DRW50

From the May 31, 1988 Digest (Network Publishing Corporation).

It's going to be odd seeing Ian without any of his kids. I have no idea where they are taking Ian as a character. Confirmed with Sonia: http://www.digitalspy.com/soaps/s2/eastenders/news/a293725/sonia-to-make-one-off-enders-return.html Interview with Charlie Brooks and Neil McDermott: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/soaps/s2/eastenders/interviews/a293038/charlie-brooks-neil-mcdermott-janine-and-ryan-eastenders.html Some of the stuff where people stood around to be insulted by Glenda was stagey, but at least it was fun. Glenda is a real loose cannon and she's also an agitator -- they can do a lot with her if they get creative and stop using her as a mattress. She could be EE's Kim Tate.

I know when Barbara first started she had a cooking show or something. That was dropped wasn't it?

I wonder if they decided not to show the funeral because they knew the guy who plays Graeme wouldn't do a great job with the eulogy.

Sen Wyden has prostate cancer. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/134135-wyden-to-miss-votes-due-to-cancer-treatment-complicating-lame-duck-schedule

That is awful but I love it We are two of the only ones commenting and we haven't really watched recently. The King of Hearts thing was the first for me in a while. Clare Cooper was good and I loved the Myra scenes and the Jacqui/Carmel scene but be grateful you missed Rhys on top of Cheryl and her legs in the air. I'm surprised at how quickly they dumped the Sharpes, I mean they ripped a hole through weeks of filmed episodes just for this. This didn't happen with the Valentines. I wonder if the ratings are still so low that Marquess was told to do this. But generally most of his new characters have been duds, brought in way too fast, given no personality or a personality that changes depending on the day. I don't see much reason to keep a lot of the other new characters either, although Jasmine/Jason seems popular, and Brendan is also popular.

Amello, what did you think of King of Hearts? So do you think that the Sharpes have been written out for good, as some at DS have said?

That should be a huge change. I wonder what the new set will look like. Maybe we won't notice a difference. When Collinson wants a character gone, they're gone, huh? Ashley, a 15-year character, gets no funeral, just some cheapjack thing that was apparently thrown together by the characters in two days. Quite a goodbye

Did she have any scenes with Dot and Jim the last time? You're right - they tend to forget her ties to Dot and Jim. It's easy to forget now that Sonia was the only Jackson on the show for some time. As for Stacey, I think they wrecked her a few years ago, so I don't see the big change in her that some do. I think Lacey always manages to play Stacey fearlessly and isn't afraid to be subtle when she has to be or to be ugly when she has to be. I don't think I'll miss Stacey that much but the show is going to have a void in their younger female characters. I still wish they'd done Stax as a proper couple. I hope that the show won't end Janine/Pat again after Janine's crimes come out. I love that relationship when it's written properly, and these last few months are the first proper writing for them in about five years.

It would be nice to see Robbie, I miss him. I do like Sonia OK when she isn't around Phil or moaning, so that might be alright. I wonder if they might have Sonia or Robbie make a few more appearances, because apparently since Patsy Palmer had some problems near the end of her pregnancy (thankfully she and baby are fine) she had to leave work several weeks earlier than expected.

It looks like Claire's exit is going to be good. Or I hope so anyway.

Y&RWT, your favorite is on the way back for a visit. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/proginfo/tv/2011/wk3/fri.shtml#fri_eastenders

Thanks for expanding. Why did Marienhof fire so many cast members? Did they think the older actors were nothing compared to new or cheaper faces? Is Marienhof the show with the gay doctor? I can't remember. I thought I'd read that there weren't a lot of new soaps being made in Germany. I'm glad to hear otherwise. VL as a show confuses me. Christian and Olli are so popular, yet the show is scared to do anything with them. Even turning them both straight would probably get more interest than their stories over the last few years. Meanwhile you have this Rebecca who doesn't seem popular yet the show keeps pushing her at people, even having her become a lesbian overnight.

Watched the King of Hearts thing. I enjoyed the scenes with Myra and Kathleen. I don't like Kathleen but she's believable as a McQueen, one of the darker of the bunch (I'd love to see her with Nana). Myra had some great lines, the best being when she dragged Kathleen out of the police station ("she weighs more than me!") and then when Rhys said "ASAP" and she said, "are you calling me a sap?" Nicole Barber Lane makes the silliest stuff work. Was it wrong that by the end I was hoping Jacqui would get together with Danny Houston? Once you get past the accent which reminds me of the worst of Eastenders "gangster" stories, he seemed to respect Jacqui by the end, as he offered her the money with no strings attached. Meanwhile, Rhys called her a prostitute twice and immediately had unprotected sex with another woman. I don't see any chemistry between Jacqui and Rhys. The body language and the reactions aren't of people who are in love. When Rhys called her a slut and she left, hurt, he barely flinched. He should have been devastated at what he'd said. Andy Moss is a good actor but you wouldn't really know it from here. A lot of face-pulling passed off as acting. And Gilly -- shoehorning his rage issues into this story was a bit of a strange choice. Since they needed some pointless sex, I would rather have seen him with the woman who had the briefcase. From past episodes, Anthony Quinlan has the arse for a late night special. Does anyone else wonder if they only had that Cheryl/Rhys sex scene because someone had some Russ Meyer fetish about Cheryl's breasts? You can't have that head-in-cleavage shot in the regular timeslot. Why did Cheryl not remember she set Rhys and Jacqui up in the first place? I did not like that bad club music overpowering scenes in the first half. The best part for me was Clare Cooper's performance, especially her scene with Carmel, which I LOVED, even with Carmel's Rickie Lee Jones beret. It was beautiful, especially when Carmel told Jacqui she would be giving her last bit of dignity away, and Jacqui asked what Carmel would have done to save Calvin. Great stuff. It reminded me of when the McQueens first started on the show, and how special they were. They still work well together, especially when Bart isn't around.

That's a shame. Will you miss the show? Are soaps on the way out in Germany?

I'm glad I don't go to the NBC boards I think some of them make good points and aren't afraid to criticize down spots, and one or two have even defended Bryan Kirkwood in the weird witch hunt against him there, but I think that the show just gets way too much leeway for being such a mess. I guess it depends on how much you care about Brendan. If you love him then apparently you love the show. What I really don't get is how do you bring on 3 new families and then know very little about what to do with most of them storywise. Not to mention the mess of the new students -- they wrote out Charlotte and Dave just for these ciphers who are barely around? It's all style over substance, but there isn't a whole lot of style. At least they are giving Jacqui more to do, which is nice, but I could think of better for her. I guess I should be grateful she's not stuck in the baby hell she was for most of 2007-2009.

Oh I will probably watch the episode -- I have been trying to get back into the show. It's just not all that easy, because I find the whole thing so sleazy and hollow. I hear such huge hype for the show from places like DS but I'm not connecting to it. I'm still so annoyed about Steph, and about the awful new characters. And the show seems to be made up as it goes along.

Geez the shots of his chest and stomach are very hot.

I don't know how to do any of that. I haven't even seen it yet. I hope it's worth it, as the show has toned down the nudity in recent years. I would care about Carl Costello if he got naked. It reminds me of when Andy Moss was asked about an embarrassing moment and he mentioned the first late night special he was in, where he and Gilly were in their underwear, with closeups of their crotches. I wonder what he'd say about this one...

Reading about the Hollyoaks King of Hearts thing I'm not sure if I'll watch. On the one hand, On the bad side,

The House is voting on the standalone repeal at the moment. The Senate is where the problem will be, and where this would take a lot of work to actually pass. SLDN is tweeting on the vote. I have to laugh at the far right Congressman who says that nations who have openly gay soldiers are crumbling -- those are most of our allies. http://twitter.com/FreedomToServe And here's the Marine commander basically saying that, I don't know, soldiers will lose their legs if they serve with openly gay soldiers? http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j2aGMFXuk0DUVjYib3Fs7g9IMCQA?docId=CNG.9d86bd1b9e1dcce9c1b3a0448d6af28b.a21

Paul Marquess teasers. http://www.e4.com/blog/hollyoaks/post/gg7ipagdwlnbo7ajzmx62a/view.e4

I've wanted to see this ever since I read about it - I remember the photo of Stanley and Lesley in his penthouse of whatever. I always thought it was odd that Lesley was taken from being in the middle of Bauer stories to suddenly marrying this wealthy man who was so evil. And then his relationships with his kids, those must have been interesting (especially the one with Holly). I also never understood how Barbara, who saw herself as such a moral crusader, tolerated being with him for so long. Unless Barbara was different back then. So at the time did GL have more of a balck cast than they later on? I didn't realize that Cole was on the show for 2-3 years. IMDB lists her run as ending in 1971 but she must have been on through at least some of 1972. I wonder why GL had this whole idea of these moguls and their black mistresses, which is such a touchy, volatile issue, but never directly confronted it.

The rest of the article.