...Neighbours

I know what you’re thinking reader(s?) – Neighbours is gash. I can feeeeel you judging me, but in this instance you’re going to have to blame my mother (not to her face please, she’s small), for it was she who used to sit with me as a new-born baby, watching Neighbours - (that was when it was new to telly, so now you know how I old I am) – and this clearly caused some kind of brain infiltrating osmosis of Neighbours dependency to emerge.

Result? A niggling Neighbours habit, equal only to my dependencies on tea, chocolate, and the non-fizzy orange flavoured Lucozade. This Neighbours habit is a tricky thing, because unlike those lucky narc addicts, there is no Neighbours Anonymous for me to turn to, and part of me thinks people would actually be more willing to admit to actual heroin addiction than they would to a desire, want and NEED to watch a bunch of Australians prat about in an extremely limited number of locations in a pretendy Melbourne suburb.

In a lot of ways I hate Neighbours, but also I love it. Therein lies the rub. For a start, Neighbours is effing stupid, I know it, you know it, we all know it. Here are some things we all know:

We all know Karl didn’t even cheat on Susan with Sarah, but it still caused their marriage to break up. (They’re back together, natch)

We all know that the current Declan is NOT the original Declan. We know that for a while the part of Libby was played by a woman who was NOT Libby. And we know that the girl who now plays Summer is not the same hairy-faced child that left the street.

We all also know that no matter how nice Paul Robinson is being, he will revert to being a bastard when the storyline demands it. Paul has nearly not been a bastard a few times now, but despite losing a limb (and now mysteriously, a limp), having a brain tumour that made him a bastard (what is he a comic book villain? You’re not fooling anyone), and getting pushed off a roof by his own wife (now holding her hostage in their own marriage, duh!) he is still now and forever will be a horrible shit of a man. But, like Kelis, I won’t let you trick me twice (or thrice)… and when I say ‘you’ I mean the crack team of Neighbours writers.

Aaaand finally, we all know the houses on Ramsey Street are no where near big enough to accommodate the circa 14 people at a time that seem to be in residence… Teenager who’s parents would add nothing to the storyline with no where to live? Off to Karl and Susan’s with you! Extreeeemely tenuous long-forgotten 2^nd cousin twice removed of someone who was once in an episode 6 years ago for 14 minutes? Lynn Scully will offer you shelter. 

Oh…. And there is just one more elephant in the room that everyone knows, and NO ONE is talking about, something that is quite frankly more alarming and unbelievable than all of the above. Ironically it’s the only thing that’s actually real, and I am breaking the silence people:

Toadie has lost a SHITLOAD of weight.

Toadie once was the actual elephant in the room, and now (and seemingly overnight) the opposite is true. Toadie is now the opposite of an elephant in a room, and has become so thin, wan and withered that he looks like he might have a degenerative disease. And yet NO ONE, not his girlfriend, Sonia, not his pretendy ‘son’, Callum, none of his friends or… ahem… Neighbours have so much as mentioned it/batted an eyelid/mooted any concern about the degenerative disease thing.

I’m gonna guess (and hope, natch) that he doesn’t have a degenerative disease, and am going to assume that Toadie (supposedly he has a real life alter ego called Ryan Maloney, but whatevs) has actually worked really really hard to lose that weight – but do they mention it? Do they fuck! Too busy making up a storyline where Paul Robinson falls down a rabbit warren, has an imagined conversation with a talking human turd and comes out the other end a total bastard (probably).

All of the above and more is what makes me shout at the TV when Neighbours is on. I HATE how ridiculous it is, how some storylines are completely crow barred in (remember Poppy Rogers? Me neither…), how the writers insult my intelligence by parading an endless stream of nonsense in front of my face and asking me to buy into it, and most of all, I hate how I insist on sky plussing it every day, and watching it when I get home, as a priority, whilst eating my dinner. Fuck. 

...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. 

...Dancing on Ice

Sunday: I watched Dancing on Ice. Pip Schofield was waaaay over excited. Even Holly Willoughby vocalised her concern at his excitement. Either he’s a good actor (not sure about that, I saw him in Joseph), or he just LOVES the programme and being a part of it. Good on him.

I’ve been watching Pip Schofield on TV since Going Live, back when he either didn’t have grey hair yet, or was pretending he didn’t – I don’t know which, I haven’t asked him. You know who else probably watched him on Going Live? Holly Willoughby. They are NOT the same age, and yet the dynamic works. Here’s why: she dresses like an old laydeeeee, thus tricking our brains into thinking she’s as old as Pip (not that he’s old, but he is older than her, by quite some margin). What is it with women on telly dressing like they’re several decades older than they are? Another case in point: Natasha Kaplinsky. Her hair is inexplicable. Even women in their sixties are now evolved enough to no longer wear their hair like that (I know cos my mum is one and her hair is actually nice, yet age appropriate).  Natasha Kaplinksy doesn’t only look like a woman in her sixties, she looks like a woman in her sixties in the nineties. Epic fail.

Anyway, what’s amusing about Dancing on Ice is not people nearly falling over on ice… well actually that is very funny, that and the fact that Pip Schofield is clearly the bant master general, as evidenced by the following exchange with Emma ‘I have no credentials to judge ice skating’ Bunton,

Bunton: ‘I fell out of a lift once, and it is scary’ (What growing-a-baby spice meant was that she fell out of a lift during a dance)

Pip: ‘I remember when you fell out of that lift, it was at the Hyatt in Embankment’ – banter thy name is Pip, and thy hair is silver.

The other amusing thing is that the presenters are constantly joking about the hilarious costumes that the celebs wear whilst pratting about on the ice, and yet I would gladly wear Dave Vittey’s rainbow lycra monstrosity any day over Holly’s old lady dress (although you can, of course, still see her boobies – when can you not? You see those boobies and you know it’s her… unless it’s Katherine Jenkins) Pip’s suits are another unexplainable phenomenon. They are the exact same colour as his hair. Its remarkable. The silken silver look works on his head, but on his suits? Not so much.

Whilst I’m on the subject I must say that my favourite thing about Pip on this programme (and it really is hard to pick just one thing), is when he gets ready to announce the results, and as a means of ensuring the viewer that he’s not making them up, he taps his ear piece just before he announces the result, as if to say ‘this ear that I am tapping has an ear piece in it, and it is via this miracle of radio communication that I will be receiving the result, which I will then say aloud – so fear not humble viewer, there is no trickery afoot, and this result will be genuine’. The fact that he encapsulates that into one tap of his ear piece is, as far as I’m concerned, the reason why the man has been on television for a long time, and should continue to be, despite his inability to dress or get through a single link without cracking up/looking like he’s about to cream his pants with excitement. If anything those things only add to his charm. 

Viewer – I beseech you – if you’re flicking through the channels on Sunday night, and you happen upon Dancing on Ice, just pause a moment before continuing to roam through the digital wilderness. Dancing on Ice is wonderfully, woefully weird, and therefore, absolutely worth watching.