Well, I'm sorry, but that's one hour of my life I won't get back. A repetitive storyline that keeps going around and around in circles for a character who should be on the next Qantas flight to Sydney, two characters with marital problems about whom I don't give a rat's arse, and a family they always pull to the fore whenever the big cheeses are off doing something else. Oops, sorry, I forgot ... a woman I can only assume is Mrs Olumbummi's twin sister as Les Coker's bit on the side, who'll most likely turn out to be Richard Blackwood's mother and, thus, the mother-in-law of Kim.
Maybe Kim and Sharon can bond in a future episode.
EastEnders' Signature Female Character.
This song's for Kat and Alfie, but the cheating bit goes to Kat ...
Here we go again. Round 1,427,263. Kat's hungover from necking Tommy's over-the-counter antihistimine medicine, feeling mghty sorry for herself and her hair looking like she's trying to imitate the Rolling Stones' Ronnie Wood ...
She's got no stall, no stock and no hope. Stacey, ever the practical one - and don't forget that Stacey has been literally a professional carer since she was a child - makes an interesting remark: her own wages would help keep Kat and the boys, but Alfie's working, and maybe he could contribute more. Kat snaps right back that she wants nothing from Alfie.
That's the interesting bit.
I know TPTB's writing room is filled to the brim with man-haters galore, and the brief is to make various men as despicable as possible, and in that respect, they've succeeded with Alfie's character, so much so that various people are hoping he commits suicide on screen. What he's done, one would be forgiven for thinking from their diatribes, is far worse than what Dean did to Linda, or what Phil did to Sharon - although Phil never intended for Sharon to get hurt as much as Alfie never intended for Kat to get hurt.
Gee, did people call for Phil's death and banishment when that happened to Sharon?
Alfie's many things, but he's not a man to stint on his children, and he's offered whatever money he's had before to Kat. When he didn't have money, he offered to care for the children. On both counts, he was roundly turned down. In fact, she went as far as denying him access to his children. Some viewers disdain the fact that he offered her food on one occasion, but I seem to remember that that staple was low in the squatting household - because that's what Stacey, Big Mo and Kat are, effectively, doing. When Stacey kicked Dean out of Dean's flat, she made herself redundant with no pay, Big Mo had no money and Kat was scraping a living on the stall. They are living in what appears to be a three-bedroomed flat in an area of East London near Stratford. Monthly rent on a three-bedroomed flat in that area starts at £1600 per month. That's just the rent. That doesn't include gas, electric, council tax etc.
There's absolutely no way those three would have been able to negotiate a lease in that short period of time, and now the rent's being raised. Sometimes I wonder how unintelligent the producers of this show think the viewers are. There's such a thing as dramatic licence, but this is more than that. This is reckoning the public will buy any old gumpf they're fed, and they'd be surprised how many people actually buy into some of the crap they sell as fact in drama.
Interpreted, Stacey's remark probably meant that Alfie had offered money, Kat refused, Alfie had found a new job, and Kat had probably threatened him within an inch of his life against making an offer of financial support. Let people see the children suffer, it's not Kat's fault, it's Alfie's. In fact, everything that's happened to Kat has been Alfie's fault, even her repeated infidelities.
But this is Kat's ethos as a character. She bangs on from chaos to catastrophe, each time wailing her old woe-is-me line ... (Hearts and Flowers, please ...)
... until finally, there's someone there to pick up the pieces, kiss it better and send her off down the garden path until she fucks up again and someone comes to her rescue.
This time, it's Big Mo and Stacey.
Stacey plays the parental figure, confronting Kat with the empty bottles of juvenile antihistimine she's been drinking. Kat brushes them aside - they're nothing, you buy them over the counter and, besides, they help her sleep. (Besides, drinking that stuff means she really isn't depending on alcohol to get her to sleep, so that makes her feel better in herself as a person); but Stacey is right. This stuff is no less addicting, and since we had lingering scenes throughout Kat'sboring story tonight, those were broad hints that Kat's probably going to become addicted to over-the-counter medicine. Yes, folks, there's another addict amongst them.
It gets rid of the edge, you see.
Mo, on the other hand, has a cunning plan, like someone else who tried to help another person with financial problems ...
She's posted the letter to Harry's solicitor, and she's nicked Kat's phone. Later, we see her taking a phonecall from the solicitor, instructing him to pay the money into the account of one Maureen Harris.
(Sorry, legal transactions such as these are never conducted over the phone, and this is yet more evidence of how utterly puerile this programme can be at some times. The original transaction was in the form of a banker's draft cheque made payable to Kat. Electronic transfer of such funds is possible, but such a transaction, into any other account other than the recipient of the gift, must have the written consent of the recipient. As we saw, that wasn't Kat speaking on the telephone, and the solicitors would have been aware that they could very well have been speaking to anyone. They wouldn't have acted unless they'd received Kat's signed intent for them to transfer the funds to Mo. Yes, I know Mo said she'd forged Kat's signature, but for what and on what? Mo retrieved the letter Kat had written and put in an envelope and posted it to the solicitors. This was the day after she'd posted it, late on the night before. I don't get what this "forged signature" is for since it was obvious that the money was put, unquestioned, into Mo's account that day and she bought stock with it. Bad, bad, bad and sloppy writing).
That's all it takes to make Kat happy again. Big Mo's picked up the pieces. Kat's got stock, she's got fifty quid off Max Branning for stuffing envelopes - and here I thought she'd be stuffing Max - and even in their straightened circumstances, she's bought a couple of bottles of wine to be chugged in very nice wineglasses, which seem to come with the flat, so you wonder if they belong to Tosh or Aleks or even Jake Stone.
Max was right. He never promised Kat 100 quid if she got the envelopes stuffed in a day. All he asked that she do as much as she could that day, but there she was, shouting the odds against him.
So the idea now is for Big Mo to play Sugar Daddy to Kat and the boys, coming up trumps with magic from Fat Elvis, when the chips are down. Stacey is right. This will all end in tears, and we know that Alfie will dry them, so suck it up, Alfie-haters.
As I've said, and I'll reiterate: This is an Executive Producer who didn't flinch on killing off an important legacy character (Lucy), when legacies are thin on the ground; he didn't stint to kill off an original character (Nick), when they are far fewere on the ground. The Moons have relatives with a business in Australia. That's a get-out clause. If the actors won't go, wield an axe. At the end of the day, Alfie and Kat are neither legacy nor original characters.
Time for them to go.
Two Cokers Croaking.
Oh, Les ... he loves his wife, and he loves his girlfriend, and he hopes they'll never meet.
Don't worry, they will.Mrs Olumbummi Claudette will most likely turn out to be mother of the elusive Vincent, mother-in-law of the insipid Kim and grandmother of the doll playing Pearl at the moment. She's touted as a matriarch, no?
You knew the momentMrs Olumbummi Claudette sat down, that the pair of hands opposite her belonged to Les Coker. He's a facile liar, using sympathy for his customers in a profession where sympathy is abundant, to explain why the business is doing badly, but I reckon old Mrs Olumbumi Claudette isn't exactly a cheap date, and that's where all of Les's money has been going.
I'm not keen on the Cokers. He's stage-trained, and so his mannerism are exaggerated, including the creepy, wide-eyed facial expressions. She's too intense and melodramatic. She's also a gossip, who's not above laughing at acquaintances behind their back - cf: the hijab joke cracked by Donna, which made Pam piss herself laughing.
I don't care about this couple. I don't know them, I don't like them and the elaborate scheme by Billy to get them onto neutral ground "to talk" was contrived and ended in that bum-clinchingly embarrassing scene of them singing a love song to each other.
Of course, it's their 43rd Wedding anniversary andMrs Olumbummi's Claudette's birthday, as she greedily claps her pudgy little hands.
The community centre scene was pretty naff too. Could Les show his conflict even more?
Nice seeing Janet again, however. Truly a cute and intelligent little girl.
Dumb and Dumber: Public Service Announcements and Shit-Stirring with Sonia and Tina. How to combine an issue storyline with dross.
I could care less about Liam the Lug and Cindy. In fact, Liam's such a dolt (and played by such a mediocre actor), that I find it hard to see what Cindy-Because-I'm-Worth-It-and-Is-That-a-Camera-over-There-Take-My-Picture-Please sees in him. It isn't love. Cindy loves no one but herself.
Carol's indifference to what Liam does isn't new. She only ever played lip service to her children bettering themselves over what she had. She was like that with Bianca when she encouraged her to bin Ricky on the strength of David having binned her. Again. Isn't Liam sixteen? Can't he quit school now if he thinks the rest of his life can be spent on Ian Beale's sofa bonking Cindy where so many variations of semen have landed before?
I thought Sharon was supposed to be looking in on Cindy, so presumably, the school would have been given her name. Obviously, they didn't get in touch with her, which is why Ian was rung on his honeymoon from hell.
Throughout Carol's erratic behaviour, Sonia's been trying to contact Rebecca with no luck. She whines to Tina, back in five year-old mode with her Bjork bunches, that she only wants to reassure Rebecca that she's there for her in the wake of her and Martin splitting up. This gives Tina, who knows jack shit on a stick about what went on between Sonia and Martin, but who was surely instrumental in Martin's attitude toward Sonia by name-calling him down the phone and buying into all the trash-talk Sonia spewed.
Of course the Court Jester assures Sonia that Rebecca's non-response to Sonia is all down to Martin. He's the one who's poisoning her mind against Sonia - you hear about it all the time; and even though Sonia protests that Martin would never do that. Martin wouldn't use their child against her, but Sonia tried to use Rebecca against Martin. You can see she's dull and dumb enough to buy into every word Tina's saying. This comes, of course, after Sonia tries to act like the educated, open-minded adult in the Jackson household by rewarding Martin with a packet of condoms.
Cindy might be a mum, but you don't want to be a dad.
Cindy isn't even a mum. She's an incubator, who - very reluctantly - looks after her child. For the past two weeks, her daughter has been on a honeymoon from hell with a murderous psychopathic child, his conniving mother and his father who has a history of mental illness. She hasn't given Beth a thought. The only thing she has done is trash Ian's house and bunk off from school to bonk. She and Liam deserve chlamydia.
It did me great pleasure to see Martin shove a gormless Liam the Lug through the Jackson front door, identifying him as one of the Jackson's group (never remembering that Liam, himself, is also part of the Beale tribe, being Ian's great-nephew, and the Beales were always a bunch of horny little pervs), if only to have Sonia the Dummy confront him about poisoning Rebecca against her. But Martin hasn't been doing that. In fact, he's told Rebecca to contact Sonia. It's Rebecca, who's decided not to have anything to do with Sonia, and can you blame her, after Sonia's justification to Martin for giving Liam condoms was that she didn't want to see what happened to them occur with Liam and Cindy. Hmmm ... Sorry, Sonia, but that's already happened to Cindy, and although she doesn't want her child, she hasn't given her away.
Sonia really is vile and unlikeable.
On the other side of the coin, we can see, perhaps, where Carol is going as a character. The one thing Sonia managed to do that worked was introduce Carol to the post-op cancer counsellor. I can empathise with Carol when she said that even though she'd beaten cancer, she can't shake the feeling that the cancer is still there, lying dormant within and waiting to strike again. As someone who's suffered from and beaten breast cancer, you never rid yourself of the thought that it might come back.
The counsellor put her at ease, in the atmosphere of the pub, and Carol opened up about her fears, when Carol usually is so close-minded and close-mouthed about something like this, resulting in her acting the martyr and making everyone around her suffer. Instead, having opened up, she's happier in herself. Whether she'll go to the support group or not is the next question. I can see her forging a career as a post-op counsellor, herself, and that might be a good direction in which to take her character.
Lindsey Coulson always works well in scenes like that.
Mad Masood. You can tell when the big guns are off doing something, the Masoods are pulled to the forefront. Something must be amiss when Tamwar and Nancy stole that scene, but then their brilliant lunchtime confessional was ruined by an off-screen situation of Tamwar kissing Nancy and then, his words, "freaking out" to such an extent that Nancy pounded out of the house and will probably never speak to him again.
WTF?
This would have been something monumental and deserved to be shown, not relayed. It was quite touching seeing the interplay between Nancy and Tamwar - he, shy and diffident, hesitant; she, taking control, initially, confessing to missing him and not realising how close she'd become to him. Lovely and understated, especially Tam's confession to "really liking her" before she broke down and told him about the chaos and confusion reigning at Clan Carter. Johnny even got a mention about how much she missed him, and Tamwar's retort was a glimmer of the old dry wit Tamwar used to own.
Well, my gay brother escaped too, if that's any consolation.
What you saw were two lonely and gauche people, without anyone else with whom to connect, realising the importance of one to the other and sealing their budding romance with a kiss. That was lovely.
But this "freaking out"? Why? Why did Tamwar freak out? It's not enough to say "because I'm me"? We know Nancy knows about his scars from, again, another unseen scene that should have been aired but was cut when the Moon house burned. So why did he freak out? Tamwar's had a non-Muslim girlfriend before in Alice, but was he thinking Nancy might betray him the way Alice did, or was he freaking out at getting involved with a woman again?
Bad, EastEnders, bad continuity and dodgy scripting and editing. The Nancy-Tamwar situation is going to carry on; don't make it a borefest before it's started.
Of course, the real reveal was Kush and Shabnam finally getting their secret out into the public. Stacey kept schtum, but Donna finding out what was going on between the pair, it was inevitable that the entire Market would know. Interesting that of all the people who came to the non-closing of the Minute Mart, there were only Fatboy, Donna, Winston and assorted extras we seldom see.
I don't understand why Mas was, initially, so upset to find that Shabnam and Kush had been seeing each other. She's not exactly in the first bloom of youth - she's twenty-nine. If they'd left it at the fact that he was going to be told at dinner that night, things would have been ok, but the red flag to a bull was Masood finding out that Shabnam had slept with Kush. (Wait until he finds out she has a daughter by Dean). What amazed me was Shabnam's naivete at thinking that Kush, after only a few weeks, wanted to marry her. Their dialogue in he Minute Mart was all about plans for her future, possibly becoming a pharmacist again.
Shabnam was right when she attested that Kush was an honourable man. He is, but he is in no way thinking of marrying her, and that was more than a bit naive of Shabnam to think that.
Once again, a weird duff-duff ending a weird and unprepossessing week.
Maybe Kim and Sharon can bond in a future episode.
EastEnders' Signature Female Character.
This song's for Kat and Alfie, but the cheating bit goes to Kat ...
Here we go again. Round 1,427,263. Kat's hungover from necking Tommy's over-the-counter antihistimine medicine, feeling mghty sorry for herself and her hair looking like she's trying to imitate the Rolling Stones' Ronnie Wood ...
She's got no stall, no stock and no hope. Stacey, ever the practical one - and don't forget that Stacey has been literally a professional carer since she was a child - makes an interesting remark: her own wages would help keep Kat and the boys, but Alfie's working, and maybe he could contribute more. Kat snaps right back that she wants nothing from Alfie.
That's the interesting bit.
I know TPTB's writing room is filled to the brim with man-haters galore, and the brief is to make various men as despicable as possible, and in that respect, they've succeeded with Alfie's character, so much so that various people are hoping he commits suicide on screen. What he's done, one would be forgiven for thinking from their diatribes, is far worse than what Dean did to Linda, or what Phil did to Sharon - although Phil never intended for Sharon to get hurt as much as Alfie never intended for Kat to get hurt.
Gee, did people call for Phil's death and banishment when that happened to Sharon?
Alfie's many things, but he's not a man to stint on his children, and he's offered whatever money he's had before to Kat. When he didn't have money, he offered to care for the children. On both counts, he was roundly turned down. In fact, she went as far as denying him access to his children. Some viewers disdain the fact that he offered her food on one occasion, but I seem to remember that that staple was low in the squatting household - because that's what Stacey, Big Mo and Kat are, effectively, doing. When Stacey kicked Dean out of Dean's flat, she made herself redundant with no pay, Big Mo had no money and Kat was scraping a living on the stall. They are living in what appears to be a three-bedroomed flat in an area of East London near Stratford. Monthly rent on a three-bedroomed flat in that area starts at £1600 per month. That's just the rent. That doesn't include gas, electric, council tax etc.
There's absolutely no way those three would have been able to negotiate a lease in that short period of time, and now the rent's being raised. Sometimes I wonder how unintelligent the producers of this show think the viewers are. There's such a thing as dramatic licence, but this is more than that. This is reckoning the public will buy any old gumpf they're fed, and they'd be surprised how many people actually buy into some of the crap they sell as fact in drama.
Interpreted, Stacey's remark probably meant that Alfie had offered money, Kat refused, Alfie had found a new job, and Kat had probably threatened him within an inch of his life against making an offer of financial support. Let people see the children suffer, it's not Kat's fault, it's Alfie's. In fact, everything that's happened to Kat has been Alfie's fault, even her repeated infidelities.
But this is Kat's ethos as a character. She bangs on from chaos to catastrophe, each time wailing her old woe-is-me line ... (Hearts and Flowers, please ...)
... until finally, there's someone there to pick up the pieces, kiss it better and send her off down the garden path until she fucks up again and someone comes to her rescue.
This time, it's Big Mo and Stacey.
Stacey plays the parental figure, confronting Kat with the empty bottles of juvenile antihistimine she's been drinking. Kat brushes them aside - they're nothing, you buy them over the counter and, besides, they help her sleep. (Besides, drinking that stuff means she really isn't depending on alcohol to get her to sleep, so that makes her feel better in herself as a person); but Stacey is right. This stuff is no less addicting, and since we had lingering scenes throughout Kat's
It gets rid of the edge, you see.
Mo, on the other hand, has a cunning plan, like someone else who tried to help another person with financial problems ...
She's posted the letter to Harry's solicitor, and she's nicked Kat's phone. Later, we see her taking a phonecall from the solicitor, instructing him to pay the money into the account of one Maureen Harris.
(Sorry, legal transactions such as these are never conducted over the phone, and this is yet more evidence of how utterly puerile this programme can be at some times. The original transaction was in the form of a banker's draft cheque made payable to Kat. Electronic transfer of such funds is possible, but such a transaction, into any other account other than the recipient of the gift, must have the written consent of the recipient. As we saw, that wasn't Kat speaking on the telephone, and the solicitors would have been aware that they could very well have been speaking to anyone. They wouldn't have acted unless they'd received Kat's signed intent for them to transfer the funds to Mo. Yes, I know Mo said she'd forged Kat's signature, but for what and on what? Mo retrieved the letter Kat had written and put in an envelope and posted it to the solicitors. This was the day after she'd posted it, late on the night before. I don't get what this "forged signature" is for since it was obvious that the money was put, unquestioned, into Mo's account that day and she bought stock with it. Bad, bad, bad and sloppy writing).
That's all it takes to make Kat happy again. Big Mo's picked up the pieces. Kat's got stock, she's got fifty quid off Max Branning for stuffing envelopes - and here I thought she'd be stuffing Max - and even in their straightened circumstances, she's bought a couple of bottles of wine to be chugged in very nice wineglasses, which seem to come with the flat, so you wonder if they belong to Tosh or Aleks or even Jake Stone.
Max was right. He never promised Kat 100 quid if she got the envelopes stuffed in a day. All he asked that she do as much as she could that day, but there she was, shouting the odds against him.
So the idea now is for Big Mo to play Sugar Daddy to Kat and the boys, coming up trumps with magic from Fat Elvis, when the chips are down. Stacey is right. This will all end in tears, and we know that Alfie will dry them, so suck it up, Alfie-haters.
As I've said, and I'll reiterate: This is an Executive Producer who didn't flinch on killing off an important legacy character (Lucy), when legacies are thin on the ground; he didn't stint to kill off an original character (Nick), when they are far fewere on the ground. The Moons have relatives with a business in Australia. That's a get-out clause. If the actors won't go, wield an axe. At the end of the day, Alfie and Kat are neither legacy nor original characters.
Time for them to go.
Two Cokers Croaking.
Oh, Les ... he loves his wife, and he loves his girlfriend, and he hopes they'll never meet.
Don't worry, they will.
You knew the moment
I'm not keen on the Cokers. He's stage-trained, and so his mannerism are exaggerated, including the creepy, wide-eyed facial expressions. She's too intense and melodramatic. She's also a gossip, who's not above laughing at acquaintances behind their back - cf: the hijab joke cracked by Donna, which made Pam piss herself laughing.
I don't care about this couple. I don't know them, I don't like them and the elaborate scheme by Billy to get them onto neutral ground "to talk" was contrived and ended in that bum-clinchingly embarrassing scene of them singing a love song to each other.
Of course, it's their 43rd Wedding anniversary and
The community centre scene was pretty naff too. Could Les show his conflict even more?
Nice seeing Janet again, however. Truly a cute and intelligent little girl.
Dumb and Dumber: Public Service Announcements and Shit-Stirring with Sonia and Tina. How to combine an issue storyline with dross.
I could care less about Liam the Lug and Cindy. In fact, Liam's such a dolt (and played by such a mediocre actor), that I find it hard to see what Cindy-Because-I'm-Worth-It-and-Is-That-a-Camera-over-There-Take-My-Picture-Please sees in him. It isn't love. Cindy loves no one but herself.
Carol's indifference to what Liam does isn't new. She only ever played lip service to her children bettering themselves over what she had. She was like that with Bianca when she encouraged her to bin Ricky on the strength of David having binned her. Again. Isn't Liam sixteen? Can't he quit school now if he thinks the rest of his life can be spent on Ian Beale's sofa bonking Cindy where so many variations of semen have landed before?
I thought Sharon was supposed to be looking in on Cindy, so presumably, the school would have been given her name. Obviously, they didn't get in touch with her, which is why Ian was rung on his honeymoon from hell.
Throughout Carol's erratic behaviour, Sonia's been trying to contact Rebecca with no luck. She whines to Tina, back in five year-old mode with her Bjork bunches, that she only wants to reassure Rebecca that she's there for her in the wake of her and Martin splitting up. This gives Tina, who knows jack shit on a stick about what went on between Sonia and Martin, but who was surely instrumental in Martin's attitude toward Sonia by name-calling him down the phone and buying into all the trash-talk Sonia spewed.
Of course the Court Jester assures Sonia that Rebecca's non-response to Sonia is all down to Martin. He's the one who's poisoning her mind against Sonia - you hear about it all the time; and even though Sonia protests that Martin would never do that. Martin wouldn't use their child against her, but Sonia tried to use Rebecca against Martin. You can see she's dull and dumb enough to buy into every word Tina's saying. This comes, of course, after Sonia tries to act like the educated, open-minded adult in the Jackson household by rewarding Martin with a packet of condoms.
Cindy might be a mum, but you don't want to be a dad.
Cindy isn't even a mum. She's an incubator, who - very reluctantly - looks after her child. For the past two weeks, her daughter has been on a honeymoon from hell with a murderous psychopathic child, his conniving mother and his father who has a history of mental illness. She hasn't given Beth a thought. The only thing she has done is trash Ian's house and bunk off from school to bonk. She and Liam deserve chlamydia.
It did me great pleasure to see Martin shove a gormless Liam the Lug through the Jackson front door, identifying him as one of the Jackson's group (never remembering that Liam, himself, is also part of the Beale tribe, being Ian's great-nephew, and the Beales were always a bunch of horny little pervs), if only to have Sonia the Dummy confront him about poisoning Rebecca against her. But Martin hasn't been doing that. In fact, he's told Rebecca to contact Sonia. It's Rebecca, who's decided not to have anything to do with Sonia, and can you blame her, after Sonia's justification to Martin for giving Liam condoms was that she didn't want to see what happened to them occur with Liam and Cindy. Hmmm ... Sorry, Sonia, but that's already happened to Cindy, and although she doesn't want her child, she hasn't given her away.
Sonia really is vile and unlikeable.
On the other side of the coin, we can see, perhaps, where Carol is going as a character. The one thing Sonia managed to do that worked was introduce Carol to the post-op cancer counsellor. I can empathise with Carol when she said that even though she'd beaten cancer, she can't shake the feeling that the cancer is still there, lying dormant within and waiting to strike again. As someone who's suffered from and beaten breast cancer, you never rid yourself of the thought that it might come back.
The counsellor put her at ease, in the atmosphere of the pub, and Carol opened up about her fears, when Carol usually is so close-minded and close-mouthed about something like this, resulting in her acting the martyr and making everyone around her suffer. Instead, having opened up, she's happier in herself. Whether she'll go to the support group or not is the next question. I can see her forging a career as a post-op counsellor, herself, and that might be a good direction in which to take her character.
Lindsey Coulson always works well in scenes like that.
Mad Masood. You can tell when the big guns are off doing something, the Masoods are pulled to the forefront. Something must be amiss when Tamwar and Nancy stole that scene, but then their brilliant lunchtime confessional was ruined by an off-screen situation of Tamwar kissing Nancy and then, his words, "freaking out" to such an extent that Nancy pounded out of the house and will probably never speak to him again.
WTF?
This would have been something monumental and deserved to be shown, not relayed. It was quite touching seeing the interplay between Nancy and Tamwar - he, shy and diffident, hesitant; she, taking control, initially, confessing to missing him and not realising how close she'd become to him. Lovely and understated, especially Tam's confession to "really liking her" before she broke down and told him about the chaos and confusion reigning at Clan Carter. Johnny even got a mention about how much she missed him, and Tamwar's retort was a glimmer of the old dry wit Tamwar used to own.
Well, my gay brother escaped too, if that's any consolation.
What you saw were two lonely and gauche people, without anyone else with whom to connect, realising the importance of one to the other and sealing their budding romance with a kiss. That was lovely.
But this "freaking out"? Why? Why did Tamwar freak out? It's not enough to say "because I'm me"? We know Nancy knows about his scars from, again, another unseen scene that should have been aired but was cut when the Moon house burned. So why did he freak out? Tamwar's had a non-Muslim girlfriend before in Alice, but was he thinking Nancy might betray him the way Alice did, or was he freaking out at getting involved with a woman again?
Bad, EastEnders, bad continuity and dodgy scripting and editing. The Nancy-Tamwar situation is going to carry on; don't make it a borefest before it's started.
Of course, the real reveal was Kush and Shabnam finally getting their secret out into the public. Stacey kept schtum, but Donna finding out what was going on between the pair, it was inevitable that the entire Market would know. Interesting that of all the people who came to the non-closing of the Minute Mart, there were only Fatboy, Donna, Winston and assorted extras we seldom see.
I don't understand why Mas was, initially, so upset to find that Shabnam and Kush had been seeing each other. She's not exactly in the first bloom of youth - she's twenty-nine. If they'd left it at the fact that he was going to be told at dinner that night, things would have been ok, but the red flag to a bull was Masood finding out that Shabnam had slept with Kush. (Wait until he finds out she has a daughter by Dean). What amazed me was Shabnam's naivete at thinking that Kush, after only a few weeks, wanted to marry her. Their dialogue in he Minute Mart was all about plans for her future, possibly becoming a pharmacist again.
Shabnam was right when she attested that Kush was an honourable man. He is, but he is in no way thinking of marrying her, and that was more than a bit naive of Shabnam to think that.
Once again, a weird duff-duff ending a weird and unprepossessing week.
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