EastEnders: Discussion Thread

[DRW50]

That's a great story

[DRW50]

The arrival of the psycho army mate is such an old cliche, pure melodrama, but it works perfectly as a dark mirror to Grant, and the strong direction gives us knife's-edge performance. The scene where he wanders down the stairs, in a daze, only to be taken by surprise, is something that feels very real, compared to the overused, stale, very badly acted hostage crisis of the month on soaps now.

It isn't difficult to see why Grant was so popular with viewers, in spite of the many horrible things he did - Ross Kemp was the epitome of raw charisma in his first 5-6 years on the show. The character was never the same when they settled him down further post-Sharon, but even then, he was mostly effective up to his late 90's exit. He was a shell of his former self in 2005-2006, and I think some part of Kemp realizes this and may be why he stays away (and if that is the reason, kudos to him).

That alternate theme worked really well for cliffhangers.

[TimWil]

First of all, Carl, thanks for the compliment re: the Gillian story. She was an extremely likeable interview subject, someone you'd want to take out and drink a few beers with. I specifically remember her saying that she was particularly mortified by the allegations because she claimed she's never been a "sexual" person and her sex drive is fairly low! Ah, well. I'm not necessarily claiming she was telling the whole truth but I tend to believe her.

One of the reasons I think Kemp might not ever return to the show could be that he might not be too thrilled with us seeing Grant as the father of a teenage daughter (Courtney) and even possiblly, down the road, a teenage son (Mark Jr.).

Edited March 9, 2015 by TimWil

[BetterForgotten]

I don't know what they would do with Grant at this point anyway. They'll probably try to do recreate Sharongate and do it in reverse, as Grant always maintained that Sharon is the love of his life. But I don't know if they'd work together at this point, even if they matured.

[DRW50]

If he ever did come back it would probably be for Mark Jr. stuff, or, as you mentioned, Sharongate, although knowing DTC, he'll fall in love with Shirley instead...

[DRW50]

Well, this looks quite stupid, and dated.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/soaps/s2/eastenders/news/a634183/eastenders-spoiler-pictures-rebecca-fowler-to-get-surprising-new-look.html

I want more Fowlers on the show but everything with Rebecca, Sonia and Martin, together and separately, has made me have an extended cringe.

[TimWil]

Oh, dear. Nothing could be as amusing as when Rosie did the same thing on Coronation Street.

[DRW50]

Those old rumors of Lucy Benjamin and Steve McFadden having such a bad breakup that she was written out of the show and that when she returned briefly in 2010 they couldn't share scenes together came back to me when I read this - he was called to testify for her in the phone hacking scandal. He says he was going to propose to her, but didn't because he thought she had a big mouth...only to realize later that their phones had been hacked. He also says the whole thing did real damage to her as a person and destroyed her career.

The whole thing is so sad it makes me a little emotional.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/showbiz/s2/eastenders/news/a634528/lucy-benjamins-career-ruined-by-phone-hacking-says-steve-mcfadden.html

[DRW50]

Shane Richie talks about how he and Jessie Wallace were affected by this.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/soaps/s2/eastenders/news/a634590/shane-richie-jessie-wallace-did-not-speak-for-five-years-over-mistrust.html

[NothinButAttitude]

All five live episodes from the anniversary week have been made public. Here they are:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scripts/eastenders-30th-anniversary

[DRW50]

Dear God, if Pam and Les Coker are not the worst characters ever created for this show, they are very high on the list.

I want someone to backhand them every second they are onscreen.

[TimWil]

They're both horrible, Roger Sloman (Les), especially. Last night's hour long episode was torture. The actor who plays Tamwar is so atrocious. It makes me angry that he's managed to stay on the show for so long. His smugness on the Back To Ours special he appeared in with Nitin Gatra (Masood) a few weeks ago made me even angrier. The kid just mumbles a few lines, stares into the middle distance and sucks the life out of any scene he's in. Maddy Hill deserves far more than him-I hope Nancy gets paired with Kush eventually.

Edited March 13, 2015 by TimWil

[Ben]

That was the worst episode this year. Les and Pam are awful, but so is Donna, and sadly, I can't muster up the will to care about Carol's story, b/c it should have happened last year. It's like they didn't care enough to finish her cancer story after she was given the all clear, so they're randomly revisiting it now (despite the fact Carol has been her usual self for the last few months), and if they don't care, I don't see why I should.

I can't believe they're going to waste Ellen Thomas' character on Les. Seriously, of all the men, she has to be attached to him?! I can't wait for the awful reveal of Pam discovering her husband has another woman. The Cokers are so pointless - even more than Donna.

Les, Pam, Donna, and Nancy have had no development since they arrived last year, but we're now supposed to care about them. Nancy sure spilled all the tea to Tamwar really quickly. She has a big mouth.

I like Shabnam and Kush, but they're giving them boring material. What was the point of Shabnam's secret? It's had no affect on her at all since she spilled to Stacey. Now her and Kush are being wasted with this secret-romance-that-no-one-knows-why-it's-a-secret-romance story.

I like Tamwar (or at least how he used to be). He always worked best when he was with interesting characters, like his family and Afia. But since Zainab, Syed and Afia have left, he's had no one to bounce off of, and due to being shelved for the last 3-4 years, he slowly become boring and very dull. Now I feel Himesh Patel is just phoning it in, and sadly Tamwar has been reduced to a caricature, due to having zero development. I'm really not feeling him and Nancy like I thought I would; they don't have any chemistry, and I don't believe Nancy would look romantically twice at someone like Tam. I always thought Tam would have worked better with Lucy during that time she had her cancer scare.

How unrealistic was Kat getting all of her stock stolen? Everyone just stood idly by watching as they took everything.

[All My Shadows]

Tamwar is still on the show? Oh dear, I can't imagine that being good.

[TimWil]

I just finished reading Pam St Clement's book. I loved it. Here's my review which will appear in an edition of the fan newspaper The Walford Gazette:

My personal bias regarding Pam St Clement and her autobiography, The End Of An Earring (is that a great title or what?) is even more all-encompassing than the one I had regarding Michelle Collins' extremely engaging memoir This Is Me. I had the great pleasure of spending a bit of time with Ms. St Clement when she was over here to appear in a WLIW EE pledge drive in December 2000. I interviewed her for The Gazette and actually got to drive out to Long Island with her in a stretch limo for the event. I vaguely remember that a bit of champaigne was imbibed. I know all too well that I bent a few fellow pledge drive volunteers' noses out of joint that night because I ended up spending most of my time with Pam in the green room area swapping show biz stories and this ended up severely limiting her time with the devoted EE volunteers manning the phones. I apologize wholeheartedly for doing this but, uhhhh, really, could you blame me? Pam is a wonderful, wonderful lady. I was overwhelmed by being in her presence, spending time with her was something quite addictive and I never wanted it to end. Pam's WLIW appearance unfortunately fell on the same night as Gore's conceding the presidential election to Bush and so the viewership numbers might not have been as high as it normally would have been and this did seem to affect the amount of pledges. Oh, well. Pam was definitely saddened a bit by this and actually apologized over and over-what a compassionate, concerned, lovely lady she is.

OK, now to her book-The End Of An Earring. Words can't express how much I adored it. It is beautifully written and contains many, many wonderful anecdotes of her highly unusual life. I was very glad that I had next to no knowledge of her early life because...wow. It is sometimes something out of a novel, perhaps by Daphne DuMaurier! Pamela Ann Clements was the daughter of a Reginald Arthur Clements and his wife Ann, who he married in 1940. Pamela was born in 1942 and when she was 18 months old Ann died of tuberculosis. This was apparently not an uncommon occurance during the WWII years. Pamela's father Reginald had been born and raised in the East End and was the son of a railway worker and was placed in an orphanage at a young age by his destitute mother after his father suddenly died. This sense of dislocation seems to have played a large part in how he later lived his life. It certainly seemed to affect his dealings with women. The man had five wives! Pamela's mother Ann was his second wife. He was by all accounts a self made man who rose up the ranks to achieving considerable success as the managing director of a toy company-Pam claims that he may have even been responsible for the invention of the nozzle on certain sports balls through which to insert air. Pam's very early childhood was spent in her father's apartment in Regent's Park, an extremely posh address, indeed. He then married his third wife and poor little Pamela was sent to a seemingly endless series of "foster homes" all over Britain. Some of them he found through advertisements, some were through friends, including a German couple he barely knew! My jaw dropped open reading these chapters. Her father was, quite simply, a piece of work. He was a womanizing alcoholic with a propensity toward violence, especially towards the women in his life. Pamela, thank God, was never a victim of physical abuse although she clearly suffered from verbal and emotional abuse. He shunted her to and fro throughout her childhood until she finally settled into a good, stable balance of a boarding school in the South Downs with a farm in Devonshire. Pam writes very lovingly and at great length about this particular home farm in Devon, run by her beloved "Aunts" Sylvia and Courty. Their impact on her life was enormous and her memorial to them via this book is unforgettable.

I'll be honest with you-when normally reading about someone's early life in a biography, especially a "show biz" one, I tend to skip to the part where they start performing. Or at least beginning to learn how to perform! I found the first chapters of this book detailing her life at boarding school and on the farm to be absolutely riveting, though. It shed light and helped me see why, in my admittedly limited exposure to Pam, she is such a special person. When I came to the parts of the book describing her early acting career I was already firmly acquainted with her natural integrity and work ethic as well as her ability to be naughty and have fun!

When she began her professional acting career Pam had to change her name from Pamela Clements because there already was someone with that name registered with the British Actors Equity union. She chose the last name St Clement, which also happened to be a street in North London where her parents had first met. She writes glowingly of her time at the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama. Her chapter detailing the three months she embarked on a world tour of with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Hedda Gabler starring Glenda Jackson is delicious-Bette Davis suddenly appeared in her dressing room during the Los Angeles run! She made many appearances on stage and on television, culminating in, of course, her role as Patricia Harris Beale Wicks Butcher Evans on EastEnders.

Pam writes numerous chapters about her time on EE and it is a 100% satisfying book to enjoy on that aspect alone. She is way too classy and intelligent to dish any dirt on her fellow actors but if you read between the lines carefully enough you can glean certain perceptions from her remarks! She doesn't name names but the people on the show over the years she seemed to take the most issue with were a certain diminutive assistant director with a particularly nasty way of running the set as well as a certain director who demonstrated what he wanted in a scene by manhandling the actors like human chess pieces. Pam writes glowingly of her fellow EE colleague and increasingly frequent scene sharer Barbara Windsor and is very honest about Wendy Richard and her complex persona. She acknowledges that Wendy had a very large heart if she liked you but if she didn't she could be antagonistic and highly difficult to be around. Pam adored working with Michael French (who played her son David) and Tony Caunter (who played her fourth husband Roy). But, as it should be, a big portion of the EE section of her book is devoted to Mike Reid who played the unforgettable Frank Butcher. She agrees with head writer Tony Jordan that Pat and Frank's love story was the only true one in the show's history. I agree with that, too. The only time Pam appears to have been furious with the show's higher ups was when they wrote in a fire in Frank's car lot not soon after Mike's son had committed suicide by actually setting himself on fire. This does seem like an "inhuman" thing to do, to use Pam's words. When it comes to Pat's eventual "departure" Pam does a very smart thing. She writes in her prologue, entitled "We Have Our Entrances And Our Exits," how she was written out and how surprised and saddened she was when it was decided, against her gentle requests, that Pat was to be killed off rather than simply hop on a flight to New Zealand. I agree that this was a terrible mistake born out of a desire by the show's executives to generate quick fix headlines. The only good that came out of it, in my opinion, was that one of my all-time favorite characters, David, returned to Albert Square for a year or so, as a result.

Of course Pam accepted this situation with class, dignity and integrity and played the hell out of the scenes where we saw Pat slowly deteriorate to the point of ending up on her deathbed on New Year's Day 2012. In an absolutely brilliant chapter Pam writes, in her own words, what she imagined was going through Pat's head as she lied there on that bed, waiting and hoping for her favorite son David to arrive. Here's a brief extract:

"He won't come...that's how he can punish me. I wanna tell him how much I love my beautiful boy...he's ruining his life and hisself...always running and destroying...destroying...neverhealing...he's like a jealous little kid...not wanting anyone else to have what he ain't got. Smashing his own brother's relationship like a toy train then walking away..."

That knocked me out. I want Pam to write for EE NOW! Or maybe write a play or a television film or a movie, I don't care! She shows genuine writing talent with this book. She is a wonder. I adore her. I think she still has further mountains to climb and it's my fervent wish to somehow meet up with her along the way.

I can't recommend this highly absorbing, entertaining memoir strongly enough to you EE lovers out there. It's simply a class act all the way, like the lady herself.

Edited March 14, 2015 by TimWil