Spoiled Brats - Review:- Tuesday 30.05.2017

EastEnders is a show for children, about children. Children of all sorts, but mostly spoiled brats of all shapes and sizes. 

Tonight, the show featured three of the most annoying spoiled kidults.

Poor, Dumb, Stupid, Gobshite Denise. I can say that now without the Denise Police (that sounds so much nicer than the word "troll" or "passive-aggressive Celtic bully", doesn't it?) charging in, stirring shit, interpreting the slightest nuance of opinion being something that it isn't.

Denise is a stupid, arrogant, ungrateful, pig-headed, rude, loud-mouthed shitkicker, for whom we're supposed to have scores of unremitting sympathy and adoration for her suffering and her plight. This is a character who quickly lost relevance the moment her serial killer husband was arrested, the moment Bryan Kirkwood called time on both her kids - the lazy, stuck-up older daughter and the boring, blue-stockinged younger one. 

Ever since 2010, successive producers have struggled to find something for Diane Parish, yet nothing stuck. She spent the majority of her time, playing straight man to the unfunny Kim and the much-missed Zainab, when she wasn't gurning and mouthing off some sort of rude, off-hand comment to someone. I find it totally peculiar the way people fawn over her and shower her with kindness, because she treats anyone who shows her concern like a piece of shit, except Patrick,and even DTC attempted to field a storyline about elder abuse, featuring her, but no one dare impugn the character of Saint Denise.

No, not ever. The show can re-cast a truly iconic character such as Michelle Fowler and then make her a statutory rapist, but poor, saintly, misguided Denise can't be allowed to put a foot wrong. Now, this inadequate producer has stunk up the show by putting her front and centre unendingly, and her storyline is set to go on and on. Next week, she renews her romance with Kush (and there goes any bonding he ever hoped to make with Arthur). We know she'll be involved in Linda finding out about Mick's dalliance with dirty Whitney because she witnessed it; and then, the fact that she's the mother of yet another secret Mitchell son means her miserable gob is going to be glued to the show, and our television screens, forever and a day.

Tonight, we got to see Daddy Patrick come home and take a situation she created, herself, into hand, treating her like the overgrown, spoiled brat she is.

I'm a grown woman ... she whined, just after behaving like a child.

Patrick fixed her breakfast, and she demurred from eating it until he coaxed and coddled her by using reverse psychology ...

There's nothing I looked forward to more than a full English breakfast.

You know, baby doesn't want to eat, so Daddy pretends that he wants baby's food. In fact, Denise and Patrick reminded me of an old oatmeal commercial from the early 1960s in the US ...

Waaaahhhhhhhhhhhh! Denise wants her Maypo, so she gobbles down the full English, whilst Patrick has a grouse about Kim "ignoring" Denise's situation. Denise is too busy stuffing her gob to even demur and tell him that Kim actually did attempt to help her, but Denise kept spurning her efforts.

So off Patrick trots to see Kim (and the adorable Pearl), only to inform Kim about poor Denise's suffering and to rip Kim a new arsehole for not paying attention to her. I couldn't believe Patrick's words!

Didn't Kim realise Denise didn't have a job? How did she think Denise was living?

(Actually, Patrick, Kim did realise Denise was without a job. In fact, if anyone would care to recall, it was Kim, who stepped in, unbidden, and nobbled The Minute Mart area manager into retaining Denise, when he was all too ready to sack her for gobbing off against her place of employment to the local press. Kim actually stuck her neck out for Denise, who proceeded to dig a hole for herself by trash-mouthing the area manager to his face -the first step which led to her wantonly making herself unemployed ...

And actually, Patrick, Kim was constantly offering to have Denise around for meals, and one time got so totally fed up with her attitude that she told her pointedly that what she actually needed was a job, and she needed to have been looking for a job since leaving the Minute Mart. Instead, all Denise did was carry on as usual. Look for a job? It never crossed her mind. She drank at the pub, she ate at the café, she fucked Kush.

(Do you hear that, Denise-bots? She lay around on her lazy arse and fucked Kush when she should have been looking for a job? She was so nasty nice, she turned her delicate nose up at the prospect of helping him on the stall!)

She never stopped to think of her economic situation until she was down to her last tenner. As much as I love Patrick, he was wrong to condemn Kim, and the writer wrote that piece as having Kim roll over and play dead in response to all of Patrick's allegations. Kim was never out of Denise's face! She made excuses to see her all the time, yet Denise feinted, lied and put her off as unwelcome, rather than show what hardship she had inflicted on herself, rather than take any offer of help from Kim.

Even in tonight's episode, Denise refused Kim's offer of money. Why? Yes, Kim married a wealthy man, and yes, she splashes money; but the offer she made Denise tonight was simply help borne of love, compassion and concern. Call it a gift, call it a loan, but this is a way that families support each other. It's a weak family who's wealthier members can't or won't look after the vulnerable. This was after she and Kim had had as much of a heartfelt conversation as it was possible for two dimwits to have, where Kim eventually fed Denise's enormous ego by telling her how clever she was again. Denise is like Donald Trump, she gets off on being told how clever she is.

The money wasn't charity. It was given with love. Denise can take a tenner off her sexy tutor, who'll eventually ask her for a return of the loan, if he doesn't sleep with her in lieu; but she cannot take a gift of money from her sister. Instead of a heartfelt, dignified "thank you," she pushes the money back at Kim and tells her to shove it. I guess Denise is just too comfotable living vicariously as an adolescent, taking an adolescent's academic courses and being supported financially and emotionally by a frail, old pensioner.

Kim didn't make that situation worse. Denise did. She wouldn't accept any offer- no job, no housing and no hand-out - from Kim.

What a pathetically stupid woman! She can't even look after herself.

The Spoiled Brat As a Thug: Jack. I hate O'Connor's stagey art film-style motifs. We witnessed one such at the beginning of tonight's episode, where the theme and the mood of the episode was set, simply by showing Mick, wearing the pink dressing gown of the woman who's the object of his anger, whilst frantically phoning the scurvy little whore who happens to be the object of his lust - cut to Jack, moodily, hunched over his laptop perusing a site dealing with fathers' rights (except he isn't the father of the child for whom he's fighting) and finally, Saint Denise, alone in her kitchen until Patrick plays Santa Claus and returns with food.

More and more, as this manipulation by Max continues, we're seeing that Jack cares little or nothing at all for his actual children. This is all about Ronnie and Matthew representing the last vestige Jack has of this psychopath, as well as a second shot at the son he never knew, who died.

He's obsessing over the fact that Charlie is applying for residency for Matthew. Deep down, he knows the real truth - that Charlie is Matthew's father. He's even paranoid about leaving the kids with particular babysitters whilst attending a meeting with his brief. Honey is busy; Max has other plans. Finally, he corrals Rebecca into babysitting.

One phrase that keeps running throughout this narrative is particularly niggling ...

Ronnie wouldn't have wanted Charlie to have Matthew.

Honey and Billy both said this, Honey a bit too piously and Billy reinforcing the sentiment by declaring that Ronnie would never have stood for this. I hate such things. These people, who aren't saints, themselves, by a long shot, sit in judgement of a man who was forced out of his son's life and who now, only, wants to have him back where he belongs.

At the end of the day, as usual and in her newfound role as common sense adjudicator of the Square, it's Stacey who attempts to make Jack see sense. It's she who recognises why Amy and Ricky are running rampant. 

They are, indeed, affected by this situation with Matthew, mostly because of Jack's behaviour. They see him spending an inordinate amount of time with Matthew, they hear him telling them how important it is that Matthew stay within the family dynamic. Everything is centred around Matthew. They might be kids, but they aren't stupid. They feel that Matthew's importance to Jack, far outweighs their own, in his life.

Amy is old enough to know that Matthew isn't her brother, and probably Ricky knows this as well. Ricky has only just bonded with Jack, himself, after the most difficult of starts, so seeing Jack work himself into a frazzle about a child who isn't their sibling has got to affect them in some way. They're acting out now in a desperate plea for Jack's attention, for a reaction, any reaction. Instead, all the get is Jack ringing some thug with a view to getting rid of Charlie permanently. Of course, he's not thinking straight, and should something like this transpire and it be revealed that Jack was behind this, he'll lose access to all his kids.

The segment was rife with obvious irony as Jack thanks Max for standing by him. One is as bad as another. Jack is willing to kill and innocent man just to retain something to which he isn't entitled.

I'm Team Charlie.

Widdle Boy Wost. Mick needs a slap. He's the worst type of spoiled brat, because when he doesn't get his way, he gets nasty and violent. Tonight he came within a hair's breadth of hurting Shirley - throwing her against a wall and hurling a glass at her.

And all because Whitney left. He's spent all night and most of the day, swigging whiskey, sulking and leaving pitiful voicemail messages on Shitney's phone. Instead of running to Bianca, she's run even further, to her skanky brother, King Drip.

May she stay there.

Instead, Mick sits, drinking and feeling sorry for himself, and blaming everyone around him for Whitney's departure - everyone, being Shirley and Linda, especially Linda. In fact, he got quite ugly about Linda.

In vino veritas ... and we saw the real Mick Carter tonight. The real Mick Carter doesn't love Linda. He loves the idea of Linda being an eternal child-like girlwoman, easily giggling, pleased by a party and playing house on a daily basis. He loves the Linda who defers to Mick, who - in her rather stupid innocence, swears that he's her best friend, even as he sidelines and passive-aggressively bullies her.

He hates and is jealous of the adult Linda, the strong Linda, who claws her way back from a humiliatingly violent rape with untold dignity. The adult Linda, who puts her priorities in the right order. Her mother, who looked after and loved her from an infant, falls ill, and Linda goes to care for her. It's not her fault that Mick hasn't told her of the maintenance repairs to do on the pub. He's told her nothing of Lee's debt, which - I'll wager - wasn't half as much as the payday loan Mick took out to get her and Elaine home on a special flight from Spain.

He hates the fact that, for once in her life, Linda has had to put someone before Mick. He even blurted out the fact that Linda didn't put her family first, and then that she didn't put him first. It took Shirley to remind him - the mother who had abandoned him -that Elaine, the woman who took him in, raised him, taught him a trade, gave him a home, financially supported him and his children until he was nearly forty years old, and he resents his wife putting her mother before him in her hour of need? Even Shirley, who has no love for Elaine, recognised this.

And in truth, although Shirley doesn't particularly care for Linda, she backed her to the hilt in dealing with Whitney, and Shirley was right. However much Mick might blame himself for what happened between him and Whitney, she pretty much made herself available around him, caught up on his moment of vulnerability and played him, in the process, alienating him from his son and planting doubts in his mind about Linda. Shirley was totally right in assessing that Whitney successively wended her way through various men in the Carter family, and even though Johnny is gay, there was a time when she hopelessly fancied him. Even now, she was playing faux Linda around him.

Shirley was right to kick her out. Mick getting involved with her would have ripped the family apart - his son's wife. In the end, after he vents his frustrations in a physical attempt at violence against his own mother, he's reduced to a blubbing, babbling wreck, whining that he doesn't know himself anymore. 

Mick is a sham, a man of straw. Everything bad which happened after Linda left is down to him and his immaturity. He really is a despicable excuse for a human.

His constant refrain throughout the night was the rejoinder: - But it ain't my pub, innit?

He sounded like a whiny, little bitch, and Shirley should have slapped him. I hope Linda does. Instead, she'll probably mother him.

What a despicable human being!

Lauren's Pregnant. And it's Steven's. Clock her face when he shows her the chocolates. If there's ever a baby that won't be born, it's this one. This is going to be a tale of a secret abortion, about which Steven will find out and then the shit will hit the fan.

Speaking of shit, too much information about Ian's change of diet. Enough of the silly sitcom surrounding diabetes.

The Rest. I'm not the biggest Honey fan - I hate her bitchy, passive-aggressiveness - but I like Billy and the real family issue and the comedy moment about settling Will into the flat, as well as trying to have an intimate moment of their own. It was genuinely funny when Billy, in a role play with his frock coat and nothing underneath, was asked by Will if he were going to work. It's nice to see Billy happy, which means that something bad is about to happen.

And Ben was simply too callous. Calling Abi "boring Branning?" This is the girl he led on in making her believe that he loved her. He cheated on her with Paul and various Grindr males, giving her an STD and then humiliating her in her desperation to hold onto a relationship he used as a front. In this instance, he deserved a smack from Abi for being such a callow cur.

Getting a Grip - Review:- Monday 29.05.2017

This is a soap. It's not real. Nowhere in the UK would you find characters of the ilk you see on Albert Square. This is London. It's highly debatable that one household would know well more than one other household in that immediate area, much less know more than one or two people by name.

The people depicted aren't real. They don't exist. And because they don't exist, we can comment on them as much as we can comment on characters in a book or in a film. Calling Whitney a slut is entirely different from calling someone like - oh, I don't know - Ivanka Trump or Pippa Middleton the same, because Trump and Middleton are real people, whether we like and approve of their actions or not. 

If you knew someone like Whitney, someone with a reputation of cutting through various men like a scythe, dumping the nice ones and pursuing the edgy blokes and always, always assuming the moral guise of the victim, even if you knew something about their traumatic background, you'd have little sympathy, as much as anyone could go po-faced and try to argue against such a thing. Someone like that would garner comment about taking control of their lives and assuming responsibilty.

And by the way, whilst the character of Whitney looks as though she needs a bath, the actress, appearing in real life, is the epitome of classic beauty and in no way represents herself as the character she portrays - because Whitney isn't real, whereas Shona McGarty is. Whitney is supposed to look grubby, as if she wears dirty knickers and piles her make-up on over unwashed skin and has hair that never, entirely, looks free of grease.

One of the best and most subtle things EastEnders has done over the years and one of the few things it still manages to do is physically symbolise a character as some moral attribute it's trying to convey. Example? In the 90s,you always knew when Cindy Beale was on the prowl and cheating on Ian. The actress allowed her dark roots to grow and she went several days without washing her hair. She looked, in a word, slutty.

Whitney is supposed to be the last dirty girl standing. She's one of the many characters who learns nothing from past mistakes. She thinks nothing of attracting a nice guy and throwing him over for someone edgier. She's dumped nice boys one minute,and the very same day, bedded bad ones. That's a mattress. In fact, when you think how the likes of Whitney, Lauren and Lucy Beale passed around sleeping partners like pass-the-parcel, that pretty much makes all of them mattresses.

But they aren't real,and alluding to that is simply stating the bleeding obvious.

It's also a helluva lot more acceptable than condoning a woman killing a man in cold blood, for the slightest offence as evidence of female empowerment. Women seek to empower themselves, but stooping to violence serves nothing but to equate themselves with the lowest common denominator.

Three of the last four EPs have been gay men. Under those men's watches, we've seen:- 

• Violence against women. (In fact, the year Lucy Beale was killed, all three main soaps depicted the graphic deaths of three young women, all at the hands of someone they knew)
• Misogyny (Sean O'Connor's EastEnders is rife with that in the disturbing character of Keegan)
• Ageism
• Racism - the passive aggressive bully who accuses me of racism ought to reference DTC's depiction of the Ian Beale-Denise Fox relationship, which clearly showed Ian as considering her something out of The Help and then exercising his plantational droit du seigneur. In the Beales' family portrait, he preferred Jane in the frame, rather than the decidedly ethnic features of Denise. That's not racism, boyo, that's stating a fact about melanin. Besides, EastEnders has long depicted ethnic characters as stereotypical. Anyone not perceiving that Dexter and, currently, Kim are offensive racial stereotypes and who accuse me of being offensive simply aren't seeing the forest for the trees.
• Male objectification: the ubiquitous male topless scene has become one big joke.
• Homophobia - DTC put Ben back into the closet, and when he finally decided to emerge,he wantonly humiliated Abi in the process. Everyone went on about Abi betraying Ben with a lie,but Ben cheated on her and gave her an STD. Also, EastEnders has to be the first soap to show a gay-to-straight conversion in the character of Steven Beale.
• Insulting the notion of adoption and implying that adopted children are better off seeking blood relations.
• Poverty porn in serving up a character who, from her own intransigence, finds herself on the breadline with several avenues of help only to wantonly refuse all intended.

All of this is fiction, yet we cannot call out any of it for the assininity that it is because it's "offensive." What? We've insulted Denise? Or Whitney? Or Honey or any of the above? Quick. Write an apology note. Send some flowers. It's funny. I recall various people getting their knickers in a twist because someone called out Tanya for being a bloody awful parent who always put herself first ... until Jo Joyner, in an interview, waxed lyrical about what a bloody awful parent Tanya was, who always put herself first.

Absolutely none of this is real, but bullying against any divergence of opinion is.

Just get a grip.

This episode showed just about everything that is obnoxious about the show at the moment.

Shut Up: Denise Is Not a Victim. Once again, something happened off screen. When we last left the star of the show, she was flat out in a faint. I'm surprised that the hospital didn't find she wasn't eating or ask when she last had a meal. Or maybe they offered her a sandwich, which she scoffed in one bite. Instead, her diagnosis was low blood pressure due to stress over the exam - the most glorified GCSE ever depicted.

Tonight's episode was particularly cringeworthy in that Kim had spread the word about Denise's fainting, and, as a result, literally the entire Square was stopping her in her tracks and enquiring after her health. Really? Honey, I can understand, because Honey is enough of a dimwit (as well as being passive-aggressive in her own right) to be nice enough to ask after Denise's health. They worked together, even though that relationship consisted of Denise pilfering food from the stock to eat while Honey did all the heavy lifting. But Martin and Stacey? They've had little or nothing to do with this character, and she's never given them a second thought.

In fact, Denise has never given anyone in the Square a second thought outside of Kim and Patrick. The last time she did, she ended up getting burned by Ian Beale. She's rude, aggressive, selfish, arrogant, and loud-mouthed. She hardly had a good word to say to clientele when she did work at the Minute Mart, so why is everyone so concerned about her health now? Had the shoe been on the other foot, I daresay, Denise would have shown no concern.

And even the Scandinavian tutor kowtowing to his "star pupil" - the one to whom he gave additional help and sustenance during her study period. Yes, I can see him bringing her flowers as a nice gesture after hearing about her fainting, but the walk in the park and the bigging up of her ego was yet another thing. Is he going to be Kush's rival - because Denise, like most of the other women in this programme, is entirely man-dependent?

Sorry, is that a sexist remark? Did I offend anyone? Does anyone wish to comment in the section below reserved for such things about what a bad, mean, and horrible person I am?

It's the truth. Denise's ultimate salvation will be at the hands of a man. Her immediate salvation, however, is Patrick. Yes, a man, but more or less the paterfamilias of the piece. Daddy's home, so Denise can cry, sit on his lap and tell him what a terrible time she's had - how she couldn't get a job (a good reference would have helped), how the mean, old Social Services wouldn't give her any benefits for a long, long time because Minute Mart and that mean old Yolande wanted her to go for an anger management course and how she was humiliated in the food bank by that drunken old cow, Cora, so much so that she gave her food away to a young mother who'd been there before and who somehow thought she could get food without a voucher.

But seriously, I found the ice cream scene in the park where Denise and the tutor took turns quoting A E Houseman the height of pretension. Still, her ego got bigged up yet again to the point where, after Patrick gives her some money for food and dries her tears, she'll strut around the Square again. And we'll all be made to feel sorry for noble Denise, who kept her financial problems to herself, managed to keep the gold bling on her fingers intact and her expensive manicure maintained and yet starved herself for culture.

Pass me the sick bucket.

Shut Up: Jack Is Not a Victim. It would be nice if Honey took a bit more interest in Billy's success and in the fact that her son is having emotional problems in adjusting to his living premises, rather than running afterJack's kids and catering to his needs.

Honey needs to shut the fuck up in challenging Charlie. She wasn't around for the Charlie-Ronnie fall-out, and to warn Charlie off seeing his son was just wrong - and highly hypocritical from the woman who tried to abandon her baby because she had Downs'Syndrome and who didn't hesitate to leave her behind with Billy to run off to Canada to pursue a silly modeling contract with William.

Once again, we get Amy the Regressed, coming up for 9 years old in six months time and still talking, acting and thinking like a 4 year-old.

You're the one who makes my daddy saaaaaaaaaaad!

Who the fuck writes this shit? Obviously, someone who doesn't have kids. Amy readily remembered Charlie. She was fucking 6 years old when Charlie was around, ya know, raising Matthew? She remembered Charlie as her uncle. For fuck's sake, she was even in Charlie's and Ronnie's wedding! She knows Charlie is Matthew's father, she should have sense enough to know that Jack isn't. Is she stupid?

Instead, she now only knows Charlie, not by name, but as "the one who makes my daddy saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad."

And what was that all about with Honey?

All right, kids, (dramatically) everybody hold onto the push chair.

Sorry for all the "fucks", but  ... what the fucking fuck was that all about?

Seriously, Charlie simply walked out of the bushes. He didn't lunge and grab Matthew or grab the pushchair, and he wasn't aggressive towards either her or the kids. He simply wanted to see and speak to his child. And, Honey, you lamebrain ... yes, Matthew has lost his mother and so has Amy, but Matthew will retain no memories of Ronnie, and I daresay that no one is going to tell him how she killed two men, and watched as they crushed one of their bodies. No, we mustn't speak about that. And in all the welter of rubbish that's occurred in recent years, I have trouble remembering it Honey even knows that Ronnie was a cold-blooded killer and a psychopath? I daresay, she'd have trouble wanting her children around such a character.

Oh, and lest I forget ... Honey, Ricky hasn't lost his mother. He's merely mislaid her. She's in Portugal, soaking up the sunshine, because she found motherhood a bore - as Ronnie would have, eventually and as she did with Matthew.

I'm glad Charlie wasn't put off by Honey's misplaced diatribe or her blabbing to Jack. In fact, he showed he was the bigger character by directly confronting Jack with his plans. Jack is just a Class A prat, and Charlie doesn't like being manipulated by Max. At the end of the day, all he wants is his child. I hope he succeeds.

Shut Up: Neither Mick Nor Whitney Are Victims. Shirley is the hero of the day

Mick is a moral coward, and Whitney is a slut. Mick wants to fuck Whitney, but he knows what side his bread is buttered on. If anyone ever.doubted Mick was an emotional adolescent, tonight rendered proof. Shirley is no fool; in fact, she's been around the block more than a few times, and she's caught the vibes between Mick and Whitney.

She also was cognizant from early on about Whitney playing up to Mick, even whilst she was married to Lee. Her confrontation with Mick didn't take long for her to coax the truth from him. His entire demeanor was that of a little boy caught with his fingers in the cookie jar. Seriously, he wasn't even an adolescent, he was a ten year-old.

I'm ashamed o'meself.

Shoulders hunched, fiddling with his fingers, not meeting Shirley's gaze. He's ashamed that they kissed, but he says nothing about Linda. Shirley gives him the benefit of the doubt, reminding him that he's a good man, but Mick is, at least, truthful here.

The real truth, but he isn't man enough to admit it, is that he caught her come-on vibes early on,and it clouded his vision of his son, who was ill and silently crying out for help. He should have been totally attuned to his child; instead, he was sulking about Linda being away and flattered by all the fluttering eyes Whitney was giving him. It was far easier to lash out at Lee, subliminally jealous of him and to drive him away.

I would also wager that he's been seriously thinking about Whitney since their first kiss, after the bus crash; because that's the first intimation that he actually had that she was interested in him, and he's been struggling with that attraction ever since. After all, this is the man who went from boy to father at fifteen, who's only ever been with one woman in life,and the first time this woman is away from him for any length of time, he allows himself to be tempted.

What was doubly interesting was Mick, evaluating himself and his behaviour to the point that he actually asked doltish Johnny the definition of an adult, wondering what the difference between an adult and "not an adult" (how about "a child", Mick?) was. Johnny, rightly, told him that an adult was someone who is responsible for their actions and the consequences thereof - in short, someone who takes responsiblity for themselves. The irony of that situation is, when Johnny returns from cleaning the bogs, Mick admits that he's been trying to remember what it's like to be a grown-up. He should stop trying, because he's never really been one -except now, he looks around and views the mess which encompasses everything around him, and he actually accepts - for all Johnny's protestations - that everything is down to him.

Well, that's progress; because for ages now, he's been rattling around in his cage, lashing out and blaming everyone and everything for all the bad that's happened. Recently, he's blamed Lee,and more recently, it's been Linda. In actual fact, Mick the moral coward is about to take the gentleman's way out and bow out of any potential involvement with Whitney - not because he doesn't lust after her. He does. It's just that he's realistic enough to see the problems ahead that any such entanglement would involve - Linda's feelings, Shirley's anger, Johnny and Ollie, Lee's moral vindication.

On the other hand, the scene of the night was the confrontation.between Shirley and Whitney. That was classic Linda Henry at her best, with the absolute line of the night:-

You're a tart ... a parasite who feeds off good men like Lee and Mick.

Shirley gave a pretty good character assessment of Whitney there, because that's exactly what she has done since time out of mind - suck up to nice blokes and shit on them from a great height, moving onto the ubiquitous bad boy. I don't know if Gillian Richmond paid women's empowerment a back-handed compliment, having Whitney call Shirley a "nasty woman." 

Since the Presdiential campaign, that term has become a clarion call, an empowerment phrase for women in general, ever since Donald Trump referred to Hillary Clinton as a "nasty woman." A "nasty woman" now means a strong, independent woman who fights for her rights and her own ferociously. Whitney's accusation was merely a backhanded acknowledgement that Shirley, at the moment, is the strongest female character on the show.

Whatever Whitney throws at Shirley, including her gloat about this kiss not being the first one -and even then,Whitney was deflecting any responsibility she had in this situation by claiming that Mick kissed her, the bus crash kiss was totally initiated by Whitney. However, Shirley was right. Whitney honed in on Mick when she knew he was missing Linda, worried about the state of the pub and a little concerned about Lee. She managed to insinuate Lee's situation into something darkly pejorative,resulting in Mick manipulating Lee into leaving, literally telling Lee that he was unworthy of Whitney. And still, as Shirley accused, Whitney's still there, at the bosom of the family, and Lee is gone.

For all the gentle,yet emotional persuasiveness of the two-hander with Kat some years ago, this exchange with Linda Henry was more powerful, forcing Whitney to look in the mirror and hitting her with the home truth that, given the choice, Mick would never leave Linda for her. Ever. He's too much of a moral coward. I'm glad Shirley threw her out, but I have a stinking feeling that she'll be back, horning around the Fowlers and comparing cheating notes with Lauren, who won't listen to a thing she says, but will only whine about her situation.

Shut Up: Lauren Is Not the Victim. No one knows Lauren better than Abi, but whether or not she thinks she's cheating on Steven, it's with malicious glee that she picks up on the fact that Steven, himself, doesn't entirely trust Lauren. Abi is only too happy to stoke that insecurity.

The truth is, Lauren is working with creepy Josh,because Josh is whittling away at her resistance. She's the victim being edged along the treasonous path until she realises too late what her fate is to be - that "Creative Team Assistant" is really a euphemism for the boss's whore, creatively finding ways to have sex on the company time and spread her legs at the photocopier without anyone noticing.

Oops, did I offend anyone?

Michelle got her divorce papers. Is anyone sad?

Shit Happens - Review:- Friday 26.05.2017

Well, that didn't last long, did it? We got one fairly decent and enjoyable episode, and then it's right back to same shit, different day. Oh, stuff happened, but then, to paraphrase Forrest G-u-hu-hump, shit happens; and shit certainly happened in this episode.

The incongruity of Sean O'Connor is that he has good ideas on paper, but for some reason, they don't translate well onto the screen. That's largely due to poor writing (and this episode was not one of Daran Little's best), inadequate acting and overuse of certain characters. In one of his interviews, O'Connor actually said that the actors don't rehearse; they just learn the lines and go into a shoot cold, and this totally shows. This is probably due to budget cuts and the stress of shooting four episodes a week. I've long been the proponent of reverting to three, even two, episodes weekly.

We're just now getting the first of O'Connor's permanent characters, after his chopping spree at the beginning of the year. My verdict so far? It's too early to tell about Joyce and Ted Murray, but they appear to be a weird amalgamation of the Slaters (who came to Walford with antecedents there, especially Big Mo, who was Pat's sister-in-law and knew Dot and Ethel) and Les and Pam. It's so easy to compare them to the latter, because they are a direct replacement - ax one elderly couple with no real connection to the Square and replace them with another of similar ilk.

At least this couple knows Walford, although in the 40 years they lived in Walford Towers, I find it odd that they found no excuse, in recent years. After all, Pete and Kathy Beale, and a very young Ian, lived there and were living there when the show started. Since that was well over thirty years ago, I'd certainly expect Kathy to remember, or at least know, Ted and Joyce. In fact, I was suprised that Sharon didn't mention Kathy living there or, for that matter, that her current husband, at one time, lived there with his first wife.

In a spot-the-retcon moment, however, Dot certainly never lived in Walford Towers. When the show began, the complex was considered a step up from the sort of accommodation where Pauline and Arthur lived cramped with Lou. Once again, EastEnders goes tampering with the show's history. It would have been enough for the Murrays to say that they remembered Dot from their days in Walford, but I find it odd that they lived so close to the Square and hadn't set foot in it in years.

They mentioned having children, which means that there's always a potential to bring in more Murrays if the couple prove popular or if Sean O'Connor wants more Murrays - most likely, the latter. Their son, Alan, had been a cohort of Nick Cotton, Does that make him a bad'un? Maybe he's the mysterious Grouty-type Mr Big character who's enabling Max's revenge from behind the bars of the prison? Maybe they're Keegan's grandparents? Maybe one of their children is Lola's mother (a mystery never unfurled)? If they frequented the Vic some forty years ago, they'd have certainly remembered Den, Angie and their small, blonde daughter. Do they know Pauline? Do they remember Lou? And more, importantly, what was the significance of the gun? Do we have yet another killer in our midst?

Do we care?

For the moment, I don't. He seems too happy-go-lucky, and I can't disassociate Christopher Timothy from All Creatures Great and Small. They appear to have lost an animal of some sort - Lucky - who disappeared a year ago. Why am I thinking that Dave the cat just might be Lucky? She just seems exactly how she described herself, a miserable,old boot. She snipes at him, always finding fault. Yes, there are couples like that, but all that behaviour did for me was convince me that she's another one of life's eternal victims, another Alpha woman who appears to have browbeaten another ineffectual husband - there are so many in Walford. Actually, it's not too difficult to imagine them as Alfie and Kat in forty years' time - him, always trying to see the positive side of a bad situation and her, always moaning about her lot in life.

Give me the warm and compassionate Pam and the over-acting Les any day of the week.

The rest of the episode concentrated on the self-pitying plights of two of the Square's biggest, hairiest, most self-entitled BabyMen - Jack and Mick. Or should I re-name them Cack and Prick? The inevitable happened between Mick and dirty Shitney, accompanied by some of the worst and cheesiest dialogue ever written by anyone before. 

Whitney: I don't know who I am anymore.
Mick: You're Whitney, whose smile lights up a room.

Who the flaming fuck speaks like this? This was truly barf-inducing dialogue. One wonders if Little were royally drunk when he wrote those lines - in fact, I've just poured myself a liberal portion of Merlot - or if he wrote them on a dare with some other writer from Corrie or Emmerdale to see who could come up with the cheesiest most barf-inducing lines.

That scene came across as his feeble attempt to re-create a down-market, Cockney version of Now Voyager's iconic last scene. All that was missing were a night-time setting and Danny Dyer lighting up two cigarettes in his mouth and passing one to Shitney.

But Danny Dyer isn't Paul Heinried (not even a poor man's version of him), and Shona McGarty certainly isn't Bette Davis. 

Mi Chiamo Denise and I'm Starvin' for Culture, Innit? It just dawned on me that if Denise's story were an opera, it would be La Bohème, with Denise playing the starving, tubercular Mimi and Kush her boyfriend Rodolfo. Because you know this is how Denise will end up, ultimately - minus the dying bit, that is, more's the pity.

All I could think of watching the ubiquitous adventures of the star of O'Connor's EastEnders, with her interaction with the awful Kim, was ...

They killed off Ronnie and Roxy for this shit?

The noble Denise is still starving from pride, when Kim pops by to offer some moral support. Being the supportive sister means sitting around being nosy and generally being a distraction, because Kim isn't the type of person who can abide being supportive of anything or anyone.

These two have been shipped by O'Connor as the soul and conscience of the community, yet there sat Kim, curtain-twitching as the Murrays moved in and offering what was tantamount to a mean and bitchy running commentary. I know it was meant to be camp, but it was laced with total vindictiveness.

She accused Sharon of being a nosy cow and horning in on the Murrays, who don't interest Kim in the slightest, simply because they are old. Sharon was showing friendly to new neighbours, just as she intervened with Max over Jack's stupidity. That wasn't nosiness. Kim, on the other hand, would only have stopped to accost the couple if they interested her, and because they were elderly and appeared to have ordinary possessions, she clearly thought them beneath her. 

Imagine getting that far in life and having nothing to show for it?

What does Kim have? Everything she owns has come to her through her marriage to Vincent. Before that, she owned a flea-bit B and B, which was in danger of being shut down a few times. Take Vincent out of the equation, and Kim has jack shit.

Denise's situation is of her own making, the culmination of a lifetime of bad choices and bad judgement when it comes to the male sex. She'll get rescued from this predicament, eventually, by Kush and his muscles, and any bonding he'd previously made with Arthur ill go by the wayside, because Kush - like Mick, like Jack - is another big,fat BabyMan, who has to have a Mommy to nurse him, discipline him and then fuck him.

So that's Kim's wonderful empathy and concern for her community. She's fronting the Community Centre drive because she's the focal point of attention, and Denise only effected a community concern when her arse landed in trouble, thanks to her arrogance and her big gob. Now, she's sublimated shoving food into that gob for the nobility of studying for her life-changing GCSE. (Jesus Christ, I just realised this asshole is going to probably devote an entire episode to her receiving her result in August, culminating in a celebratory fuck with Kush).

These two care nothing about their community. They care nothing about anyone or anything, except themselves and each other, and in this instant, in her warped way, Kim cares more about Queen Denise than Denise cares about Kim.

I get it that we're supposed to feel great compassion and pity for this poverty porn, which is an insult to people who really do struggle, but she wasn't that hungry that she couldn't resist, giving a triumphant hoot when she realised that she actually knew the answer to the first question on the exam.

Still, she sacrificed everything for her culture, just like Rodolfo starving in the garrets of Paris, devoting his life to painting for a pittance, and poor, consumptive Mimi, making her lace by the light of a single candle and hawking her wares on the cold streets of Paris.

Well, at least Mimi went looking for work, which is more than Denise did.

BabyMan I: The BeetleBrow. Jack acted like a spoiled brat. I'm sick of seeing his perpetually, pouting, down-turned mouth and his beetle-browed obdurance and his obsession with Matthew.

Jack needs help, and none of those kids need to be with him. Amy needs to go to Glenda. Ricky needs to go back to Portugal to his living mother, and Matthew needs to go to his father, who wants and loves him.

This is all about Jack's obsession with Ronnie and his unresolved grief over James. In fact, James is the one big elephant in the room here. Jack can harp on and on about having "brought Matthew up," but really, he was only a part of his life for the past year, and the fact that he refers to Matthew as "his" son isn't just a man, considering his stepson as his own. It's more than that. I daresay Phil Mitchell loves Dennis like his own son and wants to adopt him, or he did, before he was side-tracked. But he doesn't go about, harping that Dennis is "his" son. 

Or Ian Beale. He considers Steven his son, but in a pinch, he knows, as does Steven, that Simon Wicks is Steven's father.

It's not as much an obsession. For Jack, Matthew has come to represent what James was to him. James was more important to Jack than any of his other children. He didn't want to know Ricky and found dealing with Amy difficult. Now it's the same with Matthew. Matthew is his obsession. Part of this obsession does, indeed, include the fact that Matthew is the last living connection to Ronnie that Jack has, but a great part of this is the guilt he feels about James.

Don't think that Ricky and Amy haven't picked up on the fact that Matthew is the one and only in the eyes of their father. They have. They know Jack is their father. It hasn't even been a year since Ricky re-established a bond, and Amy certainly knows that Charlie, her uncle, is Matthew's father. They certainly feel Jack's preference. It's evident in the resigned, desultory tones of their voices, when Jack rhetorically asks them if they want to see Matthew taken away. They give the correct answer, but without any conviction or alarm.

They've been holed up in that house with a proprietory Jack, separated from their schoolmates and now presented with the fact that they have to run away ... to "protect" Matthew. Everything is done with Matthew in mind, which is part and parcel to the reason Amy actually opened the door to Dot. Amy has regressed from a 9 year-old to a 5 year-old. Once again, that's evident when she tells Dot in that sing-songy 5 year-old voice:-

We have to go away to stop them from taking Matthew away.

Even more proof of Jack's preference for Matthew is revealed by the fact that, whilst he wouldn't trust Dot to care for her own flesh and blood, whilst he visited Ronnie's grave to say good-bye, but he'd trust her with Amy and Ricky. In fact, I don't think Jack gives a cahoot about Amy or Ricky. If they stayed behind in Walford with Dot or the Mitchells, it would make it easier for him to disappear with Matthew.

But even Jack's plan is another fallacy of EastEnders. Jack's on bail. Surely, the first term of his bail conditions would be that he surrender his passport? Presumably, he also has to report to the local police station a certain number of times per week. The police know Jack is an ex-copper. The first thing they would want is his passport. And here's where Daran Little stated the bleeding obvious: You just knew what Dot was going to do when Jack made her promise that she wouldn't tell Charlie that he was running away, and Dot's pointed reply was...

I won't tell Charlie ...

You just knew she was going to unwittingly tell Max.

And once again, we had a maternal woman character step out of the blue and talk Jack out of his spoiled hissy fit. Because Jack was running away like a spoiled brat who didn't get his way. It wouldn't have taken long for the police to have found him. Then, not just Matthew, but Amy and Ricky would have been taken from him. He never thinks of these things, it's just reaction. He's the bull in a china shop, being soothed by his cool,calm and collected older brother.

What could possibly go wrong?

We all know - shock, horror! - that Max is now a villain and that he's out to scam the whole of Walford, but how much longer do we have to suffer the same old same old circular story of Jack and Charlie? Surely, this can't last much longer because Declan Bennett has other commitments. It just seems endless.

BabyMan II: Prick and the Mattress. You wonder how Johnny will react when he finds out that his immature father is boning the slut who was once his own sister-in-law. Johnny was last scene, playing the adult in the room in Thursday's episode, comforting Mick, who was sitting, cross-legged, on the floor of the Carter lounge, having defaced Linda's signature wallpaper.

Mick has been so far up his own arsehole that he never even realised that his youngest son had finished his exams and completed his education. Even after all of Mick's brattish behaviour, Johnny is willing to throw away his education and work behind the bar of the pub. 

For what? For Mick? Mick doesn't deserve one iota of love his children have for him. His shitty, selfish behaviour drove two of them away. This incipient affair with the slut who ruined his oldest child's life will virtually kill Johnny. I don't see how he would stay under the same roof.

Here's what we learned about Mick in this episode - he and Linda lived with Elaine, worked for her in her pub and pocketed every red copper penny they earned, saving for one day when they would be able to buy the freehold of their own pub. This means that Elaine, not only paid them, she paid for their food, their clothing and the food and clothing of their children. They, like the children they continued to have when they were little more than children, themselves, became extended children in Elaine's household.

The purchase of the Vic, bought with a million quid carefully garnered away, not in a bank account, but in a hold-all someplace, was their first venture out into the big, bad world as adults. Remember how both he and Elaine would roll their eyes and act exasperated every time Elaine would ring them?

Mick has been with Linda since he was a child. Her mother raised him, gave him a job, taught him the pub trade, gave him ambition and made his dream of owning his own pub a reality. When Mick was in his teens, he was playing house with Linda when other lads his age were chasing skirt and looking for a love they probably only found in their late twenties. Mick has only ever known Linda, who idolised him and made him and their kids the centre of her world. 

In return, she was sidelined, infantilised, treated condescendingly and sidelined, often in favour of Mick's mother, who treated her appallingly. Even when Shirley was still bad-mouthing Linda as a trollop in Dean's refutations about her accusation of rape, Mick was still sneaking around, seeing her on the sly.

These two have never spent more than a week apart from each other in their lives, and the one time Linda has to answer her seriously ill mother's plea for help, Mick lets his eye wander and responds to the overt efforts of Whitney to distract him. Back at the time of the bus crash, it was she who initiated the kiss Denise witnessed (and hopefully will remember), but even then, Mick, in his right mind, should have realised that this girl was toxic for his emotionally fragile son. Instead, his head was so far up his own arse and so resentful he was of Linda being where she was really needed, he, instead, levelled blame for all of his own inadequacies, first on Lee, and eventually, now, on  Linda.

This is the truth: MIck is the original landlord who couldn't organise a booze-up in a brewery. We've seen proof of that from the very beginning. He bought the pub without benefit of a survey and was immediately presented with wet rot. Owning a buiiding means maintaining it, but he never thought of that, of course, because with a tenancy, Elaine's landlord took care of that. Stuff like that never occurred to Mick, so the leak in the roof came as a surprise to him.

Of course, he's been thinking about Whitney since he's been away. Immediately, she had manipulated Linda into returning to Watford, she set about insinuating to Mick how Linda had abandoned him to his fate, reckoning that Elaine was more important. This was only the woman who had been a de facto mother to Mick! 

Whitney made herself indispensable to Mick, leaving little voicemails whilst he was away, ever playing the sad victim, encouraging his trash-mouthing of Lee and even encouraging Johnny into trash-mouthing his mother. And Linda's about to turn 40 soon, and there's fortyish Mick, who's never known another woman since he was a child, suddenly becoming the object of desire of his slut-faced, overtly sexual daughter-in-law, and now, he's on the road of no return. Like the traitor who gets seduced into treason, Mick will find out too late that he's done the unforgivable on Linda. Linda had never been with or thought about another man but Mick, and the only other time she was with another man was when she was raped.

I only hope that Lee has been in touch with Linda whilst she was away and told her straight up what was going on, because it seems that since he's been away, he can now see Whitney's unreasonable behaviour for what it was.

Mick is a total asshole, a deeply despicable man who sulks when he isn't the centre of attention.That Whitney still sees him as the knight in shining armour to quell all her woes just shows you not only how insipidly stupid she is, but also how narcissistic she is as well. All she needs to drop her knickers is a bloke telling her how wonderful she is with a choice selection of pretty words. She's been so caught up in idolising Mick that in the entire time she has been living with the Carters, she never once noticed what Shirley has known all along - that it's been Linda who's been the backbone and support of that family. Mick is ten times worse than Lee could ever be. At least, Lee recognised his shortcomings. Mick never will.

Linda needs to come home and dust off that WonderWoman outfit. Time to kick some ass, two in particular, out of her life and out of her pub.

By the way, don't think the symbolism wasn't lost on the fact that Whitney had taken it upon herself to order new wallpaper to replace Linda's parakeets, but pointedly told Mick that she didn't order the same style. This is Linda's home, and already that snide little bitch is trying to sideline her out of it.

Something for Everyone - Review:- Thursday 25.05.2017

Wow, I really liked that episode, mainly because of the two big surprises we had, one of whom was extremely intriguing. For a revelatory episode, this was pretty low-key, but then I suppose that's another of Sean O'Connor's trademarks. 

Don't get me wrong. The fact that this was one, marginally good episode doesn't mean I'm about to jump sides in a stream and start leveling praise exclusively, when this episode was something out of the normal humdrum of either nothing happening or too much repetitive stuff happening about so many unlikable or unredeemable characters.

There was a lot wrong with tonight's episode: Mick was still acting like a spoiled prick, his resentment against Linda growing hourly to the point that he defaces Linda's signature wallpaper, the wall of flamingos, which he mistakenly calls "parrots." He's forgetting, in a trice, how much the song "Pretty Flamingo" not only signified their relationship, but singularly identified Linda in his mind. I wonder if he knew that, as she was being raped upstairs by his brother, the jukebox in the pub was thundering out this song?

The bad Beale sitcom masquerading as a public service announcement for diabetes Type II, carried on, increasingly becoming archly gothic in its presentation. Ian is forced into visiting a diabetes support group/presentation, only to be confronted with his worst nightmares about the disease, in living colour, up close and personal. His initial snideness and condescension quickly melts into abject fear as he meets one bloke who's lost his leg to the disease, another who's lost his toes and a third who's lost his sight.

At the end of that spectacle, it's a wonder Ian doesn't want to really top himself.

And Jacqueline Jossa is still one of the weakest actresses ever to appear on the programme. The various producers who insist on continuing her employment should really stop trying to push her as a romantic lead. Let's count them ... David Witts, Jamie Lomas, Ben Hardy, Aaron Sidwell and now quirky Clark Kentish Eddy Eyre ... and she had absolutely no sexual chemistry with any of them. She's now been on EastEnders going into seven years, and she is still the most camera-conscious amateur on the programme. She's too conscious of the camera being on her to delve into the actual character she's playing and emote towards whoever is sharing a scene with her. She's too busy trying to be surreptitious about the camera getting its best angle on her. Then, there's the gurning, the funny voices and the arm-waving, none of which has gone away. Tonight she stuck chopsticks under her upper lip to enhance her gurn ability. It didn't work.

But all of the above was offset and outweighed by stuff that was genuinely good - the brilliant chemistry between Letitia Dean and Linda Henry that burst from the screen at Honey's housewarming party. These two are the new Peggy and Pat at their worst. You could easily see the pair of them getting drunk in an ice cream van, the way they giggled about Honey's "minky dreams" carpet, with Martin unintentionally bringing dog poo onto it,Sharon spilling wine and Shirley cutting her foot, with the beautiful line of the night:-

I knew something would happen without my boots on!

The surprise appearance of Lin Blakely, returning for this episode as Pam Coker, who was obviously the unheard voice on the end of Ben's mystery phone conversation. Whilst it was good to see Pam again - and country living certainly agrees with her -  made me realise just how much the show misses her and Les. One of the highlights of the episode was the quiet conversation she had with Ben, reminiscing about Paul and how she urged him to carry on with his life and told him that one day he would find someone special, that Paul would have wanted him to find another love; as well as the real intention of her visit, to inform Billy that he had been made a fully-fledged partner in Les's business. Coker and Son is now Coker and Mitchell, and it's about time that the ultimate runt of the Mitchell litter comes into his own.

Simon Williams returned as the enigmatic chairman of Weyland & Co. It seems that Max is working at acquiring an extensive property portfolio in the area, having just acquired the building that used to house Donna's old flat and the flat where he briefly lived with Kirsty. All this made me think of the recent financial transactions which have been taking place on the Square. We know about the Vic - that was a high-profile acquisiton - but think about the others: Mr Popodopoulos sold the launderette; Ian sold the freehold of the demolished chippy, rather than re-build; Sharon and Phil were paid a fortune for the car lot; and now, he's bought the dowdy, 60s-style functional purpose-built flats' building on the Square, sold right after Donna gave up her tenancy.

But the biggest surprise, by far, was learning that Williams's character, for all he's being chauffeured around in a Bentley, isn't the Big Cheese of Weyland & Co. Instead, the real Big Cheese is Max's former cellmate in prison, where he's still languishing in Harry Grout-style luxury. He's the man behind whatever Max's revenge scheme is, because he seems to be the one who's largely financing it. This guy's got the greed and Max has the motive, which seems to be the fact that a large part of the community believed him capable of killing a young girl and dumping her body ... with that in mind, Max's last words of the night were chilling. He's capable of anything.

And that was what made the entire episode worth watching.

The Rock and the Hard Place. I get it that Lauren is the victim here, caught between a cold,calculating and manipulative man who'll stop at nothing to get what he wants, and another man with a history of mental instability, who desperately craves acceptance and affection.

Yes, yes, yes, we've seen this all before, but we saw it in a new light tonight because there was a new element added ... Abi the bitch.

Abi the bitch isn't a new character; she's still the same old Abi that she's always been, and that means she's still the jealous, resentful, little kid she's always been. Lorna Fitzgerald still looks like a little girl and still sounds, snorts and giggles like Abi when she was ten years old. There was always two sides to Abi - she was always the pleasant, plodding Daddy's girl, who loved animals and dreamed of being a vet. But there always lurked a deep resentment of Lauren. 

That resentment simmered away nicely underneath, all the while Tanya favoured Lauren and Max seemed to dote on Abi; but once both Max and Tanya had to focus on Lauren, when she was killing herself by drinking, then the dark side of Abi's character emerged.

In that three-minute conversation she had with Steven Beale tonight over the booze at the party told us more about Abi's opinion of and relationship to her sister than a decade of their interaction on the show. Not only is Abi jealous and resentful of Lauren as a person, she described Lauren's character to a tee - she's selfish to the core and only thinks about herself. Abi voices the mistrust that Steven's been feeling. She gives word to all of his doubts as authentic.

Yes, Lauren might really be working late (when we know she was asked to stay behind for really no reason at all and that phony reason morphed into an in-house sushi dinner with Josh), but Abi reminded him that Lauren wouldn't think twice about staying behind and partying with her friends, because Lauren always puts herself first.

We're meant to feel sorry for Lauren, I suppose, because she's stupid. At least, Josh recognises this stupidity. Quite recently, in the Russiagate Congressional hearings, the ex-director of the CIA made a remark that could really apply to Lauren. Talking about treason, he said that quite often the Russians would target an easy victim, ply them with money, compliments and foster a sense of self-importance so that by the time the so-called victim suddenly realised he was on a traitorous path, it was too late to turn back.

This is so with Lauren. Josh knows she's stupid, insipid and self-absorbed, and he plays on that. She needs a frock to wear to a company do ... here's the company credit card. The dress gets ruined at the cleaners (or so she believes, as we know Steven destroyed it) - here's the card, buy another. "Working late" with the boss? Let's send out for sushi; the company will pay. And over dinner, we see Josh not only play up to her narrow-minded foibles - the spiel about how he never liked sushi, but came to appreciate it whilst living for a couple of months in Tokyo was a cleverly-worded insinuation for her to experiment with something foreign to her nature, a veiled hint at his intentions; and when that didn't work, he manipulated the conversation to reveal that he hadn't always been so confident and successful. We got the shaggy dog story of a shy, young boy with a stutter so bad he had to see a therapist - tug on the heartstrings and a ride home.

He's roused her interest now, and it's only a matter of time before this escalates into something else; after all, with the company paying for her clothes and her after-hours' meals, it should soon be patently obvious to the most willfully ignorant of people that she really only is being paid to be the company whore, exclusive - for the moment - to Josh,but what happens to her when she serves her purpose?

The contrived scene of Josh depositing her safely home on the Square so subtly revealed to us just how much Lauren has turned to face the Sun King that is Josh. Almost as soon as they arrive, he drops her literally right in front of Abi and Steven, who are sharing some takeaway chips, close enough for Abi to see Josh and reckon him to be hot, and also close enough for Lauren not to have seen Steven as she emerged from the car, as he was directly in her line of vision.

But she didn't see him; and whilst she didn't see Steven, she most certainly did turn to get a backwards ganger at Josh.

I doubt Eddie Eyre is in the show for a long term. He's got his finger in too many other pots to devote himself entirely to this genre; and as Steven's a pressure cooker ready to explode, I anticipate all of this will end in tears. However, the most interesting aspect of this segment this evening was the development of Abi as the Max-like character to Lauren's self-assured and self-entitled Jack-like self.

The Man of Constant Sorrow. Jack increasingly reminds me of an old Southern song:-

Jack really is a man of constant sorrow, and more than anything tonight, we are made to see that all of this is really about Jack's unresolved issues of the past- and that totally concerns, not only Ronnie, but also his dead son, James. Jack was away when James was born, and the child in Ronnie's arms when he returned, wasn't really his son at all; so he never even saw the baby.

This is actually more about James, I think, than Ronnie, even though he was always almost as obsessed about her as she was about him in the quirkiest of ways. He made it obvious that the child he had with Ronnie took precedence over all his other children - Penny, in France, was largely neglected; he disdained Amy's mother, Roxy, and really didn't know or like Sam Mitchell. I think he views Matthew as a second chance. He refers to Matthew as being "his and Ronnie's son", when he's not. That's a delusion, and it's a transference of Jack's unresolved grief issues onto this child. Matthew is not James, and he is not Jack's son.

So Jack does what he usually does when he feels victimised - first, he locks himself away and blames everybody under the sun for his problems. This time, it's Dot, whom he's accused of siding with Charlie, when she actually has done no such thing. If anything, she's betrayed her own flesh and blood by arguing with Charlie and pleading with him, virtually, to give up his rightful claim to be Matthew's father, which is totally unfair and unjust to Charlie, who's done nothing to merit this treatment.

Then, the second thing Jack does is what he always does when severely provoked: he thinks about cutting and running, after finding the children's passports in the drawer.

That actual scene got me thinking: Jack is Amy's biological father, as he is Ricky's; but none of these children bear Jack's surname. Amy is still Amy Mitchell. Richard has always been Richard Mitchell. In fact, he was named after the man Sam thought was his father, Ricky Butcher. And Matthew, who isn't Jack's son, is Matthew Mitchell-Cotton. Won't a bevy of kids traveling with a man who bears a different surname arouse some sort of suspicion. And another thing ... Amy annoys me. She annoys me because this kid is almost 9 years old; at least, she will be 9 in November. Up until recently, even when she first joined the show as talking Amy, she was always presented Suras being precociously smart-arsed. Now, all of a sudden - and this isn't dating from Roxy's death, but started sometime in the last year when she was living with Ronnie and Jack - she talks, acts and behaves like a five year-old. First of all, there was her uncomprehending the concept of death, when she'd already experienced Peggy dying and her pet rabbit overdosing on her mother's cocaine; Ricky might have been ignorant of the concept of death, but Amy wouldn't have been - besides, Ricky really is only six years old.

Then there have been the countless scenes of Jack in bed, surrounded by the kids, reading them fairy stories. Again, Matthew would appreciate stories of this sort, but Amy, two years off secondary school, would be into something a bit more sophisticated, as well as being a bit beyond being read fairy stories.

Tonight,annoying Amy stumbled into the kitchen, clutching the sort of stuffed toy only a very young child would have, only to ask in that cringeworthy, little, whining voice:-

Dud-dayyyyyyyy ... is Maffew gonna be taken aw-wayyyyy from us?

I don't know why this should even surprise me. The show is atrocious in writing for children, and they used to do the exact same thing with Tiffany Butcher - which probably was why she was so annoying, amongst other things.

Surprise Surprise I: Pam. Well, we now know the identity of Ben's mystery caller. Pam Coker came to Honey's and Billy's housewarming party. First Sean O'Connor sacks her, then he brings her back for one episode, the gist of which was her handing over the reins of the business to Billy. But not only seeing Pam again - one episode before Sean O'Connor foists upon us a Pam of his own creation - only succeeded in reminding me how much the show actually misses Lin Blakely.

In point of fact, the entire housewarming segment was a hoot. First of all, please continue with the Shirley-Sharon friendship. It's miles better than Shirley-Denise or Sharon-Michelle or even Sharon-Linda. These two are the natural successors to frenemies Peggy and Pat. Their names even have similar alliteration: Peggy and Pat; Sharon and Shirley.

They were great, giggling together about Honey's Minky Dreams carpet and its mutilation throughout the evening, beginning with Martin inadvertantly treading dog poo onto its surface and culminating with Sharon breaking a bottle of wine and Shirley cutting her foot and bleeding on the carpet, much to Honey's chagrin.

But it was the little vignettes amongst the hubbub of this party that mattered and impresssed the most - Martin and Stacey grabbing a quiet moment to reflect upon their new baby and Pam having a lovely conversation with Ben.

I know that there are all kinds of rumours surrounding the Fowler baby, but I really hope this pregnancy goes well and that we have a healthy baby. We've had a stillbirth, but I have the awful feeling that this is going to be a redux of Natasha Butcher, where Ricky and Bianca were presented with the awful spectre of having to have a late-term abortion when they learned that the baby was severely disabled. I just get the feeling that something along these lines is going to be revealed in the upcoming scan, that there is going to be some sort of congenital defect revealed which will result in them having to agree to a termination. I know what O'Connor has said about this extremel popular couple, two of the few genuinely likable characters left in the show; it's a soap.

But wouldn't it be nice if we could just have a really normal, uneventful pregnancy and the result is a legacy baby who would unite an iconic, original family with arguably the most important character to emerge from Millennial EastEnders?

One of the reasons I miss Pam so much was revealed simply in Ben's relaxing, smiling face during their conversation tonight. Ben is her last link to Paul, and equally, she's his last link to him. There will always be a bond, but Pam - whose family business has been comforting the bereaved - recognises that Ben is young and needs to move on from Paul. She gives him an open invitation to visit her and Les, either with Jay in tow or without him, or even with a new partner, which Paul would have wished for Ben. It was also really poignant to hear her speak of her loss, how raw it still is and how much both of them miss Paul. This conversation was cathartic for both of them, and you wonder about Jack's unresolved grief, and perhaps the reason for that is because, deep down, he knows that he can't reminisce about Ronnie in this way ... because she was so rotten.

One final thing of note with the party scene, even though she was nowhere to be seen, Denise was not forgotten. O'Connor had to get in a line of mention, having someone wonder why she wasn't at Honey's party, considering that she and Honey were friends. 

Sorry, but Honey and Denise were never friends. They were work colleagues. Denise kept her nose in books and pilfered food,whilst Honey did the heavy work. I'm actually more surprised that Kim didn't horn in on the proceedings tonight, as she can sniff out a free drink anywhere. Maybe the prospect of actually having to bring a gift put her off. I daresay, had Denise attended,she'd have gobbled all the food on offer.

Even when there's no ubiquitous scene for Denise, she has to get a mention. We're never allowed to forget Denise.

Surprise Surprise II: Not Simon Williams. So we get our second sighting of the mysterious Chairman of Weyland & Co, waiting for Max in his custom Bentley parked ostentatiously on the Square.

From their conversation, it seems that one of Max's prime functions has been to scout out and buy properties to add to Weyland & Co's growing development portfolio. Insipid Lauren is being used similarly by Josh, based on her supposed knowledge of having grown up in the area.

However, all isn't as it seems. Because Simon Williams isn't really the big cheese of the operation, and now we get to learn how Max came into contact with these people.

The real boss of the piece was Max's cellmate, the mysterious man he visits in prison. Obviously, this man, probably imprisoned for some white collar crime like money-laundering, channels his greed to Max's simmering resentment of the way the community (there's that word again) has treated him. The mystery man questions Max's resolve, but Max assures him. The residents of Albert Square readily believed Max capable of cold-bloodedly killing a young girl and dumping her body, so Max has convinced himself, and his mentor, that he's capable of anything.

Almost six months ago, we saw Simon Williams's character. Will it be Christmas before we see the latest mystery man again and find out who he is? Is he Lola's mother? Is he Sharon's father? Is he Mark Fowler? (After all, we never saw Mark die?)

Cracking a Walnut with a Sledgehammer. Simply, how to drive home a point. Ian's sitcom has become a draining, repetitive public service announcement to reinforce the dangers of Diabetes Type II. 

This served nothing except to scare the shit out of Ian, attending a support group to disdainfully consider several men of his age and bigger girth waiting for the meeting to begin, only to find out that one lost his leg to the disease, the other lost two toes, and the chatty younger man with whom Jane was talking, ignored the warning signs and lost his sight.

Ian was scared, yet resentful, before. Now he's abjectly frightened, and Jane is shitting herself as well.

Nothing new here, except to assume the audience are idiots.

Prick Carter. For someone who's spent weeks sitting by someone else's hospital bed in Bulgaria, Mick sure has a nice tan.

Shame about the attitude though. He's hitting the bottle, sulking and wallowing in self-pity and anger. He's resentful of the fact that Shirley has taken herself off to Honey's party, when she probably left the Vic just to get away from her putrid, babyfied son.

He's simply nasty to everyone, but there's a special hatred reserved for Linda, which makes me suddenly realise that Mick really never loved Linda at all. Oh, he loved her, as long as she predictably thought his thoughts and deferred to his status of the Sun King with the Sun lodged firmly up his hairy backside. He even acknowledged that she, at one time, was the stronger of the two.

Now, he's whining and moaning about Linda killing his dream.

Competing with that is the total and abject callowness and stupidity of Whitney and Johnny, both of whom are tiptoeing on eggshells around him. Both of them, Johnny in particular, are beginning to resent Linda going to take care of her suffering parent and seem to think Linda should be hanging around to catch Mick's ire, rather than the pair of them enduring the rough side of Mick's tongue and his self-pity.

So what do they do? What the Carters always do - throw a party to cheer up Linda. They hatch a plan to lure her back for a celebration of her fortieth and they seem to think that Mick would be cheered up by planning and putting the whole thing together.

Wrong.

Linda is at the top of Mick's shit list, so much so that he demolishes her signature wall of flamingo wallpaper. All it took was Linda making a crisis point decision, something Mick would never be able to do at all, to make Mick turn on her; and thinking about it, maybe Mick realises now, just who in that family really has the balls. Faced with mounting financial problems and the possibility of their business being shut down, Linda took the decision to take a risk. She acted under pressure, for better or worse, and Shirley did also, rather than wait for weeks until Mick returned, only to have him prowl about the place, scowling and coming up with nothing to ease their woes. He'd have had the dog put to sleep and sent her collar to Lee as a reminder that this was all his fault. 

Mick blames everyone else for problems he brings upon himself, and now, because of him as much as anyone else, he's brought his hatred and resentment of Linda bubbling over on the surface.

He really is despicable.