Yesterday's EastEnders

I know a couple of people who've lost babies who have found it impossible to watch this storyline, especially at New Year when people tend to get a bit weepy over lost family. It's such an unsympathetic angle to take as well, making the grieving mother a mad baby stealer.

Right, let's get it over with: yadda yadda what's on your i-pod: Adam Faith, "Someone elses baby"

...

^^^

For years, the soaps cover themselves by claiming their tales are reflective of issues concerning real-life (I take it they had the usual "If you have been affected by issues raised.." phoneline/disclaimer)

But this is no better than Daily Star muckraking, purely for the benefit of people that things like this would never affect, just so they can go "ooh, look at him/her, always thought they was a wrong-un"

I don't really get why this is so awful (wrt tabloid hysteria), soaps cover murder, rape, domestic violence etc etc etc all the time and these are also things that families are affected by and no-one bats an eyelid.

Mind you I haven't watched Eastenders in years so maybe I'm missing something.

Eastenders is generally better at covering things like domestic violence/rape/child abuse sensitively though. This just seems like piling misery on misery for the sake of it. Specifically immediately turning victim into villain. Murders are so engrained in fiction that no one would think of not including a murder storyline because it would be insensitive - murder with real-life parallels a different thing obviously.

Also it's just fucking bleak and not even good soap drama. The funeral episode should be fun, I might give it a miss and do something cheerier like re-reading Jude The Obscure.

Colonel Poo, because it's painting the grieving mother as a completely deranged psycho, ignoring the fact that Kat would surely recognise her own son and that the dead baby wasn't him, bypassing any sensitive way of dealing with the issue to make what someone somewhere thinks is a better story. It's factually inaccurate and handled really badly, I don't think there would be the level of complaints if it was simply either Kat and Alfie or Ronnie and Jack grieving for the death of their own actual son.

Eastenders have done cot death and miscarriage before, and handled them effectively and sensitively in the past. But this time round, it's just whizzbang ratings-grabbing mentalism.

xpost

Newborn babies all look the same to me but then I'm not the parent of one. Also the fact that one baby had a club foot and the other one didn't and the doctor's examining the dead baby didn't wonder why it had suddenly developed one that no one had previously noticed is just a really stupid plot hole.

purely for the benefit of people that things like this would never affect

idgi - pretty sure people with kids also watch Eastenders

Well, from someone who's responsible for two babies, I'd have recognised both within five mins of them being born.

xpost yes, and is it for their "benefit" ?

OK, I'm only vaguely aware of this because of OUTRAGE headlines and just thought people were pissed off because a soap was covering cot death.

I'm assuming a bit (never watch it)..

The main outrage/reaction is due to the victim/villain is not the classic Nick Cotton "born bad" nasty in all he/she does, type.

Because 'we' have been given to be sympathetic to her past situation(s), and allowed to identify with her, when she does something 'mental'/'evil', it disgusts in larger measure.

I think the main outrage is that it paints grieving mothers of SIDS babies as crazy psycho baby snatchers.

Was reading an article at lunchtime where infant death campaigners are a bit miffed at the way in which a grieving mother is being portrayed as something akin to the childcatcher

xpost

I agree with the people who have watched it and know what they're talking about.

But, as Grace Dent points out, Ronnie Mitchell-Branning is hardly your standard grieving mother. She has form in the area of doing weird baby-related nutso things (didn't she essentially offer to buy Sam Mitchell's baby off her (standard soap stuff, I know), she has reason to be unreasonable around babies, what with her dead daughter (who died twice as far as she was concerned, and was the child of incest), her miscarriage, and so on. S

All that aside, though, I totally agree with Matt DC. There's just no satisfying conclusion to this story. Nobody in the audience is waiting with bated breath to see Ronnie get her comeuppance the way they were waiting for Trevor to get his, or Tracey Barlow to get hers, or whatever. There is nothing but more misery to be wrung out of this storyline. It's just bleak and miserable and it teaches nobody anything about anything.

Stray S there. Nice.

You know, I typed out Ronnie's backstory to illustrate a point earlier, then deleted it because it made me sad that I watch such a ludicrous soap.

You forgot that her niece is her step-daughter, for extra odd kid-related stuff.

I think there's another reason people are annoyed at this that the BBC haven't really acknowledged yet, most mothers don't develop problems after going through things like this but some do and those problems are nothing like this. The writers seem under the impression that people sometimes just go crazy and that general craziness can pretty much explain any action at all, there doesn't seem to have been any research into how grief or child abuse actually affects people mentally. The official responses from the BBC so far have been along the lines of "oh but you don't realise, she's really crazy, and she has been through a lot you know." It's missing the point that people who go through "a lot" and develop problems as a result still don't go around stealing babies.

Yes, pretty daft to talk about soaps at the moment with so much rubbish going on in the world right now, but... (I couldn't find an Emmerdale thread so forgive me for sticking this here) - Jackson and Aaron's story at the moment is brilliant. Fantastic acting from those two guys, I was almost in tears last night.

How much do we reckon Whitney Dean is worth?

too right chris. guy who plays aaron is the best actor on telly, hands down. a lot of emmerdale is o_O or boring but when it's good it's stupendous.

yeah amos & mr wilks were awesome. Miss it when it was actually good. Post plane crash (of course it had nothing to do with lockerbie yeah right) is bollocks bar when nelly dingle was in it.

I never forgave them for killing off Archie

heh
http://www.emmerdale.org/emmerdale/profiles/archie.htm

his body was never found. Bring him back!

let go

I'm quite sad that there will be more scenes of Ronnie walking around in a catatonic state struggling to say anything, it was getting quite funny.

Otherwise, this show hasn't been very good at all lately. Max might be able to wear a suit well but I really doubt Tanya would even consider swapping Greg for him.

I think my facial recognition software is playing up - I keep having trouble telling Tanya and Jane apart.

EE's been pretty bad for the last few weeks. Hopefully, the scriptwriters can draw a veil over this whole sorry baby swap/Ronnie plot. I'd like to see Roxy and Christian out-clubbing again (not in the R&R, or whatever it's called these days). I'd like to see a new older femme fatale to replace Glenda.

Aaron/Jackson/Hazel in Emmerdale last night were incredible. Jackson skydiving to Doves 'Words' the other night was gorgeous too. This storyline's been so good.

I can't believe the BBC haven't registered www.butchersjoints.com

Does anyone here watch Eastenders? I ask because my mum, who watches every soap imaginable, does not watch 'stenders and gets annoyed that it regularly wins every Soap of the Year award going, she says, "It must all Londoners that vote, because nobody here watches it." Are there regional breakdowns of viewing figures? Is everyone all Corried-up North of Watford?

most people who watch soaps seem to watch all soaps, in my experience. i used to watch corrie then i moved to emmerdale and now i don't watch any of them but i've never been able to stick eastenders. it's depressing when it's depressing and even more depressing when it attempts to be amusing.

I'd say there were more Eastenders viewers in the North than Corrie or Emmerdale viewers in the South. My mother-in-law watches all of them.

I'm with my maw on this one. Can't see the attraction of Eastenders to anyone North of Watford (or South of Watford), but then I find the accents a total earache and watching a bunch of miserable mouthy Cockernees shouting at each other and murdering each other, or whatever it is they get up to, holds no great appeal for me

my sister's an enormous Soap fan and doesn't have much time for Eastenders, mainly cos like me and apparently Tom and Tom's mum she can't see the appeal of this relentlessly dour unpleasant grimy shitfest of evil gits being evil

and i'll watch a bit of Corrie now and then and seem to have seen an inordinate amount of Brookie but where's the pleasure in badly caricatured scum being scum 24/7?

I haven't watched EastEnders for years, caught a bit of it over Christmas, and wtf, Sharon's back and being proposed to by Phil and/or Jack (never found out which one) and Ronnie's going out with Alfie and Phil was being a bit weird about making Billy's daughter/grand-daughter christen her baby as a Mitchell.

I only watch Corrie now. I used to flit in and out of Emmerdale, used to watch EastEnders but totally gave it up one day and realised I didn't miss it at all.

I watched an old Red Dwarf the other night and it had a young Max Branning in it and that big comedian bloke who was 'ever's man... googles... Ricky Grover!

I saw Max Branning in the pub once. He's small.

lol that's the episode with the Canaries, right?

I missed out the fact that they're all fucking hideously ugly too

Yes, that's the chap xp

my scottish family watch the big three + river city, though i'd guess that eastenders would be bottom of the pile for them. i've seen a few episodes while i've been up home, and i feel that it's taken the comically relentless grimness to an even higher level since the last time i saw it. seems p unwatchable now, if it was ever watchable.

i do kinda like that almost everyone in the cast is ugly though, and not even just tv ugly. maybe just because it makes me feel better about myself.

I watched an old Red Dwarf the other night and it had a young Max Branning in it

Did he slide his feet noisily across the floor every time he took a step instead of picking them up like a PROPER PERSON?

i do kinda like that almost everyone in the cast is ugly though, and not even just tv ugly. maybe just because it makes me feel better about myself.

They've prettied them up a lot lately. I don't like that.

I've always watched Stenders, but it's more of an addiction now than anything else. Certainly I couldn't argue with anyone's criticism of it, except to say that the acting is often surprisingly high quality and I love the Masoods. Well, Mas and Tamwar, anyway. Tamwar reminds me of Richard Osman.

eh? the acting is absolutely terrible.

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.