpered.
I loved Denise's message to Peter - that the important thing was that Ian and Peter had each other. They were family, they'd spent a fair time sidelining her and considering her an outsider and the most insignificant person in that house. She's outta there.
But she's a bigger person than any of them in her compassion. The Beales don't deserve her.
Two Tits with Four Between Them.
Whitney didn't kill Lucy, but I'll bet she was one of the people leaving rude messages on Lucy's social networking page. How sly of her to want to do something "for" Lucy by blocking all the trolls on Lucy's page, the chief one being Whitney, herself, as she deleted her profile. There was never any love lost between the two of them, and Whitney had an axe to grind with Lucy for nicking a man to whom Whitney, in her most arrogant way, thought she was entitled.
The biggest joke of the night was seeing Lauren's picture on that website listed as "Company Director". LB Lettings registered at Companies' House, is it? Does it have a profit portfolio? Is it solvent? The truth is that it's a fantasy company run from someone's front room by two dippy girls barely out of their teens, and anyone believing a London Borough Council would stoop to use an outfit like that is in Cloud CuckooLand.
Deceptive and weak.
I don't always agree with how you express some of your thoughts, but you do give an old viewer like me (and my family, actually) who gave up on EastEnders about 18 months ago a place where we can keep up with the storylines (or the lack of them!) without needing to watch the programme itself!
ReplyDeleteI know that's somewhat cheeky - after all, you're still finding the will-power to watch the show when we've given up on it, and we can't be bothered. But you echo our feelings that its lost the feeling of 'being' EastEnders as it was when it first started in 1985, and in those first 10-15 years or so. I read comments on DS and other places and despair at the lack of intelligence demonstrated (and the lack of grammar used) in many of them. I suppose that, to them, if the past isn't 'important', 'doesn't matter' and is 'a waster of time' then expressing their thoughts using good English is going to be treated with the same disdain.
That's despair on top of the kind I was already feeling realising that the programme that used to be so rooted in reality (albeit a slightly enhanced reality), the programme that I considered a 'must watch' fixture in my TV schedule, had been pulled apart, shaken about and then put back together as if someone had tried to glue together a broken vase in the dark - most of the pieces were still there, but now only some had been glued back in the right place, other pieces were now missing altogether (lost in the darkness somewhere) and others were 'forced' back into places where they didn't fit, but hey - no worries - at least it still looked like a vase! (Apologies for the extended metaphor!)
So now, this blog keeps me (and, I'm sure, many other disillusioned 'original viewers') in the EastEnders loop, and it has been appreciated. Ultimately it has to be your decision whether you keep going, or not, but it has been appreciated, even if sometimes the way you've expressed some thoughts hasn't been my cup of tea.
Finally, I totally agree with your assessment of Lacey Turner not being a fantastic actress. A fantastic actor/actress - to me - is someone who can take on a variety of roles and make me forget the last thing I saw them in as a different character. Like you, I've been watching 'Crimson Fields', and yes, Suranne Jones is making Lacey Turner look stupid in terms of fantastic acting. I don't know if you watch Doctor Who, but Suranne Jones was totally different in that too - so different you have to really put your mind to it to know she's the same actress! That's proper acting, Ms Turner, not just taking the same facial expressions, voice and mannerisms into shows with different names!
Apologies for making such a long comment. I don't expect to be published - it's not why I made it - it's just a roundabout way of saying I would miss the blog if it wasn't here and an appreciation of the work that goes into it, even if I don't always agree with every word!
As always you've hit the nail on the head!
ReplyDeleteI think it would be a shame to chuck the blog (although perhaps I'm being selfish) as for the last year or so this has been more entertaining than the actual programme. Most of the time I only sit through the show so that I can read your take on it afterwards, and more often than not I agree with most of what you say.
I think I'm one of the few "millenials" who has actually bothered to watch the original episodes (or as much as I can), and I'm also one of the few "millenials" that actually preferred Eastenders the way it was. A programme people could relate to not the complete farce it has become. I still prefer watching the early years (I've seen up to Tiffany dying so far) and think they are much better written, staged and directed than they are now. The original episodes have a timeless quality about them... There is nothing timeless about the recent stuff which has been rolled out. Eastenders used to be about good actors and great story lines, now it just seems to be about youth, pretty faces and mediocre writing.
I stopped watching several years ago and only started when Sharon came back. She was always one of my favourites and I was excited to see where they were going to go with her. Well now I know. They've destroyed her. More-or-less completely. And now I find myself watching in the hope that she will be restored back to her former self (as we keep getting promised) ... however DTC reminds me a lot of a politician. He promises the world and invariably gives you nothing.
I guess what I'm trying to say is you aren't the only one frustrated with how things are going. And even though I'm only 22 myself, there are still some of us "millenials" who agree with you, who understand where you are coming from and who are as pissed off with DTC as you are.
What ever you decide to do, thanks for the laughs and thanks for the entertainment which Eastenders is no longer providing. Thanks for Eastenders Unleashed!
L