...Eastenders

Eastenders is a soap that I wasn’t allowed to watch until I was thirteen because in my mother’s words ‘they don’t speak correctly, and you might pick something up’ – like what? AIDS? I think she thought that if I watched it enough I would start dropping my ‘t’s, telling everyone to ‘get outta my pub!’ and drinking shots of vodka out of wine glasses. Anyway, I waited until thirteen as instructed, and managed to side step those potential landmines - I do NOT drop my ‘t’s, I don’t have a pub, and don’t order people out of it, and I drink vodka shots out of the appropriate receptacle (flashing shot glass – nifty!)

I digress… so what I love about Eastenders is the way they crowbar storylines in to accommodate cast members’ illnesses/absences/stints on Strictly Come Dancing. This week the cast member who needs a swift exit is Bianca, aka Patsy Palmer, who I should inform you (in case you are BLIND) is pregnant. Who knew? Well, everyone. They’ve essentially made no attempt to cover it up, and they may as well have put a disclaimer across the screen for every scene she’s in that says ‘Viewer, please suspend your disbelief, thaaaaaanks’.

Blindness would literally be your only excuse for not noticing, because the Eastenders team has made nothing more than a token attempt at covering the bump. Apart from Bianca’s newfound penchant for carrying plastic bags in the most unnatural way, right in front of her stomach (well, I’m convinced). If anything she’s just drawing attention to it. Whilst we’re on the subject of botched cover-ups, a note to the Eastenders wardrobe department: a waterfall cardigan doesn’t do it either. She is ENORMOUS. From the side (and the front, and every angle) she looks, umm…. PREGNANT?!

They would have done better to invent a storyline where Bianca develops a proclivity for stealing things and sticking them up her jumper. Its no less ridiculous a notion than her sudden and largely unprovoked attack on Connor where she bonked him over the head, left him for dead, ran away, came back, and turned herself into the police. I imagine she’ll be locked away for approximately the length of her maternity cover. Just a guess…

I think the Eastenders wardrobe department must really love waterfall cardigans actually, because Carol is never in a scene without one. Each is a more drab and colourless article than the last, that clings to her, looking like the Cuppa Soup Hug in a Mug’s waster brother that fell into a downward spiral of drug addiction, ended up with a heroin habit, and woke up one morning to find itself draped, cold and alone over Carol’s shoulders, only to find itself strewn aside when she jumped into bed with a man-child half her age who reminds her of her dead son, to the extent she actually referred to him as Billy the other day. IMAGINE if she’d done that in bed?! One word: ewwwww.

What with that cry-for-help demonstration of weird imagined incest, and the recent baby-swap gate, it seems Eastenders really has no boundaries when it comes to making viewers shout ‘NOOOOO’ at their televisions. That. Is why. I love it.