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When Eastenders started it was written by real Eastenders who based the characters on people they knew. The early years of Eastenders were populated by such memorable figures as Dirty Den and his long-suffering wife Angie, the Beale/Fowler family ruled over by the terrifying Lou Beale, the geeky but lovable Lofty, the decent Dr Legg and the occasional flash-harry like Simon Wickes.
What a polar opposite from the melodramatic mess the show is now. Four times of week (plus the omnibus and the occasional spin-off episode) and written by middle class right-on writers who clearly have no idea about writing and even less idea about the working classes. This show is nothing but non-stop misery from one end of the week to the other. There's adultery, rape, incest, child-abuse, abduction, domestic violence, bullying, murder, suffering, all treated as though it were part of everyday life. If life were really like this, the rivers would all be bursting their banks with the bodies of suicide victims.
To be honest the rot started when Eastenders went three times a week. Extra episodes don't improve TV shows, they simply put more pressure on them. I can't believe it's a co-incidence that this show became noticeably more grim in tone in 1994 when the episode-count increased. Misery and tragedy are far easier to write than humour or intelligent thought-provoking drama. This show's ideas about the East End are in cloud city. Nobody in Albert Square has a washing machine, property and businesses can change hands as easily as a Lego house on ebay, characters can change their personality at the drop of a hat, everyone is a criminal, everyone's at it with someone else's wife or husband. The show is now a political platform, there to embrace homosexuality (every gay character has been ridiculously good-looking), as well as multi-culturalism (despite the fact a realistic show about the modern East End would have far more ethnic characters), and there to preech anti-marriage, anti-family and various other propaganda. Albert Square seems to exist in some parallel universe where the credit crunch, the various Middle East wars and open-door immigration never took place. The story lines are recycled rubbish (the "who shot character X" plot is trotted out predictably every so often), there are no longer any sympathetic characters, and to be honest I think the show is now used as a way of keeping public morale low. Incredibly it is always nominated for, and often wins, awards. But then again, the general public don't decide what TV shows are nominated. The likes of Bafta are nothing but executives and showbiz celebrities patting one another on the back. The fact that a tedious, depressing, badly-written lowbrow mess like Eastenders is the BBC's "flagship" show I think says a lot about the state of a once-proud channel.
score 1/10
StormSworder 22 March 2005
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1044769/ |
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3-1-2021 11:22:06