Yesterday's EastEnders

I watch it in the same way I suspect lots of ILXers do, drifting in and out of it according to interest in the storylines. I've been feeling cheated since the underwhelming death of Derek Branning and haven't really bothered much since, assuming there's going to be loads of coverage of his boring children and not much else.

Masoods sans Syed and Christian >>>>>>> most of the other characters.

Whoever plays Carol Jackson, she is quite a good actress. Not quite so enthusiastic about the millionth comeback of Sharon even with her newfound love of painkiller abuse, or Max's Other Wife with the interesting lips.

Yeah, Carol is good, and from what I saw a couple of years ago, the lass that plays Whitney is pretty good too. I used to think Jessie Wallace was good too, she was excellent around the time of the terrible baby-swap storyline.

Baby swap story was a deal breaker/final straw for some people.

Her who played Stacey was good.

Their bad guys have always been awful.

Most of the women are really good, except Sharon. I don't understand why they keep bringing her back, I can't imagine she's even that popular as a character.

I loved Derek Branning as a bad guy. He was another really good actor they got in, then didn't really seem to know what to do with. Mostly I liked him because his character had proper motivations for doing things and didn't just go around trying to screw things up for everyone, the way Phil Mitchell does. Phil Mitchell is a dreadful character and one of the things that makes me wish I could find something else to do with myself in the early evenings. He just blocks everything, all the time, and his stupidity and lack of any apparent motivation other than malice make him boring. I can't figure out if Steve McFadden is a very bad actor, or if the character is just unplayable. Probably both.

The Derek Branning guy was a terrible actor and the character was flimsy as fuck as well. You're OTM on Phil Mitchell though.

trishy i'm wondering about yardstick of good acting. the women are camping it up, generally, seemingly to make up for the presiding misery of the thing. there's a lot of acting going on for sure, though. e.g the character whose name i don't know who had the scene last night where she found a jewellery box and presumed it was a ring and was about to be proposed to. i mean, i know she's supposed to be a comic character but rolling your eyes like a pantomime dame isn't really comic acting.

i hate that thing they do where they write the youngsters exactly the same as the middle aged gangster types. the teenaged guy with the red hair who works with phil mitchell is written as jaded and joyless as phil mitchell himself. it's not the actors fault though, what else could he do?

So who killed Lucy Beale?

YOU DID

Exhausting episode tonight. Putting the viewers through the ringer.

or wringer.

I laughed out loud at Jay and Roxy's scene last night where he was explaining how he ended up on the sex offenders' register, when Roxy said "Never mind, you'll find someone else," and he said, "yeah, because girls are queuing up to go out with a paedo."

Yeah, that was good. I've just come back to EastEnders again recently, mostly because Coronation Street is so terrible that I can barely look at it so I need to get some actual soapy misery and a plot that takes more that 20 minutes to develop and be resolved. I'm not sure a week of Roxy trying to poop drugs out of her bum was the place to start back again.

Aw, I liked Ben. I suppose in keeping with the new BBC aesthetic (to be seen across not just Stenders, but Strictly too, he'll be some stubbly hunk with chesticles like rocks, even if he is only twelve or something.

I'm basically having to treat Martin Fowler as a new character who just happens to be called Martin Fowler at this stage because of this.

http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a82/bobbysixer/IMG_1239_zps6qrd7g96.jpg

It was dependably grim. And Roxy wasn't even the most miserable person last night, as that honour went to Ian Beale.

Not sure myself of the success of the strategy of playing the Roxy, Billy and Jay scene for laughs.

Peggy's death with the ghost of Pat was awful, just too knowing and meta. Phil Mitchell has been really good in it for the past few weeks though.

As bad as Corrie is and as ridiculous it still bears some relationship (murder plots notwithstanding) to how people actually engage with each other is daily life, that people are generally pleasant to each other, funny at times, want to be thought well off and be Liked and act accordingly. Whenever you see eastenders it's a torrential screaming match or people scowling at each other like they genuinely hate their family and neighbours and doing that growly talking thing.

Eastenders is all time at the moment fuiud.

Corrie is nothing like that at the moment. No-one interacts unless they are required to do so to drive forward a ludicrous plot which will be forgotten about in a week. They change personalities at the drop of a hat, again just to suit the plot. Storylines are forgotten about as soon as they've been done (see Faye's baby, Fiz's daughter's cancer, Tyrone's debt problems, Sinead's modelling career, Maria's gay husband, and that's just in the last few months).

I dropped out of EastEnders for about a year there. Coming back to it, the characters remain well-defined and pretty much as I remember them, and things are still bubbling on which were going on years ago. The only on-going ones in Corrie have been this ludicrous Tracy v Carla thing and Calum's murder, both of which are set to be resolved within this week, leaving them with, I dunno, absolutely nothing. It's the one-year anniversary of Kal's death so they've had a wee bit between Leanne and Yazmeen acknowledging this, but not a squeak from Sophie considering it's also the one-year anniversary of Maddie's death too. There's no continuity at all, it just lurches from one short-lived plot to another. Relationships are completely forgotten (see, for example, Carla & Michelle having nothing to do with Maria and her son, despite them having a lot of history - Carla's now on her third partner who has also been in a relationship with Maria, not to mention Liam being Michelle's nephew). Eastenders seems to exist as an actual community and acknowledges its history. Coronation Street doesn't. Which is a shame, because that used to be one of its major strengths.

I think the history thing is something that EE has been explicitly trying to do for some time after having not really bothered for years (funnily enough the time when it was really boring and I didn't bother with it).

Also I never thought I'd actually enjoy Danny Dyer in anything but he is great in it.

Eastenders is all time at the moment fuiud.

This is generally true, but man, Friday night's soul-searching convo between Roxy and hunky small-faced builder guy was some of the worst dialogue I've ever seen in anything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhsz6EAmCsU

It is pretty good at the moment - but the Andy aka 'hunky small faced builder guy" scenes are a bit too ridiculous.

to be fair Andy doesn't need to act or speak anything of sense, he just needs to keep walking out the shower wearing only a towel

Impressive very special episode last night: four dads and their sons.

Or rather, three dads and Billy Mitchell. I was a bit confused by him saying to Jay, "you're right, you're nothing to do with me." I thought Billy was officially Jay's foster dad? Surely that's something?

Best line of the night was Mick's, though: "You think you can just cook the girl a chilli, ask her to have an abortion, and everything'll be sweet?"

It was a good episode.

It's always a bit risky when Eastenders decides to rely on acting ability rather than plot, but they managed it well.

Another classic 'Dad' issues episode tonight, with Martin Fowler acting the heavy-handed dad protecting Bex from Shakil's lusty intentions.

http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a82/bobbysixer/IMG_1497_zpsz7rxtq0g.jpg

and Phil struggling with Ben.

Well, New Year's Eastenders was quite something. I did wonder why Ronnie was wearing such an awful wedding dress. Little did I realise it was for DRAMATIC PURPOSES.

i saw the episode that ended with ronnie and roxy chatting on the pavement and thought it an exceedingly nice and warm moment by eastenders standards. good that we were only being set up for an exceedingly bleak fall

much as I love Ronnie Mitchell and I thought the actual episodes were lacking in drama because it had been in all the newspapers for about ten years preceding it actually happening, I thought it was very brave of them to kill off both characters and I'm glad they did because it has become very easy for the show to rely on big names eventually coming back rather than writing new, full-formed characters.

Lee's depression storyline has been a total disaster though. The character is completely unlikable, makes terrible decisions and could easily have avoided all his problems.

Yeah, it's not exactly the Deerhunter. I think they've taken what was a good arc for Lee: awkward ex-squaddie can't settle into civilian life because it just doesn't make any sense to him and he can't get a decent job and he's not easy to be around, and they've handled it poorly. Why would he take a job like the one he has? Why isn't he working security night shifts or working in the car park like that woman he met? He would easily get work like that, I'd have thought. I can sort of buy the wanting-a-catalogue-life-for-his-woman bit, because he wants to have the appearance of normality, but he's so completely awful at that job, I'm amazed he ever got past the interview.

"Lee's depression storyline has been a total disaster though. The character is completely unlikable, makes terrible decisions and could easily have avoided all his problems."

this isnt an unusual situation irl tbh &etc

yeah that description could basically be me at varying points of my life. Lee's never been likable though, it would have perhaps been more effective to do with a character that's easier to support like Jay or Johnny.

Denise better not be dead.

given that the bus seemed to be going at 5mph I would be amazed if anyone ends up with more than a nosebleed.

Denise not dead, but it's looking grim for Whitney (if she's under there), having a bus repeatedly dropped on her head by lots of well-meaning bystanders. That'll be fun and games for Lee's depression storyline development, eh?

Was also going to say "bloody hell, Lacey Turner's a right good wee actress" but she must be really well-practised at doing hysterical screaming over the years.

I thought that episode was actually surprisingly well done and extremely tense throughout.

I'm guessing that Whitney isn't even under there (her phone could be in the market for any number of reasons) but Lee dies trying to save her. Everyone else survives.

(Also Whitney is a more interesting and popular character with more history and better actor so killing her just to advance Lee's depression/departure storyline would be a weird move even for a soap).

I'm guessing the bridge is going to collapse as well. They're rebuilding the set so they might as well take the opportunity to trash some of it.

Yeah despite the actual crash being nonsense I thought the episode with the aftermath worked really well, even the "community lifts a double decker bus" part didn't seem as ridiculous as it must have looked on paper. All the references to terrorism didn't feel as clunky as these things normally do either. I'm glad Martin isn't dead, I don't need to see Max and Stacey again and again.

The bus thing actually happened in London a couple of years ago:

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/incredible-moment-crowd-of-bystanders-lift-bus-to-free-trapped-cyclist-in-walthamstow-10283901.html

Yeah, I think the Whitney's phone thing is a massive swerve (could her and Lee have the same ringtone?). But if it drives her into having an affair with Danny Dyer, I'll be well pissed off. Coronation Street are already going down the "deal with grief & a depressed partner by having an unlikely affair" route (and making a right mess of it), Stenders can fuck right off with doing the same. I think Lee dying/Lee suffering survivor's guilt on top of everything else would give Whitney and him a storyline in itself, not re-running Stacy & Max with new characters.

They are definitely going to put Whitney and Mick together. Definitely. They were already building up to it with the whole "oh, I'll sleep on the sofa, you wear L's pyjamas" business.

I thought this episode was great. Does it feel like the crew for Eastenders must be a lot bigger than it used to be? I wonder if the BBC is trying to avoid laying people off by just piling them all into Albert Square and hiding them there.

I hate the actress that plays Michelle.

Me too.

to be fair the character seems to have been ruined and she can only do so much with the role/lines she is given.

The girl who plays Bex has been really good throughout this fake Hollyoaks storyline.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWI7W5G_dwo

Hey, last year it was great when we killed off two sisters! Let's (maybe) do EXACTLY THE SAME THING THIS YEAR!

jesus, this programme. I started following it because i spend a lot of time at my mum's looking after her and she watches all the soaps. god, what a depressing show. it's quite incredible that this can be a primetime soap although on the rare occasion that they try to do something light and comic it's even worse. eastenders is really terrible at comedy.

the wilmot brown & family takeover of the square was quite a good belated acknowledgment of the changing face of the east end but it's landed the show in the same place it was before.

i think "how can anyone watch this?" when i'm actually watching it. not only that it's gotten to the point that i iplayer it when i've missed it and still wonder how anyone can watch it!

...even though i've actively chosen to!

I've actually been really enjoying it lately. I really fancy Max Branning and he has been at the centre of it so that has helped but I'm also loving Abi's pre-fall transformation into mini-Janine. I'm really hoping this upcoming heist storyline sees the men involved struggle to pull it off and a team of Sharon, Kim, Karen and Linda team up to save the day, because camp female icons are always more watchable than naff gangster storylines.

You've got to figure that if you were Martin and Stacey you'd find someone far away from Walford to spend Christmas with, wouldn't you? Although I suppose Martin's got to shift those sprouts.

I really fancy Max Branning

For real?