Batshit Ratshit - Review:- Tuesday 17.01.2017

This was a filler episode, with a lot of foreshadowing, and, pessimist that I am, I'm not too keen on much of it. 

O'Connor is pandering, again, to the tweenie set, by introducing yet another twatty-looking teenaged boy. He's brought back Danny Mitchell, who's just a hop, skip and a jump away from the dire awfulness that encompassed the Moon Goons, Joey Branning and Dexter - as if having Shakil and the misogynist Trumpster, Keegan, weren't enough. He's setting up Saint-Fucking Denise as being saintlier, having Phil harbour secret regrets about the Holy Christ child from Sharon, and implying that Sharon, who's done absolutely nothing wrong in this, is a bitch. Once again, he's pushing the meme about adoption being a cardinal sin, with the idea that children are far better off with their blood families than being raised by "strangers." Denise's mother looks like Medusa, with a face which would turn anyone to stone ...

No wonder Vincent keeps well away from his house.

Mick's acting like a spoiled schoolboy, Babe's a cartoon, Whitney looks as if she wants to run her hand down Mick's boxers and grab him by the pussy, Trump's about to be inaugurated in this piss poor and worsening world. 

What could possibly go wrong?

The Carters Dig a Bigger Whole for Themselves. The Carters are oozing overt foreshadowing. They may as well walk around with yellow Post-its stuck to their foreheads saying ...

Leaving ...

or 

Cartoon figure approaching ... 

or 

I fancy Mick ...

or 

I'm in debt too, but nobody knows it ,,.

or, collectively 

We'll lose our licence, Sharon will become the licencee, and we'll manage the pub for her.

Because all of the above is happening or is bound to happen at some point in the future.

Mick is downright nasty to Lee. His true feelings are out in the open. The only way Lee will ever regain Mick's love and trust is to leave. Seriously. Mick never once attempted to reconcile with Nancy, treating her like shit, until she decided to go travelling with Tamwar. Then he blubbed for England. 

Now, he barely acknowledges Lee, whilst going out of his way to compliment her, thank her for all her help and make her feel important. Whitney encourages this actively, by always being within arm's length of Mick, emphasizing to him that she's doing all she can to help the family, of which she seems to think she's an important part - the natural successor to Linda, no less - and constantly thanking him for everything he's done for her and Lee, which is a tacit and bitchily subtle way of pointing out that this is all really Lee's mistake, and she's trying to make amends for it.

She plays up to Mick, the fact that Linda's not around, when she knows he's missing her. She makes all the right sympathetic noises and makes all the sad little faces reflecting his own unhappiness, whilst constantly reiterating the reality that Linda isn't there ... Linda would pull out all the stops for Supper Nights ... Linda would love all the Scottish hoopla ... It's such a shame that Linda couldn't be there. The other day, she even began to reflect Mick back to Mick by referring to Linda as "L", which is Mick's pet name for her.

Mick is feeling alone, worried and vulnerable, and Whitney is reinforcing his feelings by making remarks about Linda, reassuring him that she doesn't want Linda to worry and, almost in effect, trying to step into Linda's shoes. She even engaged in coy flirting with Mick, teasing him about his age.

Mick, Lee and Whitney had spent the weekend in Watford, where Linda had laid on a big spread for Mick's 40th, with Tamwar and Nancy flying in from Italy. Lee remarked that Mick never spoke a word to him all weekend - and Linda never noticed that? An earth mother like Linda wouldn't notice her firstborn being cold-shouldered by his father?

Whitney's guard dropped with Lee for a split second over breakfast when he informed her that he had another job interview after work, in insurance sales. 

Commission? She sneered, as if that's something she looks down her nose about. Who is she? She's never had a bona fide job in the world. Her ambition is nothing more than to find a man who's a good provider and spend his money. At one nad the same time, she expresses her love for Lee, but also reiterates the blame he must bear for Mick's financial crisis.

In fact, when Lee returned to the pub after his interview, announcing to Whitney that the interview went badly, and that the job never really was him, Mick made a snide remark ...

It never is.

He smacks down anyone who tries to get him to reconcile with Lee, but it's all too easy for Mick to blame Lee for his own shortcomings, because Mick has a big secret. He is as much in debt, even moreso, than Lee, who has genuinely promised to repay every penny of the money he owes Mick - of course, that doesn't count the money he stole from Jack or the money he earned pawning the expensive gift he lifted off a neighbour. But I can't imagine Lee owing more than a few thousand pounds - certainly enough to be covered by Mick maxing out his credit cards. Mick's debt is the £14,000 he borrowed from a dodgy loan company to bring Linda and Elaine home from Spain. He knows he is as guilty as Lee for going into debt, and what is more, he went into debt for precisely the same reason Lee did - for the woman he loved.

Because of this, he's in thrall to Babe, who's not only started a breakfast buffet at the pub, but also was behind the idea of having international supper nights, which was a good idea on paper. 

The Carters have a lot to prove with Scottish Night, after the failure of Italian Night because of Johnny's irresponsibility, but Babe is also embroiled in a ridiculous feud with Kathy, pitting the café against the pub. It seems the only people who frequent the breakfast buffet now are those people who want to start their day with the hair of the dog, because babe serves up alcohol from a tea kettle poured into china cups, something that is against the licencing laws and which could lose Mick his licence. She's come close to being caught by Mick and by Tina, and tonight she was blasted by Kathy for trying to advertise the supper nights in the café, whilst Kathy was promoting the evening trade there.

As a means of revenge for their encounter, Babe contrives to divert Tina long enough (not hard) to put ratshit droppings in the coffee maker, but made the stupid mistake of telling Tina not to drink the coffee. (Pretty stupid, when you think that Tina is remarkably loyal to Kathy for giving her employment and would pick up on a remark like that). As a result, there was a very public showdown in the Vic between Kathy and Babe, where Babe was forced to admit, in front of all the drinkers and diners, that she put ratshit into the café's coffee. How to drive a business into the gutter in one easy lesson. The first Supper Night was an epic fail. This one sealed the venture's fate.

You can imagine what will happen. Somehow Kathy or Jane or Ian or even Donna or worse, Carmel (who likes a drink, but not first thing in the morning) will find out that Babe is serving alcohol as part of the breakfast menu; Mick will be reported, and he'll lose his licence.

Watch this space for Sharon as the new licencee of the Vic, with the Carters managing it for her.

The Ties that Bind. We spent the bulk of last year watching Denise screw up her face and walk around rubbing her belly; now we start this year watching her mope about her house, looking sad and mournful and whining about "her milk."

Too much information.

I totally get it that it's hard to give a child up for adoption, but she had her reasons, and those reasons, for the most part, were good and honest. But EastEnders pisses me off, royally, the way it subtly injects the idea that adoption and anyone who gives a child up for adoption is unnatural and abnormal.

I hate the idea they push about blood kin is the only sort of familial relationship that matters. Look, no one ever gave a child up lightly, just as most people don't take abortion lightly and blithely use it as a means of birth control. The latter is a myth pushed by extreme Rightwingers; the first makes the people who produce EastEnders look as batshit crazy and pejorative as the Christian Taliban.

In EastEndersLand, with the exception of Sharon, adopted children find or are returned to their birth parents and live happily ever after. In the case of Rebecca, this scenario would never in a million years have happened. Once you sign the child off for adoption, that is it. Records are sealed and cannot be accessed until the adoptee is 18 years old.

As someone who's married to an adoptee, I know that "happy ever after", for the most part, is a myth; I also know most adoptees are taken in by families who have chosen them and who love them unconditionally. Sharon fared badly with her birth mother and even worse with her joke of a birth father. 

The show promotes the idea that it's shameful to give a child up for adoption, when in many ways it's brave, and it's actually putting the child's needs first. Denise is getting one poxy GCSE. Where she'll go with that is anyone's guess, but unless she goes into further education, my guess is that she'll go nowhere other than a zero hours' contract at the Minute Mart.

She's depicted in a totally unrealistic situation as is, living in a house worth a cool half-a-million in that area of London and sharing a mortgage with a man whose only source of income is his State pension. How could she possibly support a child? The bottom line with her is that she doesn't like Phil Mitchell, looks down on him, but I doubt she'd turn down money from him for the child. The real reason behind this is that, close to her half-century, she wants to move ahead now in a different direction. She's had her children, and she wants this child to have something neither of her girls had - a normal, loving family.

And sometimes, with all the best intentions, your blood family can really fuck a child up. Kim's child is a reflection of her own vanity. She uses Pearl as a fashion accessory. Pearl is the prettiest child on the show, but the look of abject terror on her face anytime she's around Kim is palpable. And although Grandma Medusa is coming around, I don't trust her. At best, this character - with her posh voice and stoneface, is a tit-for-tat quota replacement for Claudette, except this time, where Claudette gave Kim grief, she will be the mother-in-law from hell for Vincent, and she'll probably end up bonking Patrick at some point and sparring with Dot, which is just boring and predictable.

There were three particular characters who stood out in this instance, as well as the brooding Denise and the supercilious Libby.

I wish I could feel some sort of sympathy for Denise, as I infer that the message they are trying to impart is that she's noble and sacrificing and that Sharon, somehow, is the bitch in all of this, but I can't see how that is. Denise got drunk and slept with Sharon's husband. Yes, he was still, at that time, her husband. Just because they were not living together gave neither of them licence to engage in sexual activities with anyone else. Phil was too drunk even to remember what he was doing, and Denise was just pathetic and irresponsible. By the time she found out about her pregnancy, she was still within the time limit to get an abortion, and I've never seen so much cognitive dissonance who is such an avowed atheist as Denise, who believes in a Right to Life. That doesn't jive at all.

She got herself into this situation, and kudos to her for sticking to her guns and not giving into her appalling sister and mother. Kudos as well to her for sticking it to her po-faced daughter who proclaimed, when she learned of the pregnancy, that Denise was wasting her life, having another child at her age. Libby can spend the rest of her life apologising for that remark, but initial remarks about a situation, like leaks of secrets, often turn out to be true in sentiment.

Grandma Medusa whines on and on about being denied a grandson, but that's not an impossibility. Kim is certainly young enough to have another child, and doesn't Grandma have another daughter, younger than either Denise or Kim - Daphne, is it? Or has she been conveniently forgotten?

The other three characters who stuck out in this were Carmel, Shirley and Vincent.

I really like Vincent, now that they've got away from the gangster shit and Claudette and that insidious fling with Ronnie. However, in salvaging his character, they've emasculated him. Like poor Charlie Slater, he's been reduced to pushing a pram around Walford and becoming a nanny for Pearl, whilst Kim preens and prances about, in love with herself. I feel sorry for him having such a bitch of a wife and an exhibitionist of a mother-in-law that he had to sneak out of his house to express any kind of sympathy and compassion for Denise.

Carmel annoyed me, because she was the vocal piece, echoing the message EastEnders has sent out for years, by EastEnders that blood ties were the only thing that mattered, that adoption was an aberration, which was pejorative, even when it worked - just look at Sharon being the buffer zone between her warring parents.

Carmel was the embodiment of judgement, even to the inane remark about ...

I could never give up any of mah boys.

Well, you didn't have to, you dozy bitch, because you were married and in a stable relationship when each of them was born. What a stupid remark to make. Yet still she has to be goaded, shamed into visiting Denise, unable to separate her judgemental nature from being able to show any sort of compassion or understanding for someone who's supposed to be her best friend. In the end, it just showed how incredibly weak and shallow Carmel is as a person.

And finally, there was Shirley, who both fascinated and annoyed me. It was interesting to note that she understood exactly why Denise did what she did, wanting a better life for the child and even that she had thought about doing the same for Mick when she had him at fourteen; but, as she said, her family interfered, and she didn't have to make that decision. Yet at the same time, when she found out that Phil knew and that he had ultimately walked away from this situation, she immediately blamed Sharon for coercing him into the decision, reckoning that Phil, being ill and vulnerable, would never have given up his son.

That disturbed me. Just what did she expect Phil to do? Take the baby? Did she think that Sharon would leave eventually, with this decision, so she could move back in with Phil and show him how much she would accept and raise this child? Just like when she cried upon learning that the baby was Phil's, I don't understand this. Neither of these women is taking into account just what this would do to Sharon, who had one miracle child and who would have loved to have given Phil a child, a Mitchell wife, doomed to raise someone else's children who are Mitchells.

I know Phil has regrets, which he's hiding from Sharon - so much for the epiphany. He doesn't want Ben to find out about this, and that's understandable. This son would be the non-Ben; but now this makes Sharon vulnerable too, because baby or not, there's still the chance that, like Wicksy, Phil will drift along to the mother of his latest child, and I'm still not certain that EastEnders will let this storyline go.

But then, I'm a cynic.

A Tale of Two Babies - Review:- Monday 16.01.2017

I'll give Sean O'Connor credit for one thing - no one has produced a thematic EastEnders, the way they did it in the 80s and 90s, the way he has managed to do so. 

I thought the obvious juxtaposition tonight between two MItchell babies, actually, was significant, and the contrasting endings were obvious: Phil lost the opportunity to be a father to his natural son, whilst Jack gained the opportunity to keep his wife's baby son, a child to whom he had no right. In point of fact, Phil had no real right to the baby in question either, as he wasn't married to Denise; but the difference between the two situations is that Jack views Matthew as Ronnie's legacy - her only child, whom he'll love as his own because of the love he had for her - and Phil views Denise's son as an extension of himself and the Mitchell legacy.

The Blood Mitchell. Denise has got to be one of the most unpleasant, ungrateful people in the show. I know she has a huge fan base, and most of those people view her as "quirky" or spikey, but she's just bloody rude and unpleasant to everyone. She was even upleasant to Patrick, who's done nothing but support her, against his better judgement, through this pregnancy.

But this is the way she's always been - unpleasant, rude, condescending and arrogant to most people in the Square. And people are nice to her, which I can't understand. Chelsea was very much like Denise in her treatment of people. Take friends, for example.  The Denise-Carmel dynamic reminds me of an middle-aged version of Chelsea and Preeti. 

At best, Chelsea treated the ineffectual Preeti like a mildly amusing doll; at worst, she treated her like an annoying pest. It's the same with Denise and Carmel. Most of the time Carmel, who's all about herself anyway, wants a companion to listen to her bang on and on about herself, she nabs Denise, who makes a face and then proceeds to get drunk. Mind you, Denise is always making a face about something, and it's usually indicating boredom or disgust or disapproval. Her face-making isn't gurning the way Jacqueline Jossa or Tillie Keeper gurn to disguise the fact that the really sorta kinda aren't very good at their craft, but certainly Diane Parish has made Denise's unpleasant face-making a signature piece of her characterisation. And there really isn't any need for that, because Parish is an adequate actress. At other times, whenever Carmel has done something thoughtful for Denise, as a friend, she's turned up her nose at the effort - and she does that for pretty much anyone. Thing is, when people do ignore her, she throws herself a pity party and lives to regret it, usually ending up snogging someone she shouldn't or going to bed with them, the way she did with Phil Mitchell.

Actually, the more I think about her little dance with Phil, which came as a result of a massive drunk which was a culmination reaction to JJ being taken away from her and to Libby refusing to give into her bullying and continuing with her plan to have an abortion, and to her feeling massively sorry for herself because she was on her own again, and because her silly, simpering sister bagged a man and a baby and big house, the more I think this was karma for the way she treated Fatboy a few years ago. Fatboy was dead serious about this relationship, even asking her poignantly if she were just using him for sex - and in the end, that's exactly what she did.

I get it that the sound of babies crying on the maternity ward was reminding her in the episode of what she was giving up, but she was so bloody flippant and unpleasant to Patrick, and he didn't deserve what he got at all.

On the Mitchell side of the coin, there was the irony of Phil asking Sharon if he could adopt Dennis. I wondered how long it would be before he broached this subject, even mentioning the fact that Dennis Rickman was the boy's "real" dad. As things stand, tragically, Dennis Rickman is little more than Denny's birth father. Phil's been the mainstay of his formative years and, unfortunately, his role model; but it's clear that he loves Phil and that Phil loves him. Any other time, and Sharon would have willingly embraced Phil's obvious effort to make Dennis a fully paid-up member of the Mitchell tribe, but she well remembers Phil's remark about "blood Mitchells" and does what she did years ago regarding Lisa's secret about Louise.

I must admit, I was wondering how Sharon would react to all of this tonight, and I wasn't disappointed by the fact that that, as I expected, Denise showed only surprise when Phil and Sharon entered her room, but no shame in the fact that Sharon knew about her dirty little secret. Line of the night to Shazza:-

A word of advice: If you want to keep something a secret, don't go talking about it in public loos.

I actually thought Sharon carried this leg of the episode. When she has material like this, there's no one better than Letitia Dean - the relatively quiet way she was forced to tell Phil about the existence of a child who was the result of a liaison about which he remembered nothing. She knew she had to tell him about this, especially when Phil forced her hand by announcing that he wanted to adopt Dennis; Sharon knew it would only be a matter of time before he was aware of this child's existence; she also knew what his reaction would be when he learned of the baby, and it reflected what he felt for Dennis, and that's a little sad. Phil might love Dennis, he may even love him as if he were his own son; but in the face of the existence of another "blood" Mitchell, Dennis doesn't stand a chance. He was the second choice option for Phil, and when Sharon and Phil adjourned to talk about whatever options Phil thought he might have, I thought Sharon played Phil brilliantly.

Because it was Patrick who was the only person who thought about what this child would mean for Sharon and was concerned by the fact that neither Phil nor Denise was even considering how the existence of this child might affect Sharon, whom Patrick pointedly referred to as Phil's "wife."

Sharon didn't rant and rave at Phil. She kept her calm, even when they adjourned to talk amongst themselves about the child; and it was Sharon who put  both Phil and Denise in their places when they had a confrontation in the corridor of the maternity ward, with Phil demanding to see the baby and Denise shouting the odds. As Sharon reminded them, they got themselves into this predicament, and now it was down to them to extricate themselves, like adults.

I don't think for one instant Sharon wanted to take responsibility for this baby, the way Phil was asserting that he wanted to take the child. It was certainly rich of him to announce that, expecting Sharon to go along with his plan. What woman would want to raise her husband's child, who was the result of a cheating one night stand? And, listen, this was cheating. Phil and Sharon may not have been living together at the time, but they were still legally married, and any liaison he had with any other woman who wasn't his wife was exactly that: cheating. I thought she tackled the situation very well, with astute reverse psychology.

While Phil used the same reasoning as the insipid Kim, about "strangers" raising a child who had a family, Sharon quietly asked Phil if he loved Dennis, and if he considered Dennis his own. When Phil replied in the affirmative, she reminded Phil that this unknown couple who were adopting the baby, were just like Den and Angie when they adopted Sharon - and I'm glad that Sharon's backstory has now reverted to her being adopted by Den and Angie and not traded by Gavin to Den for a place in a bank robbery gang. Those people will love and accept the child as much as much as Den and Angie loved her. Den and Angie were flawed people in a toxic marriage, but there was no denying that they loved Sharon unconditionally.

Phil's reasoning about what would happen if the couple broke up or if one of them died, how would the child fare then? That was a stupid question. Life goes on. The same thing could happen to a natural child born into any family. As Sharon reasoned, they wouldn't be able to give the child back, and besides, Phil could die at anytime. Still, she promised to stand by Phil in whatever he decided to do about the child, and she even vowed to help him fight for his rights.

I don't think she was sincere about that. I think she knew that if she dug in and opposed him in his efforts, he'd plough right ahead, like a bull in a china shop, and pursue trying to get the child. I think she also realised that if the baby were around, considering Denise had said that she had tried not to, but had come to love the child, that it wouldn't be long before there was some sort of bond forming between Phil and Denise. So she played along, until Phil realised that what Denise had said all along was basically true. Phil is a man in his mid-fifties. By the time the child would be a teenager, he'd be in his seventies.

And I realised in this episode that the real reason Denise was giving the child up had nothing to do with fearing Phil's interference. She simply disliked him too much. Libby was smart. When she accidentally got pregnant by a man with whom she had nothing in common, rather than have the child and establish a bond with this man which couldn't be broken via the child, she had the baby aborted.

In this episode, Denise's dislike of Phil was visceral. The way she sneeringly called him an alcoholic, as if this were a life choice and not a valid disease, and as if she isn't one to reach for a bottle the minute life doesn't go her way! She was three sheets to the wind when she went to bed with an equally drunk Phil. At least, she was honest enough to admit that she was too old to be dealing with a young child, that she had a poorly-paid job (even though she was living in the type of property which, in that part of London, would bag half a million quid) and that she wanted to move ahead; that the couple who had agreed to adopt the child could give him a better life, they were younger and would grow with the child, pointing out that by the time the kid would have reached his teens, she'd be in her sixties.

That was pretty understandable and reasonable, although older women have children every day - Kathy and Zainab were the same age when they gave birth to Ben and Kamil.

But I thought it was pretty harsh of her to bang on about how well her two girls had turned out and to browbeat Phil about Ben and Louise. Phil is a big part of Ben being the way he is, but then so is Kathy, who virtually abandoned him at a young age. And as for Louise, to be fair, for years, on two occasions, Phil didn't know Louise's whereabouts. Her mother kept her whereabouts from him for years, and for all of that, Louise, apart from being obnoxious, seems pretty well-adjusted to me. Denise's kids are nothing to brag about - Chelsea was lazy, self-obsessed, arrogant, dishonest and quick to jump into bed with a man minutes after meeting him. Who can forget her encounter with Jack in the toilets of the Argee Bahjee? Or the fact that she served time in prison for perverting the course of justice. (Just like Sharon and Jane, Denise destroyed evidence of Chelsea's lie and was pretty content to see an innocent man go to prison). Libby has always been a snobbish pill.

At the end of the day, Phil decided to let the child go, and the final irony came as he and Sharon left the hospital as the social worker and her team were coming to collect the baby.

Baby Cotton. Hallelujah! Dot's remembered Charlie, although precious good that will do. Jack's moved into the anger side of grief now, assailing Dot for telling Ricky stories about Ronnie and Roxy being "with the angels". (Note to Glenda: Matthew is not Ricky's brother, and he isn't Amy's brother either. He is their cousin).

At least Dot remembered that Matthew had a father and a living one at that. She has a right to let Charlie know what has happened, because Charlie has a right to his son. She says that he hasn't been answering his phone and perhaps had changed numbers, so why can't she contact Yvonne? Certainly she would know where she was, wouldn't she? In this age of globalisation and the internet, it shouldn't be hard to trace either of the two.

Instead, Glenda convinces her that Jack needs Matthew and that Matthew needs to be wth this family. Well, maybe; but Matthew is only two years old. Were he to go live with his father, it might be a bit of an adjustment, but he's so young, he wouldn't remember an of the Amy-Ricky association, much less, his mother, who left most of the childcare to Charlie when she was alive anyway.

i would think that Jack is clinging to Matthew because he is Ronnie's son, and the last link to her that he has.

I did enjoy the scenes between Dot and Glenda and Dot's picking up on Glenda's tacit disapproval of Jack's direct way of telling Ricky that Ronnie and Roxy wouldn't be coming back.

So Jack gets to keep a baby to whom he has no right, whilst Phil loses the rights to his natural son.

The Carter Situation. Clock Whitney and her closeness to Mick. Her body language, her actions, everything with regard to him intimates that she wishes to be more than just a daughter-in-law. Her facial expression and her attitude when she and he were leaving to go to the Cash and Carry was proprietorial in a way in which only Linda has the right. Something will brew between them in Linda's absence.

Babe susses something, which is why she was quick to put Whitney in her place, but I think Babe will lose Mick's licence when it's found out that she's serving drink before legal hours during the breakfast buffet.

Is it on the cards for Sharon to become the licencee again?

Bumface's Baby Boy - Review:- Friday 13.01.2017

Everything happens on Friday the 13th. You get a birthday and a baby you don't want.

This episode represented everything I hate at the moment about EastEnders, the representation of women as weak-willed, subservient creatures, willing to give up a future at the expense of a man, casual misogyny, and circular characters, not to mention characters who have been drinking in the last chance saloon for so long, it's become a way of life for them.

The Christ Child. This episode, more than any, brought home to me how much I hate Denise and most of her family that surrounds her - specifically, the effetely snobbish Libby, the caricatured stereotypical shuck'n'jive black woman, and tonight we got introduced to Medusa Ada AKA Emerald Fox, Denise's snake-haired, big-mouthed mother. Another stereotype. The West Indies by way of Walford, another mother-in-law from hell, this time for Vincent, who's settled nicely into the role of emasculated male, having graduated from his Oedipal complex. How many months until this creature is bonking Patrick and he's leering at her crossing the Square and going ...

Y-eee-aahhhhh, mon ... she a fiiiiiiine woman.

Honestly, who writes his dialogue, a descendant of the woman who wrote Gone With the Wind? 

Patrick is a great character, the patriarch of the Square, and I'd go as far as saying, the natural successor to Pat, but in many ways, he's a token stereotype - the rum-loving, life-loving atypical West Indian man, just as much as Kim is the screeching black woman.

Apart from Patrick, they were an embarrassment tonight. What hospital would countenance the shouting, hectoring overreaction in the hallway of the maternity ward such as what we saw tonight exhibited by Kim and that putrid mother of hers? There would be complaints, and they would be asked to leave.

I know Diane Parish has her fanbase, but I don't think she's anymore than an average actress, a soap actress who can't progress beyond the soap genre because it's easy money, and because she's in the midst of a gaggle of ethnic characters who fulfill a quota imposed by the BBC on this programme. She lost relevance years ago, when the divine Don Gilet left originally.

Since 2010, TPTB have struggled to know what to do with this character. They tried her as Zainab's wingman, and Zainab moved on to greener pastures. They attempted a love triangle between the odious Kim, her fella played by Chuckie Venn, and Denise, and it never got further than an elicit kiss. They tried a cougar affair between Denise and Fatboy, and that actually worked ... for a few episodes. It also worked last year between her and Kush, until Sean O'Connor decided to push the envelope toward a Mitchell pregnancy.

I blame Lorraine Newman. She came up with the idea of making Denise relevant by associating her with an established Walford family, and made her Ian Beale's fiancée. They were an unbelievable couple with no chemistry whatsoever. When DTC returned to the fold, he brought Jane back to the Beale dynamic, and from that moment on, the way Ian treated Denise verged on subtle racism - from the "vaguely racist" oven gloves he gave her for Christmas, to not wanting her in a family picture advertising Beales' to nudging her, Libby and Patrick aside from the family cortege at Lucy's funeral.

But O'Connor picked up the possibility of linking Denise with an established Walford family and ran with it. DTC planted the "little bomb" of a possible pregnancy as a result of a drunken one night stand Denise spent having a pity party with Phil. 

It didn't have to be.

At the time she discovered her pregnancy, she was heavily involved in another cougar affair, this time with Kush, the son of her best friend, who was, herself, at that time going through a midlife crisis. Instead, O'Connor embraced the idea of making Denise relevant by linking her indelibly with an established Walford family - but not just any family: the Mitchells.

She's having Phil Mitchell's baby, but there's just one slight glitch.

Phil has a wife.

So all through this fiasco, we've been asked to feel sympathy for Denise - oh, because she's so popular with the fanbois. Good actress, my arse! She's got by like so many others - by gurning (her speciality is the bumfaced grimace of disapproval) and by shouting people down. Every storyline has a whiff of romcom or sitcom about it.

Tonight's show centred around the nobility of Denise going through with giving the baby up for adoption - ostensibly, because she wants to proceed with getting her GCSE in English literature (let's hope Michelle doesn't tutor her in grammar), but I wonder how much of this is fear that, not only Phil, but Sharon, will find out.

Sharon was present at her baby shower, and even sat at the table with her in the pub the other night. How can Denise be so fucking shameless? Even when she confessed to Shirley that Phil was the father of her baby, she was more concerned with sparing Shirley's feelings than even thinking about Sharon.

Of course, Sharon is bound to come out the bitch in this situation, even though she's as much a victim in this as Denise. Tonight she told NuMichelle that she knew Phil was messing around when they were separated, because she found the condom he intended on using when he slept with Bumface.

Also, Sharon's avowel tonight that she would "take care of Denise" foreshadowed the fact that she's going to be made out to be the bitch in this instance, when O'Connor should be doing everything in his power to salvage the character of Sharon, an iconic and original character, when her character has been mangled since Simon Ashdown made her subservient to Tanya's friendship, left her stranded at the altar by Jack Branning and popping painkillers. Lorraine Newmant largely ignored her, but DTC drew her into the irredeemable web of people protecting Bobby Beale, and that was totally unforgivable.

I will say this: If a character like Denise has to be linked irretrievably with an established family, especially if the only way to make her relevant is by making her the mother of Phil Mitchell's baby, another in a long line of women who've had Mitchell children - nay, Mitchell boys - then it's time for her to go.

Seriously.

What happens next? Because by all intentions tonight, either Denise will change her mind about the adoption or Snakehead, Kim and the idiot savant Libby will conspire to talk her around. I hated all of that shit tonight about "my grandson being raised by strangers" and Kim spouting statistics about "black boys" being left in social care. (Dimwit, Denise's baby is bi-racial, even though it was obvious he was being "portrayed" by a white baby. Go figure that one). I hated all the emotional blackmail and the bullying, but I knew that eventually we'd see what was supposed to be a touching scene between the martyr Denise and the baby in question.

So what does happen next? With Phil as yet unknowing, he told Sharon, he didn't want any more children, thinking he'd done badly by Ben and Louise. (He has). But Phil doesn't know about this child, and why did Sharon decide, when she knew the baby was being adopted, to tell Phil? I hope she doesn't go off on this Mitchell tangent about family and wanting this child to get to know his family here. I hope the reference made by Phil to Sharon and NuMichelle being a lot like Peggy and Auntie Sal wasn't some sort of foreshadowing.

In apposition to Denise's po-faced bumdom, I still think that Letitia Dean has the most evocatively expressive face on the show. The pain and gried in her face, the sad resignation in her eyes as she watched Honey and the insipid Carmel fuss about Denise as she went off to be induced, was heart-breaking.

If she keeps this baby, I can see Phil bonding with her over it and Sharon and Dennis being shoved aside, because the boy isn't a blood Mitchell, and Sharon isn't the mother of a blood Mitchell. Just like what happened with Wicksy and Cindy when Wicksy was with Sharon. It looks, however, that Sharon is going to fight for her family. I hope she lamps Denise.

This has got to be one of the most unnecessary, trite and unpopular storylines of all time. 

O'Connor should have kept Roxy Mitchell and sent Denise away. For good. With Kim, Libby and the snake-headed mother in tow. Vincent, Patrick and Pearl can stay. The others are toxic.

Weak Women and Open Misogynists. It's nice to see that female man-dependency and open, hateful misogyny is alive and well amongst the younger generation in EastEnders. 

This group of teens was bad enough; then we got Keegan. Another aggressive, Afro-Caribbean male being depicted as an open bully, an ardent misogynist and someone who revels in being tactless and cruel.

Rebecca is a weak, stupid girl. She began the episode by insisting on going to a music school to get a BTech diploma, but Martin and Michelle, enlisted by Martin, work on her to get her to stay at Walford High and get her A-Levels. Since when did Walford High have a Sixth Form? Everyone who lasted beyond GCSEs went to a Sixth Form College. Abi Branning did.

It's true that Rebecca would "have more options" if she stayed in Walford. She'd have more options for hanging around with the unintelligible Shakil and maybe letting him in her knickers again. Interesting that she seemed to be intent on going to the music college, even after Michelle spoke to her, but once she'd encountered the piece of shit known as Keegan, with his highly offensive remarks - about Shakil could do better than Rebecca, again about Louise's supposed frigidity and at last, flippantly asking if Louise was "on the rag."

EastEnders has been on a misogynist bend lately, but they doubled back on that because after that encounter, the silly bitch decides to stay in Walford ... because she'll have more "options." The sly smile she gave as she slinked out of the room away from Martin and Stacey gave us the real reason she wanted to stay in Walford. The stupid girl will never do anything with music. The only ding-dong she wants to play with is Shakil's dick. 

It'll all end in tears. And soon, I hope.

Lordy, Lordy, Look Who's Forty. I'd be concerned about Whitney if I were Lee. Anyone casually watching tonight would have thought her more romantically inclined toward Mick. The gift she gave him for his understated fortieth indicated that. 

She knew that she and Lee were in dire straits financially, and yet, unbeknownst to him, she bought an expensively framed limited edition photo of the Boleyn Ground to present to Mick as his main birthday present. Babe sussed right away that Lee knew nothing about the gift, and for once, she was right in assailing Whitney about the needless extravagance. I was a bit disappointed that she didn't take it one step further and accuse Whitney of being just a tad too fond of Mick for the public eye.

Babe was also right about Whitney frittering away money, and I thought it rich of Whitney to pin the blame of their suffering on Lee, when a lot of what Lee did was to satisfy her expensive tastes. (For two women without a pot in which to piss, Denise and Whitney sure do have expensively manicured nails).

The poor excuse of a fortieth birthday party was a contrivance for Babe to take a well-needed pop at Whitney, who defended herself by saying that whilst Babe hung around like a bad smell, Whitney actually was needed - by Lee, by Mick and by Ollie. 

Big mistake.

You don't do that to Babe.

I still say there will be something brewing with her re Mick. When she looked in on him sleeping off his drunk, I thought for a moment she was going to crawl into bed and cuddle him. 

Slut.

How to Ruin an Original Character in Two Easy Steps - Review: Thursday 12.01.2017

I get it that this is a throwback ("Throwback Thursday", get it?) to the heyday of two-headers and to the last two-hander between REAL Michelle and Sharon, when the episode ended with Michelle telling Sharon that Vicki was her sister.

But this two-header was between Sharon and someone called Michelle who was not even remotely like her. 

Good acting - Letitia Dean was brilliant. I learned today (Sunday 15.01) from listening to Elaine Page that Jenna Russell is another one in a long line of musical comedy actors to do a stint on EastEnders - John Partridge, Declan Bennett and Maria Friedman being the others, including the first musical comedy actor to appear on the show (Nigel Harman) - and that Russell is actually the 2007 recipient of the Olivier Award. Impressive, but she just isn't doing it as Michelle Fowler.

The acting was good, but there were so many holes in this storyline, probably due to laziness on the part of Carey Andrews in not researching things thoroughly, and some of the statements made by Sharon and Michelle in the piece were absolutely laughable.

Listen, I'm a purist who's watched the show from Day One. I'm entitled to my opinion, and being American - and part of this storyline takes place, not only in America, but in my old stomping ground (the South) - I know when I'm being sold a pup.

Realism, my arse, Mr O'Connor, and if I thought Dominic Treadwell-Collins was bad in totally re-writing various established characters' back stories (Sharon's, Phil's and Kat's, specifically), Sean O'Connor has just pulled the prize for the absolute worst thing to do to an iconic, seminal and original EastEnders' character ...

You make them a sex offender. Worse, you make them a sex offender, and you make her best friend, the mother of an impressionable yet precocious young man, forgive her for it, even make a joke about it.

Cradle snatcher.

That pithy attempt at a joke was in far worse taste than the jokes Phil and Ian cracked as they skipped away from Paul Coker's corpse.

A parent would be totally disgusted at what Michelle had done. You wouldn't joke about such a thing.

Here are the hilarities I found in this episode, things that made me choke on the popcorn I'm eating:-

1. Sharon:- When you're on that plane tomorrow, I'm coming with you. 

2. Sharon:- I've got skills. I can get a job.

3. Sharon:- You and Tim should know some good high schools in the area for Denny.

Let me stop being gob-smacked first.

Sharon lived in the US for many years. I can only assume that she got a Green Card because Angie made her a partner and co-owner in the bar she owned in South Miami, which is the only way Angie got a Green Card, herself. The US is way past "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free", especially now that it's about to become TrumpLand INC and especially in Florida where the felon Rick Scott holds sway.

The US wants to give Green Cards to doctors, physicists, scientists, mathematicians, IT experts and entrepreneurs ... or anyone who buys a US business and employs US citizens. As a business owner, Sharon got a Green Card, which Michelle would also have.

Green Card holders cannot stay out of the US for longer than six months, or you lose your residency status. John Yorke and Louise Berridge never let a little thing like the law, however, bother them, because not only was Mark Fowler hoping to emigrate to the US (he couldn't then, being HIV positive), but Sharon came and went and spent more than six months here all the time during her last stint.

On the other hand, was she thinking she could return based on her anchor baby? That's right. Dennis Rickman Jr is a US citizen, having been born there. Of course, he's entitled to a British passport, because his parents were British, but by virtue of the good old 14th Amendment to our Constitution (which is probably about to be shredded sometime in the ensuing year now that we're all virtually Russian citizens), Dennis is American by birth, and as such, he can get his old ma residence status, especially as he's a minor.

But I don't think Sharon's clever enough to think of that - or rather, I don't think Carey Andrews is clever enough to think of that.

Secondly, Sharon's claim about having skills and getting a job. As what? She can pull a pint, but, even with an anchor baby, she's got to have someone guarantee her employment, and whoever employs her has got to prove to Immigration and Naturalization (the US version of UK Border Control) that there isn't a US citizen in the area or, indeed, in the land who is capable of having any of Sharon's "skills." And we all know that there are umpteen college students and then some who are more than capable of serving drinks in a bar.

The last time I looked, Sharon wasn't a neurophysicist, so that remark went out he window too.

As for her third remark, Denny wouldn't be starting high school. At best, he'd be entering middle school, but that's debatable. School districts discriminate between middle school and high school. Some districts equate middle school from years 7 to 9 (12 to 14 years old), others from years 6 to 8 (11 to 13 years old). Denny wouldn't start high school until he was at least 14 years old.

Besides, what happened to this super-dooper British school to which Michelle sent her twatty totty son? Surely, Sharon would want to send Denny there?

I'm saying that, for all the years Sharon spent there - and she never ever spent anytime with Michelle, apart from visits - she would have known how the school administrations were set up, at least from Michelle.

Other risible moments:-

4. Michelle's grammar.

5. Michelle gave private English tuition.

6. The aftermaths of Michelle's crime.

Throughout all of this, Michelle's grammar was atrocious. I was raised rurally, and there are members of my family whose grammar leaves much to be desired; but in the US, good grammar is a sign of good education, and it's something by which you are judged, especially if you are an educational professional.

I totally get it that people of various regions the world over often have a dialectical version of their own language and speak that within the confines of their demographic; but this isn't even Cockney dialect or East End parlance, it's just fucking bad grammar.

To hear her say that she gave private tuition in English is a joke, considering the amout of times she used the word "ain't" in conversation tonight ot "me and him" - and I still remember her letter on the eve of Sharon's wedding to Phil ...

Me and Ian ain't coming on account of Ian's health.

Seriously, this is a high school English teacher? I'm beginning to think that this was the real reason Michelle was dismissed from her job, and not just the fact that she'd been banging a student.

As far as that little episode is concerned, know this: In Florida AOC is 18 - no ifs, ands or buts. Anyone above the age of 23 having sex with anyone between the ages of 15 and 17, and anyone above the age of 18 having sex with a 14 year-old, is guilty of statutory rape. 

And that's Michelle. 

This is a crime. A sexual crime of rape. Worse, she was in a position of trust with a duty of care (a schoolteacher) and she had sex with one of her students - an affair that lasted over a year and began when he was sixteen. Michelle said the school found out and sacked her on the spot, even citing that she'd broken the law. Bullshit! They'd have done more than sack her, they would have immediately phoned the police and had her arrested. Schools act in loco parentis, meaning that they are the virtual parent when a child is in their charge. Michelle stressed that the school found out, only when the boy's mother found out about their plans to elope.

Where were they going? To another state? AOCs vary from state to state, but most of the Southern states have an age limit of 18, but even if they travelled North where AOCs are 16, then the fact that she's transporting a minor over a state line for the purposes of having sex makes it a Federal offence, and that is even worse.

This is a crime which is non-negotiable, and if the school simply sacked Michelle and left it at that, the parents could have sued not only Michelle, but the State of Florida and have taken away the livelihood and the employment prospects of everyone connected with that school district. Mud sticks.

That was totally unreal.

The two-header achieved nothing in the way of revealing the characters of Michelle and Sharon. The episode began where Tuesday's episode left off, with Sharon inadvertantly finding out that Phil had impregnated Denise. For me, the highlight of the episode was a subtle incident - when Sharon emerged from the toilet, with a bewildered Honey in pursuit, the first person to see her was Shirley. In a split second, faster than the speed of light, we see that Shirley suddenly realises that Sharon was in the loo at the same time as she and Denise. Instead of facing Sharon, from the look on Sharon's face, Shirley thought it best to duck back into the bowels of the Vic. For a moment, I thought she would smack the shit out of Denise at that moment. (She really should have); but she restrained herself.

Sharon's first and righteous reaction is anger at Phil and his betrayal. She wants to leave him, and I was cheering her on at this point, even though the insipid Michelle was telling her again and again that she really loved Phil. (And where did the two of them get off having this showdown in the Beales' house? I totally get it that this was the old Fowler house, but Sharon and Michelle were liberally helping themselves to Ian's booze).

I loved Sharon's initial reaction to Michelle, after telling her that Phil had taken this one a step too far. Michelle said she'd stay with Phil and hear him out.

This is not my mother you're looking at.

Great line, and great that Angie is yet again being referred to as Sharon's mother.

This was a perfect opportunity for Sharon to break off from Phil and their toxic relationship, and she was right in knowing about Denise's son would gut Denny  - this harkens back to Phil's "blood Mitchell" remark when he was making his will, and it harkens back to that moment Denise's eyes took the shape of pound signs when she heard Ben confirm this. As soon as Phil learns about this child, any relationship he's cultivated with Dennis is forgotten.

But running away to America (an impossibility) wasn't the answer. She should stay and fight her ground, shame Denise for her stupidity and assume the moral high ground. And who is Michelle to encourage her to stay? Was it because Sharon was angling to come to America, and Michelle was reluctant to tell her that Sharon wouldn't have a place to stay because she, Michelle, didn't?

Real Michelle would have encouraged her to leave Phil, not to take any shit such as this, and she'd hold Sharon's corner in shaming Denise. But then the next moment, Sharon does her maths and comes up with the pithiest and weakest excuse to stay with Phil - that Phil slept with Denise in April, when he and Sharon were separated.

Oh, well, that's all right then. Well, no, it isn't. They were still legally married. Just because you're separated from your wife or husband doesn't automatically give you the right to sleep around. And that morning after the night before, Sharon showed up to take Phil to his hospital appointment, and found him drunk and Denise slinking out the door.

It's still cheating, and I'm disappointed that Sharon saw fit to excuse this and to stay with Phil, even more, to stay quiet about what she knows. For some reason, as she told Michelle, it keeps her in control. How? If Denise keeps the child, then can Sharon impart to her that she knows the truth, and hope that the most irrelevant character still stinking up Walford slopes off? That would make Sharon the bitch and Denise the victim, and Denise just loves playing the victim in this.

If Sharon's truth to power means we get rid of Bumfaced Denise and the atrocious Libby, I'm all for it. But I doubt that will happen at all.

Now onto Michelle's sordid little secret. When, exactly, did Michelle become so shallow? She also said that Tim was much older than she - how much older? As Sharon indicated, they were at an age where an older man was actually a geriatric. Den would be in his seventies. Does Michelle seriously think that his libido would be at an all-time high even then? Also, a remark was made by Sharon about Michelle's conduct twenty years ago, and Michelle inferred that this was about her affair with Den, remarking that Den didn't cheat on Sharon. I wonder if Sharon's twenty-year remark had to do with Michelle's betrayal, again, of Sharon by sleeping with Grant.

If Tim is, indeed, that much older than Michelle, then sexual libido does decrease in people after a certain age. And when people have been married a long time, love evolves from a great passion into a comfortable, trusting companionship. The fact that Tim wasn't cheating says a lot, although Michelle remarked that he was "cheating with his mind". What the hell was that? Did she catch him watching porn, having telephone sex, reading Playboy?

As someone remarked, Michelle was a user of men. Every subsequent relationship she had, after the one-off with Den, was measured by him. She carried a schoolgirl crush on this man, who used her and only kept her on hand for access to his natural child, a child he eventually refuted in favour of the child he considered his true daughter, Sharon. Den's significant other throughout the time he shared in Walford with Michelle at hand, was his mistress, Jan.

She cut a swathe through a bevy of men, and when she bored of them, she moved on - Lofty, Clyde Tavernier, the student Jack, the horny lecturer. She had a penchant for older men, and it's always said that this had an Oedipal ring about it. Michelle's father was a nice, albeit ineffectual man, and I actually took the remark Michelle made about Lofty as likening Lofty to Tim and not the boy with whom Michelle "fell in love."

In that respect, she was "typical Michelle" - dumping Tim, or rather, as she said, "giving up" and seeking solace elsewhere. This was a student, a minor in her charge, and somewhere along the way, a line was crossed. It doesn't matter who made the first move, she sought to continue the relationship, which developed into some fatal fantasy of such proportions that they were going to run off and start a life together, significantly at Christmas of this year, and the mother in question found the boy's suitcase, coincidentally, on what would have been the last day of term before the Christmas break-up.

I agree with Sharon ... this is menopausal behaviour, and I think that Michelle is probably in denial about the fact that she is, indeed, menopausal, with hormones all over the place and, thus, not thinking straight.

Well, she's blotted her copybook now, and in the age of globalisation, any job in education she'd seek in Walford, the employer by means of e-mail could get the low-down on her last job and why she was dismissed.

I resent the fact that we are meant to feel sorry for this character, who's suddenly gone from a strong, often obnoxious and unlikable, character - very much like Stacey in having a high moral calibre for everyone else but herself, to a weak, whining, selfish, pathetic woman who, unwittingly, turned herself into a sexual predator and who has, quite possibly, ruined a young man, psychologically, for life.

She did make a comment, which I found offensive, in justifying her actions. She stated that if she'd been a man, half the blokes in the pub would have been shaking her hand and patting her on the back for scoring with a 17 year-old girl. Er, sorry, but no, they wouldn't. Lucy Beale was an adult when she and the single Max Branning slept together, and he was regarded as a lech. Mick Carter can't abide the sight of Jay Brown, who didn't sleep with an underaged girl, but texted her. Jay is 21, and he's still treated like a pariah. 

Any father of a daughter, who hears of a middle-aged male English teacher having sex with one of his 17 year-old students doesn't view him as a hero, but as a perv and a lech. Carey Andrews dropped a clanger there.

And Sharon, mother of a young son, inviting Michelle to stay with her and treating the whole episode as a joke, was wrong, wrong, wrong as well.

EastEnders epic fail on this one.

Much Ado about Something at the End - Review:- Tuesday 10.01.2017

Let's cut to the chase, because this episode made me angry, and it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Denise is nothing more than a self-serving bitch, with no thought at all about anyone but her ... and whatever inappropriate man she's happened to cross.

This was a strange episode, almost surreal, a lot of nothing about nothing - Mick's moobs and his latest bromace, this time with Vincent. It's also bothering me just how much female objectification is being illustrated now in the show. With the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief about to assume power in the Western World, we get to see EastEnders draw a line under the overt demarcation of women as objects, as well as watching women determine their own destiny in a way that's only insulting to their own gender.

We'll never get gender equality in this world if we look to EastEnders, and the people who produce it, to lead the way by example.

We had to listen to Mick going on and on about how his moobs were "bigger than the old lady's" and how Vincent spent his fortieth celebrations ending up in Surrey in the home of a girl who's "rack" would put Mick's moobs to shame.

Yes, I know men speak this way; and, yes, I know Sean O'Connor is striving for realism (and succeeding sometimes, whilst failing at others), but Mick and Vincent both have daughters. Would they like some man assessing Nancy or, eventually, Pearl, when she's older, in such a manner?

We even got a hefty dose of misogyny in the kitchen scene when Ben condescendingly confronted Abi, who was overwhelmed by Johnny's stupid entitlement at making the kitchen an "event" to be savoured by his uni mates. Abi handed him his arse, but at the same time, she was wittering on and on about having to work when she could be at a vets' practice do trying to entice a partner who has a girlfriend she doesn't deem good enough for him. 

And all the while the insipid Rebecca sat making cow's eyes at Shakil and his misogynistic little scrote, Keegan, who's interested in scoring with the "frigid" Louise.

What a mess, and what a message this show is sending out ... EastEnders in the age of Trump. What next? Nigel Farage doing a cameo at the bar of the Vic? And who the hell runs The Albert, whilst Vincent is drinking in the Vic?

Millennial Michelle's Moping About. Sean O'Connor has made three major mistakes since taking over EastEnders:-

• Killing off Roxy Mitchell
• Attempting to resurrect a character like Denise by linking her to an A-Grade Walford family
• Re-casting Michelle Fowler

I'll rant about the second point below, but the third point was simply, suffice it to say, not only daft, but unforgivable.

I've read countless comments in various fora by viewers who admit that, since they were either too young or not yet born when Susan Tully played Michelle, the re-cast doesn't make any sort of difference to them. Why should it? For them, they'll always accept Jenna Russell as Michelle.

But EastEnders didn't begin in earnest in 2000 when John Yorke took over. It was fifteen years old by then, and the way the show is being written (or rather, rewritten) today seems to imply that everything that went before 2000 and Yorke's tenure didn't count for anything. Hence, we have the Sharon, who's a cross between a doormat and a tragic heroine, the love of whose life was Dennis Rickman. Grant Mitchell never happened, and she actually loved Phil Mitchell, who - since 2000 - has been a continuously more depraved thug, not Grant.

This Michelle still isn't working, but I doubt O'Connor will do anything about that. The people who dislike her are the demographic which doesn't matter, and, besides, the actress is a favourite of the EP, so the opinions of the legions of licence-fee payers who pay his inflated wage don't really matter. But she isn't Michelle. In a million years, no one would chnage this much having lived in a different culture. I've been in the UK for 36 years, and I'm still recognisable, both as an American and as myself, whenever I return.

Michelle says she's leaving on a jet plane, don't know when she'll be back again, the next day and has the ticket all booked and paid for. In fact, as she states, Tim, her husband who has no last name (which means she and her son have to keep the name Fowler) and her effete Surrey-sounding twat of a son will meet her at Pensacola airport.

Wow, she's going to have a looooooong flight. Roughly, a total trip time of about 14 hours. There are no direct flights from London to Pensacola, so Michelle will have to mosey about Atlanta airport for awhile before taking a domestic flight to Pensacola. (Pensacola, incidentally, is a big naval base in the States.)

But we first see her coming out of the local pawn shop, with cash in hand. There's a big farewell do being got together for her at the Vic, courtesy of Sharon and Stacey and with a little help from the Beales.

This was a really weird piece,because half the people there didn't know Michelle at all - Honey and Billy certainly weren't around, and she hasn't said two words to Ian since she's returned. In face, she and Kathy were close as relatives and friends, but she hasn't even acknowledged her.

All in all, this episode, indirectly, was about Sharon, because ultimately, Sharon got the duff-duff, for a heartbreaking reason. 

The vignette centred around the banter about the table, Sharon feeling guilty about making a joke at Denise's shower the other evening, Shirley simmering with suspicion about Buster having fathered Denise's child, and lots of chatter about Denise and childbirth and speculation about the child being healthy- resulting in a lot of faux pas being made - Jane inserting her foot into her mouth about Down's Syndrome in Honey's presence and Honey remarking pointedly about Sharon's biological clock running down, when someone referred to Denise as a "geriatric mother" (it's medical terminology).

As much as we learned about Michelle in all of this is that she's got a big house - well, bigger than the houses in Walford - and a cleaner and a gardener (both of which, I might add, probably are illegal latinos who are paid less than the minimum wage). That's the way things are in Florida, as much as Michelle dispelled the myth that all Americans have guns and drive trucks. (No, they have guns and drive SUVs.)

The cleaner bit I can buy. Mexican labour is cheap, but the gardener takes the mick. Michelle is a high school teacher, and it's implied that she teaches in a state county school. Her husband is a lecturer, ostensibly at one of the three universities/colleges in Pensacola (none of which are top-flight). With this in mind, and considering that even though state school teachers in the US make more than their British counterparts, they are still woefully paid in terms of the relative standard of living, and especially badly paid in Florida, where the governor, Rick Scott, is a Republican and a convicted white collar criminal who steals from the poor regularly and gives to the rich. I don't suppose her husband would earn much more than she, so how they can afford gardeners or how they can laughably send their son to a non-existent British school (Believe me, ain't NO British schools in Pensacola or any other place in the US - there might be some Spanish-speaking schools nearby, however) is beyond my ken.

Michelle is adamant that she's leaving the next day, but what I think niggles me the most about this character is her voice and the dialogue they give her ...

We're survivors, Sharon ...

Really? Really? Do people even talk like that? The entire vignette, instead of focusing on Michelle, and Sharon begging her to stay, instead focused on everyone's concern for Denise (see below) and Shirley confiding in Sharon that she thought Buster fathered Denise's baby - because as Shirley and everyone sussed at that table, it had to be someone they knew.

I doubt Michelle is leaving. This was a calculated lie, either for her to insinuate herself into staying at Sharon's or to slope off to a B and B someplace. Stacey could barely contain her glee at the thought of her leaving ... and neither would I.

The Most Ungraeful Bitch on the Show. I don't know why anyone wastes time worrying and simpering and mollycoddling Denise. She is one of the most ungrateful and rude characters on the show. She honestly never shows gratitude to anyone on that show, even her sister, and she's always looking down her nose at everyone and their motives. No wonder that both her daughters were similarly condescending.

Of course the toilet scene was the apogée of this episode, with Sean O'Connor's own brand of twist at the end. Sharon in crouching in the next cubicle, hearing Denise confess to Shirley that Phil was the father of her child.

This scene was disturbing and angering, because Denise's sole concern about this pregnancy was Phil finding out. Neither she nor Shirley ever mentioned Sharon, or the fact that Phil is a married man. Yet Denise managed to sit at the table next to Sharon for the better part of the evening, as shameless as the sin, itself.

Shirley's tearful reaction was the most baffling, following Denise's remark that she knew that Shirley "had history" with Phil. So, let me get this straight ... that bum-faced bitch is concerned about hurting Shirley's feelings in all of this, but the thought of what this might do to Sharon, should the truth out, never crossed her mind?

Why was Shirley silently crying at the news? Because she was still obsessed with Phil? Because she thought it tragic and sad that Phil wouldn't get to know "his boy"? A few weeks ago she was giving Sharon respect and telling her how lucky Phil was to have her, and now this reaction? Or was she worried about how this would affect Sharon when - I say when - she found out?

I hope, now that Sharon knows, that she doesn't go into doormat mode. I think she should, at the earliest opportunity after the birth, smack the living shit out of Denise, and I would hope Louise is on hand to pack a punch upside Libby's condescending gob.

Roxy should be alive, romping the beds with Max and bantering with Donna, and Denise and po-faced Libby should have been sent packing.

The Situation at the Pub. I guess the next big neal is Mick's 40th, considering that Vincent was employed by Whitney - her face clearly glowing with love for Mick - to find out what he wanted for the big 4-0.

In between laments about his moobs being bigger than Linda's and Vincent's waking up on his fortieth birthday with a girl who had a "nice rack", I gather that things aren't going so well at the pub, with Abi and Johnny left in charge of the kitchen.

What was that scene all about? Johnny is supposed to be clever, but he's pathetically stupid. He's miffed that he's not spending time with his friends at uni - which was a surprise because old Johnny had no uni friends; he holed up on the sofa and was waited on hand and foot by Linda. Then there was Abi, whining on and on about a person at the vets' practice who held her interest - except he had a girlfriend. There was some sort of party, to which she hadn't been invited (she reckoned because they knew she had to work another job, otherwise, they would have really, really invited her), to which the bloke's girlfriend wasn't attending. 

I can't figure out why Johnny invited his uni mates to an "event" in the kitchen when he knew that he and Abi were in charge of the cuisine on a night when the Vic was beginning a series of supper evenings to earn money. And what was the purpose of that wierd scene between Ben and Johnny, as if Ben were trying to come onto Johnny? Didn't he try that once and get rebuffed?

Tantamount to all fo this was Ben's condescending attitude toward Abi, and I was glad she handed him his arse for pretending not to be gay, before storming off to her part and leaving Johnny to fend for himself.

Needless to say, the dinner was a failure, and I think this might be leading to Mick eventually losing his licence at the pub, and perhaps Sharon and Shirley taking it over. 

And what was that all about, Dennis referring to Sharon as a "cow"?

Unusual episode, and quite disturbing.