Yesterday's EastEnders

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.

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