Yesterday's EastEnders

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?

there's something about him that's very attractive despite his non-conventional good looks

A quick bit of research indicates that this is indeed a thing now.

Must admit I’m very surprised. He does nothing for me.

It's been a thing for a while - several ladies of the internet (not me) were quite excited when he did Strictly a few years ago. I saw him in a pub once. He's tiny.

i actually find him hideous sometimes and all right at other times.

Whether you find him attractive or not, it's pretty obvious that in the world of EastEnders he is regarded as attractive. Perhaps being unable to lift up your feet properly when you walk is a mark of virility in the mysterious netherland of Walford.

lol i hadn't noticed that. will keep my eyes peeled.

I never noticed it until trishyb pointed it out to me and now it's definitely a thing I notice about him.

It's like he's scuffing out some kind of code!
Although I don't know if new-style hoodie lurker Max wears the same hard-soled shoes.

They've been showing him with his shirt off a lot lately, presumably to add at least a shred of credibility to the world's least convincing screen lothario.

I know, its been great!

https://metrouk2.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/jake-wood-blendy.gif

giving us baldies hope yet !

( saw last 5 mins of the xmas day episode, and realised why i stopped watching after bh died ... )

this was, perhaps, the stupidest thing i've ever watched.

tell me about it, and it went on so long. couldn't tell if they were going for comedy or misery half the time.

Can’t believe this is the new universities regulator. pic.twitter.com/0VugT1UbsM

— Dion Georgiou (@DrDionGeorgiou) January 1, 2018

:D

I particularly enjoyed how they wrapped up the Jay's Dad storyline with about thirty seconds of dialogue, which happened while Jay was spending New Year's Day chilling by an iron railing

Well, it's not like he can sit on the tyre swings like every other adult in the square.

They had a change of showrunner not so long ago which resulted in a load of stories being very rapidly tied up which makes sense because most of them were terrible, especially the "oh yeah that guy wasn't your dad at all" one.

Yesterday's EastEnders was completely insane - jumped ahead two days about twenty minutes in, Masood's aunt cured Danny Dyer's bullet wound with a bowl of soup, and the bloke who shot him appears to have just moved in and become another terrible comedy character. And Masood's aunt seems to have mellowed quickly to the area she was so dead set against via the medium of Linda's terrible brand of down-to-earthishness and, er, getting involved in covering up a shooting.

The Abi storyline seems like it's just been inserted into the rest of it whenever they remember about it. No-one outside of Max or Jack seem to really care that Abi's baby has been delivered and that the two Branning sisters are still in hospital.

Yeah, it's absolute rubbish. Hour-long episodes are a disaster, too. They need to get back to some proper Eastendersing.

I also loved the fact that Sonya said "Uncle Max" about fifteen times in her one scene at Ian's house, as if the writers have just remembered that they are related. And these Irish gangsters; I don't know. Unless they're a roundabout way of dragging Janine back in, I'm not interested. But my suspicion is that they're going to drag Alfie or Kat or both in with them.

This stuff is cobblers but actually preferable to the hamfisted boardroom shenanigans of the last year or so.

Ha, I noticed the "uncle Max" thing as well. I think the Irish gangsters might be to drag Melanie back in - I think I read somewhere that Tamzin Outhwaite was coming back, so probably as another gangster. Because Stenders needs more gangsters.

I've only ever given up watching Eastenders once before. Something about Ian pretending to be gay or married to someone he wasn't married to, or some other farcical thing that he was doing to get well in with the local chamber of commerce. I'm very close to giving up again.

Cupla focal ar Eastenders! All is forgiven.

this programme, fuck sake. just wow.

Friday was like watching a show where rhe main cast were all on holiday.

the whole thing of Karen and Masood having a clean-off and her saying mr popaloo, mr dopapom, mr popadoodle.... i mean WHAT

Don't like the Taylors anyway, but Karen's racism idiocy (and Mr Papadopoulos letting it slide and still considering her for a job) is just awful.

At this stage we've all been watching soaps long enough to know the drill: mouthy, noisy family moves into the square/onto the street, shakes things up for a while, gets accused of all sorts, turns out to be solid gold, and eventually gets sucked into the same routine as everyone else. Battersbys, Slaters, Taylors, they're all the same.

The stuff with the launderette was ridiculous. Masood's ice cream van thing was ridiculous. Mel's hat not being blown off her head on the ferry was particularly ridiculous. Maybe they should go back to two half hours a week.

I'm sure it's less than a year since we had someone take a briefcase to a fake white collar job.

This Tiffany storyline is awful as well, like why wouldn't Whitney just pick up the phone to Bianca at any point rather than swallow every single thing that comes out of Tiffany's mouth?

Shakil's funeral episode was really powerful. I've never seen anything like that done on a soap.

Not having watched Eastenders regularly for a while, I caught a few bits of it recently. I'm kind of disappointed that they've retconned Tina so that her inability to take anything seriously, including motherhood, right up into her forties is the result of a trauma. I've never liked that character, but I always admired the writers for having someone who was just plain old useless.

it's really bad just now but apparently Kate Oates, the exec producer who just left Corrie and turned Emmerdale around a few years ago, is being considered for the job

it's truuuuuly awful. it's not just the writing and storylines though, it's the directing as well, like why are people talking like that? like they're in a comedy sketch from the 1970s?

Corrie has been dreadful under Kate Oates. Good luck Stenders :-(