Remember Brookside? That's the dead show that EastEnders smells like at the moment. Right before its illness became terminal, before it descended into balloon-like tits, lots of arse and a vehicle for the bad acting of Claire Sweeney (with a few gangsters thrown in for good luck), it's last extended storyline was one of incest.
Remember the very proper middle-class Simpson family - dad Ollie, mum Bel and kids Nat, Georgia and Danny? On the surface, they were all prim and proper, but Bel had lost her job because she took up with a much-younger male trainee and ended up getting charged with sexual harassment. She later went on to sleep with Mike Dixon and caught a dose of the clap from him and passed it on to Ollie ...
... but that's not all the Simpsons were hiding. Nat and Georgia were sleeping together. That was the ueber-big sensationalist storyline. Brookside tackled incest. It wasn't just shame and incest. At the end of the day, incest won. They left the close to live together as a couple in a place where no one knew them, disowned by Ollie, who had -by then - finished with Bel.
After that, the show sorta kinda descended into a bad farce, which seems to be EastEnders' direction now anyway.
It's now obvious that EastEnders are doing their very own incest storyline, and of course, it has to involve the Taylors, the closest thing to trailer trash the show has at the moment.
I come from the South. The very rural, often mountainous hill country of the Deep South is often parodied by the North and other areas as being incestuous, and there's some truth to that. The classic duelling banjos scene from "Deliverance" shows what inbreeding can achieve. Hell, the Royal Family shows what inbreeding can achieve, but somehow that sort of inbreeding is different from the likes in which trailer trash, hillbilles or - in the eyes of Sean O'Connor, a middle-class man from leafy suburbia - chavs participate.
I don't know what the attraction, emotional or psychological, was that bonded Keanu in what appears to be a physical relationship with his sister. He seems a responsible, sensitive and sensible young man, and she's more of the sort who's not the brightest lightbulb in the pack, someone who's at one time street suss but also naive. Like a lot of people these days, she has no cognizance of or respect for public property, especially that sort of property intended as a memorial. It was one thing to be carving into the wood of Arthur's bench, but she was carving childish love initials. Are we to believe that she's actually in love with her brother?
More importantly - and Social Services will love this - she's underage. This really is sexual abuse the likes of which Jay's accidental foray into that realm pales in insignificance before that. Bernadette has, legally, been sexually abused by her older brother. Consent doesn't come into it. She's underaged.
Another irony surroundes Lorraine Stanley - once again, she portrays the parent of an underaged daughter mixed up in inadvertant sexual assault, this time by her brother.
Some may argue that this isn't the first time the show tackled incest, considering Sharon's son has a total of three grandparents, and his father and mother had the same father; but no one even promoted that as incest, and people were quick to point out that (a) Sharon was adopted, so there was no blood relationship, and (b) she and Dennis weren't raised together and didn't relate to each other as siblings.
But this is something different, and unless there's a twist in the tale regarding the actual familial relationship between the two, then I'm not sure where they could go with this story. For the moment, however, it's not only an immoral relationship, it's an illegal one.
This was the twist in the tale whose backdrop was the family's revenge against NuMichelle's snotty telling-off of Bernadette for defacing Arthur's memorial bench. The scene lacked any sort of depth or meaning because the character of NuMichelle lacks such death and meaning. Viewers simply don't identify with Jenna Russell as Michelle Fowler. Imagine the impact the scene would have had, had this occurred with either Martin or even Stacey objecting to Bernadette's behaviour. Instead of the ubiquitous "me mum" phrase, which has become a parody for this actress, we had "me dad" in this episode, in her protests about the bench.
The Taylors' revenge had a double purpose - removing Arthur's memorial bench was a stiff middle finger in Michelle's direction, as well as providing additional seating and a place for Keanu to sleep in the flat, rather than sleeping on the floor. Symbolically, I suppose this was O'Connor's stiff middle finger at Old Walford. The Mitchells are depleted, the Beales an unfunny sitcom joke and the Fowlers little more than background characters. The removal of Arthur's bench, its triumphant taking as a trophy by the newcomers was almost a symbolic gesture of O'Connor figuratively thumbing his nose at Old Walford, whilst giving the show a new family replete with everything stereotypical about a chavvy family as assumed by someone deeply entrenched in the middle classes who might even be a reader of The Daily Mail. And now this includes incest!
The Parable of the Cat with Nine Lives. I don't know what was worse in this instance - Sonia's insufferable self-righteous attitude or June Brown's head-bobbing from the bed.
Listen ... Dot's been in hospital before. And hospitals have had no-smoking policies for donkey's years. Why was so much fuss made about Dot wanting a cigarette, literally dying for a cigarette, even wanting an electronic cigarette, when she knows damned well that smoking simply isn't allowed in hospitals. Ambulatory patients actually go outside for a fag, but Dot not only isn't ambulatory, she's refusing physiotherapy.
Suddenly, she's become a head-bobbing, gurning, difficult old biddy - rude to the nurses, not heeding the doctors. The only issue with which I agreed was her ticking Sonia off about barging into her house and literally taking over. She needs to speak to Carol. Carol would soon suss that something just isn't right in Sonia's life at the moment, or else she wouldn't be trying to control everyone else's life. She's got an interview for nursing again. Let's see what comes up about the job at Kidderminster or Kettering or wherever the hell she was.
And, of course, we knew that Dave the cat wasn't dead, but following the trail of Dot to the hospital was too Disney-esque for reality or appreciation. This, I surmise, is Dave's third life - the first, as Lucky, living with the Murrays, his original owners; the second as a stray, and now the third with Dot. I guess he's entering his fourth existence now, as I imagine there's about to be an almighty custody battle between Dot and Joyce Murray, whose husband is about to succeed the ranks of Jim and Patrick as potman at the pub. Now that's an ambition!
OOOoooh, Psychokiller ... oooh Qu'est-ce que C'est. Watching Steven finally lose it is interesting, but Abi is all over the place. She likes him, but she goads him and feeds his insecurities about Lauren. She baits him to the point that she actually taunts his weaknesses, the prime one being his obsession with Lauren. She makes no secret of the fact that she thinks it's pathetic that he's spying on Lauren, yet at the same time, she feeds his insecurities, harping on about Lauren's shallowness, her self-absorption, her general insatisfaction.
It's obvious that she likes Steven, and she thought something would come of the two times they had sex, but that was angry sex on Steven's part. There was no love there, no tenderness. It was a sex that was akin to rape, because it was brutal, violent and unlasting. A short, sharp, shock. The only difference between what passed between Steven and Abi was the fact that Abi consented to the act, on both occasions. It was the sort of sex Jack Branning had the first time with Roxy Mitchell, when he discovered her trashing his office. We know what the result of that encounter was.
On both occasions, Steven and Jack used the sisters of their love objects as someone on whom to vent their sexual anger. Take that! He gave her one! The difference in victim is that Roxy moved on from the situation, and Abi, initially, thought that just maybe there would be some sort of romance there for her with Steven - then she could really have one over on Lauren. Even as late as this episode, Abi is offering it to Steven on a plate, and in the Beale household; but Steven refuses.
It's then that Abi gauges the full extent of Steven's obsession with Lauren and realises that they could never have anything together. In short, she's been used, and after that moment of realisation, she treats him with contempt.
The irony of that situation is, that by watching her at work, he suddenly understands the awful truth, before she even utters the actual words, of her total deception. Whilst watching her, he rings her at work, she admits that she's having lunch, and he asks if she's eating the salad he made for her -seeing her chomping on something else and the salad sitting, untouched, on the desk beside her. Lauren lies and says she's eating it. At that moment, with that trivial lie, Steven sees her for the liar she is and he knows he's being deceived.
Later, he watches serious chat between her and Josh, realising that the previous evening, when she worked late, yet returned home, wanting to cuddle with him on the couch, had been the result of a close, nearly intimate encounter with Josh. She almost slept with him, but didn't -not, she explained, because she didn't want to do so, but because she didn't want to cheat on an established relationship the way her father regularly did. Maybe Lauren recognises the trait of serial dissatisfaction that she inherited from Max, the propensity for infidelity - after all, she's already been the significant other in a marriage she broke up.
Steven watches this in utter horror, interrupted by a taunting Abi, whom he frightens away with a serious warning, but the breaking point comes when Lauren literally admits to Josh that what she has with Steven isn't good, and that she only stays with him, basically, because he's good with Steven - in short, as Josh surmises, a babysitter.
Watching psycho Steven emerge made this mediocre episode worth the watch, not that I'm overly enthusiastic about the programme at all at the moment.
Remember the very proper middle-class Simpson family - dad Ollie, mum Bel and kids Nat, Georgia and Danny? On the surface, they were all prim and proper, but Bel had lost her job because she took up with a much-younger male trainee and ended up getting charged with sexual harassment. She later went on to sleep with Mike Dixon and caught a dose of the clap from him and passed it on to Ollie ...
... but that's not all the Simpsons were hiding. Nat and Georgia were sleeping together. That was the ueber-big sensationalist storyline. Brookside tackled incest. It wasn't just shame and incest. At the end of the day, incest won. They left the close to live together as a couple in a place where no one knew them, disowned by Ollie, who had -by then - finished with Bel.
After that, the show sorta kinda descended into a bad farce, which seems to be EastEnders' direction now anyway.
It's now obvious that EastEnders are doing their very own incest storyline, and of course, it has to involve the Taylors, the closest thing to trailer trash the show has at the moment.
I come from the South. The very rural, often mountainous hill country of the Deep South is often parodied by the North and other areas as being incestuous, and there's some truth to that. The classic duelling banjos scene from "Deliverance" shows what inbreeding can achieve. Hell, the Royal Family shows what inbreeding can achieve, but somehow that sort of inbreeding is different from the likes in which trailer trash, hillbilles or - in the eyes of Sean O'Connor, a middle-class man from leafy suburbia - chavs participate.
I don't know what the attraction, emotional or psychological, was that bonded Keanu in what appears to be a physical relationship with his sister. He seems a responsible, sensitive and sensible young man, and she's more of the sort who's not the brightest lightbulb in the pack, someone who's at one time street suss but also naive. Like a lot of people these days, she has no cognizance of or respect for public property, especially that sort of property intended as a memorial. It was one thing to be carving into the wood of Arthur's bench, but she was carving childish love initials. Are we to believe that she's actually in love with her brother?
More importantly - and Social Services will love this - she's underage. This really is sexual abuse the likes of which Jay's accidental foray into that realm pales in insignificance before that. Bernadette has, legally, been sexually abused by her older brother. Consent doesn't come into it. She's underaged.
Another irony surroundes Lorraine Stanley - once again, she portrays the parent of an underaged daughter mixed up in inadvertant sexual assault, this time by her brother.
Some may argue that this isn't the first time the show tackled incest, considering Sharon's son has a total of three grandparents, and his father and mother had the same father; but no one even promoted that as incest, and people were quick to point out that (a) Sharon was adopted, so there was no blood relationship, and (b) she and Dennis weren't raised together and didn't relate to each other as siblings.
But this is something different, and unless there's a twist in the tale regarding the actual familial relationship between the two, then I'm not sure where they could go with this story. For the moment, however, it's not only an immoral relationship, it's an illegal one.
This was the twist in the tale whose backdrop was the family's revenge against NuMichelle's snotty telling-off of Bernadette for defacing Arthur's memorial bench. The scene lacked any sort of depth or meaning because the character of NuMichelle lacks such death and meaning. Viewers simply don't identify with Jenna Russell as Michelle Fowler. Imagine the impact the scene would have had, had this occurred with either Martin or even Stacey objecting to Bernadette's behaviour. Instead of the ubiquitous "me mum" phrase, which has become a parody for this actress, we had "me dad" in this episode, in her protests about the bench.
The Taylors' revenge had a double purpose - removing Arthur's memorial bench was a stiff middle finger in Michelle's direction, as well as providing additional seating and a place for Keanu to sleep in the flat, rather than sleeping on the floor. Symbolically, I suppose this was O'Connor's stiff middle finger at Old Walford. The Mitchells are depleted, the Beales an unfunny sitcom joke and the Fowlers little more than background characters. The removal of Arthur's bench, its triumphant taking as a trophy by the newcomers was almost a symbolic gesture of O'Connor figuratively thumbing his nose at Old Walford, whilst giving the show a new family replete with everything stereotypical about a chavvy family as assumed by someone deeply entrenched in the middle classes who might even be a reader of The Daily Mail. And now this includes incest!
The Parable of the Cat with Nine Lives. I don't know what was worse in this instance - Sonia's insufferable self-righteous attitude or June Brown's head-bobbing from the bed.
Listen ... Dot's been in hospital before. And hospitals have had no-smoking policies for donkey's years. Why was so much fuss made about Dot wanting a cigarette, literally dying for a cigarette, even wanting an electronic cigarette, when she knows damned well that smoking simply isn't allowed in hospitals. Ambulatory patients actually go outside for a fag, but Dot not only isn't ambulatory, she's refusing physiotherapy.
Suddenly, she's become a head-bobbing, gurning, difficult old biddy - rude to the nurses, not heeding the doctors. The only issue with which I agreed was her ticking Sonia off about barging into her house and literally taking over. She needs to speak to Carol. Carol would soon suss that something just isn't right in Sonia's life at the moment, or else she wouldn't be trying to control everyone else's life. She's got an interview for nursing again. Let's see what comes up about the job at Kidderminster or Kettering or wherever the hell she was.
And, of course, we knew that Dave the cat wasn't dead, but following the trail of Dot to the hospital was too Disney-esque for reality or appreciation. This, I surmise, is Dave's third life - the first, as Lucky, living with the Murrays, his original owners; the second as a stray, and now the third with Dot. I guess he's entering his fourth existence now, as I imagine there's about to be an almighty custody battle between Dot and Joyce Murray, whose husband is about to succeed the ranks of Jim and Patrick as potman at the pub. Now that's an ambition!
OOOoooh, Psychokiller ... oooh Qu'est-ce que C'est. Watching Steven finally lose it is interesting, but Abi is all over the place. She likes him, but she goads him and feeds his insecurities about Lauren. She baits him to the point that she actually taunts his weaknesses, the prime one being his obsession with Lauren. She makes no secret of the fact that she thinks it's pathetic that he's spying on Lauren, yet at the same time, she feeds his insecurities, harping on about Lauren's shallowness, her self-absorption, her general insatisfaction.
It's obvious that she likes Steven, and she thought something would come of the two times they had sex, but that was angry sex on Steven's part. There was no love there, no tenderness. It was a sex that was akin to rape, because it was brutal, violent and unlasting. A short, sharp, shock. The only difference between what passed between Steven and Abi was the fact that Abi consented to the act, on both occasions. It was the sort of sex Jack Branning had the first time with Roxy Mitchell, when he discovered her trashing his office. We know what the result of that encounter was.
On both occasions, Steven and Jack used the sisters of their love objects as someone on whom to vent their sexual anger. Take that! He gave her one! The difference in victim is that Roxy moved on from the situation, and Abi, initially, thought that just maybe there would be some sort of romance there for her with Steven - then she could really have one over on Lauren. Even as late as this episode, Abi is offering it to Steven on a plate, and in the Beale household; but Steven refuses.
It's then that Abi gauges the full extent of Steven's obsession with Lauren and realises that they could never have anything together. In short, she's been used, and after that moment of realisation, she treats him with contempt.
The irony of that situation is, that by watching her at work, he suddenly understands the awful truth, before she even utters the actual words, of her total deception. Whilst watching her, he rings her at work, she admits that she's having lunch, and he asks if she's eating the salad he made for her -seeing her chomping on something else and the salad sitting, untouched, on the desk beside her. Lauren lies and says she's eating it. At that moment, with that trivial lie, Steven sees her for the liar she is and he knows he's being deceived.
Later, he watches serious chat between her and Josh, realising that the previous evening, when she worked late, yet returned home, wanting to cuddle with him on the couch, had been the result of a close, nearly intimate encounter with Josh. She almost slept with him, but didn't -not, she explained, because she didn't want to do so, but because she didn't want to cheat on an established relationship the way her father regularly did. Maybe Lauren recognises the trait of serial dissatisfaction that she inherited from Max, the propensity for infidelity - after all, she's already been the significant other in a marriage she broke up.
Steven watches this in utter horror, interrupted by a taunting Abi, whom he frightens away with a serious warning, but the breaking point comes when Lauren literally admits to Josh that what she has with Steven isn't good, and that she only stays with him, basically, because he's good with Steven - in short, as Josh surmises, a babysitter.
Watching psycho Steven emerge made this mediocre episode worth the watch, not that I'm overly enthusiastic about the programme at all at the moment.
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