Natalie Mitchell is a writer who isn't used enough by the sensitive snowflakes inhabiting the writing room. While not much happened in this episode, it was brilliant in characterisation and subtlety.
It was all played out against the children's Nativity, the rehearsals for the play, and Jack's stag do.
A Brief Word about Jay. Considering that this is my own blog, I can say what I like about an actor who's basically a one-trick pony, and who will probably end up a 45 year-old version of his beetle-browed self, mooching about, feeling sorry for himself, and making mincemeat of the fact that this is the only role he's ever played.
Lazy. Actor.
Anyway, let's get one thing straight. Jay is a sex offender. And there he was, bold as blazes, sat in the café, overseeing the woman Louise's and Denny's breakfasts. That's right, someone on the Sex Offenders' Register was in charge of two underaged children, one of them a girl.
Louise is one of two girls whose stupidity is legion in Walford, but she's fifteen years old. She's been in Social Services care before, and she should have common sense to know that Phil, even at his healthiest, couldn't fight the Social if they come gunning for removing Louise because it's their right. Jay cannot live in a house where there are underaged children.
Billy and Honey did the right thing. They invited the Social Worker into their home and talked about how long they had known Jay and how they trusted him. They were cool, calm and very articulate. Instead, we had Phil, shuffling and grunting about - he was rude to the police officer, so was pithy Louise, and he baited the guy with stupid Christmas cracker riddles. The police officers, and one was a woman specifically for that purpose, know now exactly what type of household Phil runs.
Jay is sitting on a time bomb waiting to be turfed out, and he will do so in martyr meme. When the Social tries to take Louise from Phil and Denny from Sharon, Jay will become the self-appointed sacrificial lamb.
He even made a major sacrifice tonight - removing himself from the Christmas play - Jay plays a white younger Scrooge who eventually ages into a black man - because he was required to take Louise's hand in the play, and then kiss her. The latter was on Derek's direction. I find it astounding that no one had thought to apprise Derek of Jay's situation. Instead, it was left to the Madonna of Albert Square, Denise (ironically carrying the sainted Mitchell Rainbow Christ Child) to suggest that there might be something more useful Jay could do "behind the scenes." Since when did Denise learn tact?
Once again, and worryingly, EastEnders are pitching sympathy for a sex offender. At best, had Linzi been of age, Jay would have bedded her, not just because he was attracted to her, but to prove a point to Ben, of all people. His basic premise for being with Linzi was to score a bonk. Six weeks he was seeing the girl, and he never once thought to ask her anything about herself - her age, what she did for a living, her family ... nothing.
He was stupid, he got caught and admitted his guilt. He's paying the price. He has to abide by certain terms and conditions of his licence for five years. He isn't worthy of pity - the remorse he showed was purely because he was awfully sorry he was stupid enough to get caught.
Please stop asking viewers to sympathise with a convicted sex offender. You'd think the BBC, who made a living out of harbouring the worst kinds of sex offenders, would know better.
A Word about Denise. Sean O'Connor is re-inventing many characters, and Smacked BumFace is one of them. Because she's been inveighed with wisdom and self-importance from carrying the blessed Mitchell Rainbow Christ Child. she glides about the Square, benignly imparting wisdom and solving problems.
She's still basking in the admiration heaped on her by the multitude of uneducated people in Walford. It's clear from the dialogue Patrick uttered the other day that she'd openly plagiarised dialogue from the A Christmas Carol, itself. Tonight's scene between young Scrooge and the girl he gave up for money had this offering ...
I want to spend some time alone wiv you, Ebenezer.
Really, Denise? We're talking 1840s England, not 21st Century Walford. Belle, for that was Scrooge's lady friend's name, could no more have "spent some time alone with him" than she could have kissed him. Don't be so bloody ignorant.
And tact ... since when has Denise ever had tact, sidling up and whispering to Jay ...
I understand why you can't do this scene ...
Before toddling over to the café to offer Roxy some benign advice about make-up and children. Shut up. Just shut up. You aren't so great, and now we realise that her putrid mother is about to be cast - just another stereotypical Jamaican who'll play reggae, fuck Patrick and be the mother-in-law from hell to Vincent, whom I'm liking more and more.
And more and more, I'm thinking that maybe Ronnie and Denise should jump to their deaths and leave Roxy and Kim.
A Brief Word about the Blisters. I know they are leaving, but do you know what I hate about this entire leaving line, which, evidently, will result in both of them dying?
It's this: Ronnie needs karma. She kidnapped a child and let his parents believe that he was dead. She killed two men in cold blood and proceeded to swan around the Square as if her shit didn't smell. She married a good, had his son, bot bored and fucked a man on the floor of her front room whilst her young son was upstairs. She "arranged" for her husband to be put out of the picture, after he called her out for being what she is - a cold-hearted, control-obsesses psychopath.
She was rewarded with a reconciliation with her first husband, and acquired two of his children to add to the one she already had by the husband she ran off. And the viewers are being asked to accept her as the suburban Yummy Mummy, whose happiness has been regularly upset by her immature little sister.
Roxy, on the other hand, deserves to grow as a character, without the impediment of Ronnie, hanging about like a bad smell, reinforcing the poor self-esteem she holds about herself, that without Ronnie guiding her life, she'll inevitably fuck up.
What TPTB have given us is an abiding image of Ronnie as the core of stability, happy with Jack and successfully raising (and spoiling) Jack's two children, one of whom happens to be Roxy's child. Roxy, on the other hand, is now being represented as a feckless, irresponsible failure of a mother, who can't do anything right for her child, who fails her at every turn.
Of course, Amy is going to want to be a part of Jack's and Ronnie's dynamic. They are spoiling her rotten with riding lessons, a pony and all manner of material stuff. The idea being pushed is that Roxy has become one of those part-time parents who haven't got a clue about what their children like and need. The ultimate example of this was presented in Friday's episode, when Roxy gave Amy a gift at the end of the Christingle service - a make-up set for an 8 year-old. Roxy's idea of a day out with Amy is a trek around the shops, when Ronnie and Jack take her to the pantomime or the zoo or someplace kids enjoy going. It was heartbreaking to see Amy's puerile, rude response to Roxy's gift, dumping it unceremoniously back in the shopping bag from whence it came. Instead, she would rather go with Jack, Amy and Ricky to visit Grandma Dot. And why not?
The meme being pushed is that Amy, like all children, craves stability and normality, something she didn't have with Roxy; and the writers have contrived to have everyone from Donna to the Reverend Stevens suggest to Roxy that the kindest thing she can do for Amy, the ultimate sacrifice of unconditional love is to get Jack and Ronnie to adopt Amy.
Last week, we had Donna tell Roxy that the kindest thing her mother ever did was to put her into care, where she sould get the specialist attention she would need by responsible people who made it their business to look out for her. In Friday's episode, we had a quiet moment on Arthur's bench between Roxy and Rev Stevens when he quoted a fridge magnet and implied that the ultimate sacrifice Roxy could make for Amy would be to give her to Jack and Ronnie.
I actually find this offensive.
Roxy has never been anything less than a loving mother for Amy, and in that respect, everything else hasn't been any better or any worse than any other dodgy mother on the Square, and I could include the likes of Stacey, Jane, and even fucking Ronnie in that equation. Certainly Sharon. Definitely dumbass Denise. And Pearl is only an accessory for Kim's bad taste.
I also know that all of this is meant to lead Roxy back into the iniquities of a cocaine addiction, which was heavily implied by her last scene, drinking alone in The Albert, then meeting up with a female pusher in the alleyway to score a hit, and finally having the camera pull slowly away from the image of Roxy standing alone and bereft in the middle of the Square.
All of this played out subsequent to the big scene between the Blisters, when Roxy tearfully gave Ronnie permission to adopt her daughter. For all of Ronnie's alligator tears, this is what she's wanted and intimated all along. Now she has a real-life child version of Roxy to bring up in her image.
But we know that won't happen. Because two weeks from today - Sunday 18th of December - Roxy and Ronnie will both be brown bread.
A Word about the Beales and the Fowlers. Theirs was a sitcom moment, a real-life enactment of Scroogy Cousin Ian denying Cratchitty Cousin Martin time off from the stall in order that he might attend his step-daughter's Cristingle.
But the Beale-Fowler dynamic seems to be steeped in sitcom situations at the moment. Martin and Stacey the Arthur-Pauline picture of stability with their requisite three children, had the continuity moment of the season with Stacey afraid to enter the church, as the Cristingle performance from the previous year had triggered her psychosis.
At the moment she decides that she's unable to face the performance, who should turn up but Martin - his situation saved by the combined efforts of Jane and Lauren, who decide to man the stall so Martin can have the afternoon off to attend the performance. What was all that hoo-hah about the other day, with Martin doing a song-and-dance, beleagured Steven drafted in on the fray and Stacey shouting the odds about Ian's stinginess, when all anyone had to do was appeal to Jane, the current disabled version of Lou in the frame of things, and all would be well.
Instead, we see Jane and Lauren being wheeled to the rescue of diffident Martin, only to find, in a few moments time that Ian's dependency on Martin and his excuse being his bad back precluded him from shifting and ferrying Christmas trees, was fraudulent.
Har-dee-har unfunny sitcom moment: Ian Beale liked being fussed over so much with his bad back that he enabled the problem to last a few days longer than necessary just to savour the moment of people running to and fro and doing his business.
The backdrop to all of this is silly, insipid Rebecca's crisis. I gather that she managed to allow the cretinous turd-headed Shakil to get a leg-over in the NuFowler abode the other night when she was there, ostensibly, baby-sitting two young children, and since then she's heard nothing from him. Again.
All it took was one bad, nasally-sung song dedicated to a dickhead with a man bun, for Shakil to realise that she'd be up and ready for some more spreaded leg action. Rebecca needs to realise something - that virginity isn't a thing that's lightly given, and that a romantic sacrifice like that is all too often done in the spur of the moment, not clinically planned the way she did, complete with dressing up and doing her make-up. Maybe that's why the occurrence wasn't that great. She also needs to realise that whilst she might think she "loves" Shakil, for him, she was a convenience, one of a gaggle of girls who said "yes" to his demands.
As long as some other prettier, long-legged, blonde damsel - like Louise, whom he'll have to kiss in his new-found role as young (Iranian) Scrooge - doesn't make herself available, he'll happily carry on banging Rebecca RedNose.
This isn't Mick and Linda. This isn't a childhood romance. It's just an ugly girl mooning after a dipshit boy who comes from a long line of horny, self-obsessed chancers.
The actress who plays Rebecca is all kinds of bad. She overdoes her reactions even in the smallest of ways. Had I been Lily, when Rebecca gave me the advice for conquering nerves of taking a deep breath and exhaling, I'd have run a mile. The intensity of her delivery would have frightened any child.
A Word about the Stag Do. In this instance, I think Danny Dyer as Mick works best. This was a believable stag do. Ian Beale wasn't invited. Nor was Phil Mitchell, who was too ill - nor Ben, nor Jay. The dynamic of Mick, Jack, Martin, Kush, Shrimpy and Mick's two sons, with Billy picked up along the way, worked well, and was quite amusing.
The whines about the Christmas lights and the stealing of the Council's Christmas tree was a bit over the top, but nothing compared to last year's storming of the Council's Christmas dinner by the market traders, and Billy, booted and suited, with a Santa Clause beard was quite funny.
However, more and more, I think it's obvious that not only was Lee in on the robbery at the Vic, which has been established, I think he was also in on the burglary of Billy's and Honey's flat. My guess is that when Lee leaves, he'll be in for some bird ... in prison.
Watch this space.
It was all played out against the children's Nativity, the rehearsals for the play, and Jack's stag do.
A Brief Word about Jay. Considering that this is my own blog, I can say what I like about an actor who's basically a one-trick pony, and who will probably end up a 45 year-old version of his beetle-browed self, mooching about, feeling sorry for himself, and making mincemeat of the fact that this is the only role he's ever played.
Lazy. Actor.
Anyway, let's get one thing straight. Jay is a sex offender. And there he was, bold as blazes, sat in the café, overseeing the woman Louise's and Denny's breakfasts. That's right, someone on the Sex Offenders' Register was in charge of two underaged children, one of them a girl.
Louise is one of two girls whose stupidity is legion in Walford, but she's fifteen years old. She's been in Social Services care before, and she should have common sense to know that Phil, even at his healthiest, couldn't fight the Social if they come gunning for removing Louise because it's their right. Jay cannot live in a house where there are underaged children.
Billy and Honey did the right thing. They invited the Social Worker into their home and talked about how long they had known Jay and how they trusted him. They were cool, calm and very articulate. Instead, we had Phil, shuffling and grunting about - he was rude to the police officer, so was pithy Louise, and he baited the guy with stupid Christmas cracker riddles. The police officers, and one was a woman specifically for that purpose, know now exactly what type of household Phil runs.
Jay is sitting on a time bomb waiting to be turfed out, and he will do so in martyr meme. When the Social tries to take Louise from Phil and Denny from Sharon, Jay will become the self-appointed sacrificial lamb.
He even made a major sacrifice tonight - removing himself from the Christmas play - Jay plays a white younger Scrooge who eventually ages into a black man - because he was required to take Louise's hand in the play, and then kiss her. The latter was on Derek's direction. I find it astounding that no one had thought to apprise Derek of Jay's situation. Instead, it was left to the Madonna of Albert Square, Denise (ironically carrying the sainted Mitchell Rainbow Christ Child) to suggest that there might be something more useful Jay could do "behind the scenes." Since when did Denise learn tact?
Once again, and worryingly, EastEnders are pitching sympathy for a sex offender. At best, had Linzi been of age, Jay would have bedded her, not just because he was attracted to her, but to prove a point to Ben, of all people. His basic premise for being with Linzi was to score a bonk. Six weeks he was seeing the girl, and he never once thought to ask her anything about herself - her age, what she did for a living, her family ... nothing.
He was stupid, he got caught and admitted his guilt. He's paying the price. He has to abide by certain terms and conditions of his licence for five years. He isn't worthy of pity - the remorse he showed was purely because he was awfully sorry he was stupid enough to get caught.
Please stop asking viewers to sympathise with a convicted sex offender. You'd think the BBC, who made a living out of harbouring the worst kinds of sex offenders, would know better.
A Word about Denise. Sean O'Connor is re-inventing many characters, and Smacked BumFace is one of them. Because she's been inveighed with wisdom and self-importance from carrying the blessed Mitchell Rainbow Christ Child. she glides about the Square, benignly imparting wisdom and solving problems.
She's still basking in the admiration heaped on her by the multitude of uneducated people in Walford. It's clear from the dialogue Patrick uttered the other day that she'd openly plagiarised dialogue from the A Christmas Carol, itself. Tonight's scene between young Scrooge and the girl he gave up for money had this offering ...
I want to spend some time alone wiv you, Ebenezer.
Really, Denise? We're talking 1840s England, not 21st Century Walford. Belle, for that was Scrooge's lady friend's name, could no more have "spent some time alone with him" than she could have kissed him. Don't be so bloody ignorant.
And tact ... since when has Denise ever had tact, sidling up and whispering to Jay ...
I understand why you can't do this scene ...
Before toddling over to the café to offer Roxy some benign advice about make-up and children. Shut up. Just shut up. You aren't so great, and now we realise that her putrid mother is about to be cast - just another stereotypical Jamaican who'll play reggae, fuck Patrick and be the mother-in-law from hell to Vincent, whom I'm liking more and more.
And more and more, I'm thinking that maybe Ronnie and Denise should jump to their deaths and leave Roxy and Kim.
A Brief Word about the Blisters. I know they are leaving, but do you know what I hate about this entire leaving line, which, evidently, will result in both of them dying?
It's this: Ronnie needs karma. She kidnapped a child and let his parents believe that he was dead. She killed two men in cold blood and proceeded to swan around the Square as if her shit didn't smell. She married a good, had his son, bot bored and fucked a man on the floor of her front room whilst her young son was upstairs. She "arranged" for her husband to be put out of the picture, after he called her out for being what she is - a cold-hearted, control-obsesses psychopath.
She was rewarded with a reconciliation with her first husband, and acquired two of his children to add to the one she already had by the husband she ran off. And the viewers are being asked to accept her as the suburban Yummy Mummy, whose happiness has been regularly upset by her immature little sister.
Roxy, on the other hand, deserves to grow as a character, without the impediment of Ronnie, hanging about like a bad smell, reinforcing the poor self-esteem she holds about herself, that without Ronnie guiding her life, she'll inevitably fuck up.
What TPTB have given us is an abiding image of Ronnie as the core of stability, happy with Jack and successfully raising (and spoiling) Jack's two children, one of whom happens to be Roxy's child. Roxy, on the other hand, is now being represented as a feckless, irresponsible failure of a mother, who can't do anything right for her child, who fails her at every turn.
Of course, Amy is going to want to be a part of Jack's and Ronnie's dynamic. They are spoiling her rotten with riding lessons, a pony and all manner of material stuff. The idea being pushed is that Roxy has become one of those part-time parents who haven't got a clue about what their children like and need. The ultimate example of this was presented in Friday's episode, when Roxy gave Amy a gift at the end of the Christingle service - a make-up set for an 8 year-old. Roxy's idea of a day out with Amy is a trek around the shops, when Ronnie and Jack take her to the pantomime or the zoo or someplace kids enjoy going. It was heartbreaking to see Amy's puerile, rude response to Roxy's gift, dumping it unceremoniously back in the shopping bag from whence it came. Instead, she would rather go with Jack, Amy and Ricky to visit Grandma Dot. And why not?
The meme being pushed is that Amy, like all children, craves stability and normality, something she didn't have with Roxy; and the writers have contrived to have everyone from Donna to the Reverend Stevens suggest to Roxy that the kindest thing she can do for Amy, the ultimate sacrifice of unconditional love is to get Jack and Ronnie to adopt Amy.
Last week, we had Donna tell Roxy that the kindest thing her mother ever did was to put her into care, where she sould get the specialist attention she would need by responsible people who made it their business to look out for her. In Friday's episode, we had a quiet moment on Arthur's bench between Roxy and Rev Stevens when he quoted a fridge magnet and implied that the ultimate sacrifice Roxy could make for Amy would be to give her to Jack and Ronnie.
I actually find this offensive.
Roxy has never been anything less than a loving mother for Amy, and in that respect, everything else hasn't been any better or any worse than any other dodgy mother on the Square, and I could include the likes of Stacey, Jane, and even fucking Ronnie in that equation. Certainly Sharon. Definitely dumbass Denise. And Pearl is only an accessory for Kim's bad taste.
I also know that all of this is meant to lead Roxy back into the iniquities of a cocaine addiction, which was heavily implied by her last scene, drinking alone in The Albert, then meeting up with a female pusher in the alleyway to score a hit, and finally having the camera pull slowly away from the image of Roxy standing alone and bereft in the middle of the Square.
All of this played out subsequent to the big scene between the Blisters, when Roxy tearfully gave Ronnie permission to adopt her daughter. For all of Ronnie's alligator tears, this is what she's wanted and intimated all along. Now she has a real-life child version of Roxy to bring up in her image.
But we know that won't happen. Because two weeks from today - Sunday 18th of December - Roxy and Ronnie will both be brown bread.
A Word about the Beales and the Fowlers. Theirs was a sitcom moment, a real-life enactment of Scroogy Cousin Ian denying Cratchitty Cousin Martin time off from the stall in order that he might attend his step-daughter's Cristingle.
But the Beale-Fowler dynamic seems to be steeped in sitcom situations at the moment. Martin and Stacey the Arthur-Pauline picture of stability with their requisite three children, had the continuity moment of the season with Stacey afraid to enter the church, as the Cristingle performance from the previous year had triggered her psychosis.
At the moment she decides that she's unable to face the performance, who should turn up but Martin - his situation saved by the combined efforts of Jane and Lauren, who decide to man the stall so Martin can have the afternoon off to attend the performance. What was all that hoo-hah about the other day, with Martin doing a song-and-dance, beleagured Steven drafted in on the fray and Stacey shouting the odds about Ian's stinginess, when all anyone had to do was appeal to Jane, the current disabled version of Lou in the frame of things, and all would be well.
Instead, we see Jane and Lauren being wheeled to the rescue of diffident Martin, only to find, in a few moments time that Ian's dependency on Martin and his excuse being his bad back precluded him from shifting and ferrying Christmas trees, was fraudulent.
Har-dee-har unfunny sitcom moment: Ian Beale liked being fussed over so much with his bad back that he enabled the problem to last a few days longer than necessary just to savour the moment of people running to and fro and doing his business.
The backdrop to all of this is silly, insipid Rebecca's crisis. I gather that she managed to allow the cretinous turd-headed Shakil to get a leg-over in the NuFowler abode the other night when she was there, ostensibly, baby-sitting two young children, and since then she's heard nothing from him. Again.
All it took was one bad, nasally-sung song dedicated to a dickhead with a man bun, for Shakil to realise that she'd be up and ready for some more spreaded leg action. Rebecca needs to realise something - that virginity isn't a thing that's lightly given, and that a romantic sacrifice like that is all too often done in the spur of the moment, not clinically planned the way she did, complete with dressing up and doing her make-up. Maybe that's why the occurrence wasn't that great. She also needs to realise that whilst she might think she "loves" Shakil, for him, she was a convenience, one of a gaggle of girls who said "yes" to his demands.
As long as some other prettier, long-legged, blonde damsel - like Louise, whom he'll have to kiss in his new-found role as young (Iranian) Scrooge - doesn't make herself available, he'll happily carry on banging Rebecca RedNose.
This isn't Mick and Linda. This isn't a childhood romance. It's just an ugly girl mooning after a dipshit boy who comes from a long line of horny, self-obsessed chancers.
The actress who plays Rebecca is all kinds of bad. She overdoes her reactions even in the smallest of ways. Had I been Lily, when Rebecca gave me the advice for conquering nerves of taking a deep breath and exhaling, I'd have run a mile. The intensity of her delivery would have frightened any child.
A Word about the Stag Do. In this instance, I think Danny Dyer as Mick works best. This was a believable stag do. Ian Beale wasn't invited. Nor was Phil Mitchell, who was too ill - nor Ben, nor Jay. The dynamic of Mick, Jack, Martin, Kush, Shrimpy and Mick's two sons, with Billy picked up along the way, worked well, and was quite amusing.
The whines about the Christmas lights and the stealing of the Council's Christmas tree was a bit over the top, but nothing compared to last year's storming of the Council's Christmas dinner by the market traders, and Billy, booted and suited, with a Santa Clause beard was quite funny.
However, more and more, I think it's obvious that not only was Lee in on the robbery at the Vic, which has been established, I think he was also in on the burglary of Billy's and Honey's flat. My guess is that when Lee leaves, he'll be in for some bird ... in prison.
Watch this space.
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