30 May-3 June

(It’s not quite a resumption of regular updates, but it’s a start!)

The past is a peculiar thing in EastEnders. Nine times out of ten, it’s ignored or forgotten about; glossed over by the characters as they go about their day-to-day lives, because if they allowed themselves to dwell on everything that had happened to them since setting foot in Albert Square, they would never bring themselves to leave their warm cocoon of a duvet in the morning and face the bleak reality of life in a soap opera.

More importantly, remembering the past would make social interaction in Soapland all but impossible. Family gatherings would be a nightmare beyond belief.

“Jack? How are you? I thought I’d invite all of Jim’s family round for lunch on Sunday, if you’re free? So that’ll be you, and your wife – how’s she doing, by the way, since kidnapping that baby? – and I suppose we ought to invite her sister, since she is the mother of one of your many children…which means we should probably invite her boyfriend too, even if he is the biological father of the baby you thought was yours… But don’t worry, it won’t be awkward! Because I’ll also invite your brother Max, the one who you beat to a pulp a couple of weeks ago, you remember, you nearly ran off to France with his wife…and Carol as well, of course, though it’s a shame none of her children are around these days, with Bianca in prison and Billie dead…wasn’t Billie responsible for you ending up with a bullet in the brain and totally paralysed (but not really), by the way? What’s that? You can’t make it? Oh, what a shame…”

Hiatus

I’ve just discovered a post explaining why I’m taking a break for a bit sitting in Drafts instead of Published posts. Oops. Sorry about that!

For various reasons too boring to go into ‘The Week in Walford’ is on hiatus at the moment. Normal updates will be resumed soon-ish.

25 April-6 May

Due to a holiday, a busy schedule since coming back, and sheer laziness on my part, there will be no proper ‘Week in Walford’ entries for the last two weeks.

I will, however, sum up my memories of the last fortnight as best as I can remember them through a haze of not really paying attention to several episodes in a hotel room when they aired and missing the omnibus both weeks.

Theme of the fortnight? People reverting to type.

The Masoods seem to be on some sort of mission to win the coveted Family that Lies the Most in Soapland award; and my god, that’s a category with some fierce competition. Zainab is lying to Masood about meeting with Syed and lying to Syed about the problems in her family. Masood is lying to Zainab about his gambling and relationship with Jane. Tamwar and Afia are lying to everyone about their marriage. Syed is doing his best to return to this family of liars by – that’s right – lying to Christian about meeting Zainab. Kamil is the only (current) member of the family not lying to everyone he knows, but that’s probably only because he hasn’t learnt to talk yet. And somewhere in Pakistan, no doubt Shabnam is failing to tell the truth every time she picks up the phone as well.

18-22 April

There’s something a little disturbing about reporters from the national press turning up in Albert Square.  I can just about cope with the reality of Walford bearing little resemblance to our reality as long as we accept that Walford is its own microscropic universe where once-in-a-lifetime tragedies happen every other week.  But when a BBC outside broadcast van turns up outside the Vic, a certain cognitive dissonance starts to creep in. Are we pretending that EastEnders takes place in the real world, then? In this strange plane of existence called Reality, it’s true that a recently bereaved mother swapping her dead baby for a live one would attract media attention. But in Reality, so would a pastor going insane, locking his wife in a cellar and killing a whole bunch of people, but I don’t remember seeing hide or hair of a reporter in Walford last July. In Reality, so would a high-profile murder case ending with the main suspect falling from a roof, but I don’t remember the Brannings being hounded by journalists back then.

And if we’re pretending that EastEnders takes place in Reality, would it not be slightly improbable that two women living on the same Square with astonishingly similar life stories would both give birth to baby boys on the same day, even if this meant one of them conceiving while the father was still in a coma? That both babies would be of a similar size, shape and general appearance, as well as wearing exactly the same baby gro, meaning that even those who spent time with each infant wouldn’t ask, ‘hang on a second, am I going mad or has he shrunk?’ The reporter who spoke to Whitney looked excited by the revelations he heard, but at no point did he looked shocked by the facts of the story or the insane amount of tragedy that can happen to one woman in two years.

One wonders what exactly goes through the mind of a journalist sent to cover a story in Albert Square.

11-15 April

My god, that was a lot of pink.

Now I loves me a good soap wedding, I does, and all the ingredients were there for a classic:

1. As per the rules of soap weddings, one half of the happy couple was in love with someone else and not really wanting to get married at all.  Nothing like an ex telling the bride in all her finery that she should be with him instead to cause nostalgic flashbacks to the several thousand times we’ve seen this before.  Always a treat.

2.  A contrived set of circumstances that may prevent the wedding from taking place at all; cue the ripping of Abi’s bridesmaid dress and Max’s poor navigation skills.