Bradley exit spoiler.

The Sun is claiming he commits suicide by jumping off a bridge. Poor Bradley. Such a good character wasted by years of repetitive storylines. One last shock value gimmick for Santer before he goes.

Edited January 18, 201015 yr by Sylph

Enders denies Bradley suicide plot

EastEnders bosses this morning refuted rumours that one of the show's much-loved characters is to commit suicide during the soap's live 25th anniversary episode.

A tabloid newspaper today claimed that Bradley Branning - played by 22-year-old Charlie Clements - will stun the residents of Walford by leaping off a building and plummeting to his death in "one of the most heart-breaking soap goodbyes ever".

However, a spokesperson for the soap this morning told DS: "We will not comment on Bradley's exit storyline other than to say he does not commit suicide."

Back in November, Clements announced his decision to quit EastEnders after nearly four years in the role of Bradley.

At the time, executive producer Diederick Santer said: "I can promise a big exit for the character."

The BBC soap's live 25th anniversary episode will air on Friday, February 19 and features the 'Who Killed Archie?' reveal.

I am in love with this show right now. The x mas episode was amazing. And I love Christian/Syed/Amira love triangle. This show is so much better than what we have in the states. It's not fair we can't watch it over here.

http://www.digitalspy.com/soaps/s2/eastenders/news/a198351/steve-mcfadden-quitting-eastenders.html

Steve McFadden quitting 'EastEnders'?

Thursday, January 21 2010, 8:32pm EST

By Mike Moody

Steve McFadden quitting 'EastEnders'?

EastEnders star Steve McFadden is reportedly considering leaving the show when his contract ends in the summer.

According to The Sun, the actor could follow departing cast member Barbara Windsor, who will exit the BBC One soap in two months' time.

McFadden, who plays Phil Mitchell in the programme, said that he is "absolutely gutted" by Windsor's impending departure.

"Her leaving will be a massive hole for the show and for me personally as well," he added.

"I'm sure they will leave the door open for her - they'd be mad not to."

I don't think this would be a big loss. Steve is a good actor, but there isn't a lot left for Phil. They have to resort to comedy alcoholism. Most of the Mitchells are played out. I would keep Ronnie, Glenda, and if they can figure out what to do with Billy, keep him, and write out the rest.

Are they finally going to write Janine like a person again, instead of a camp villain? I hope so. The stuff with Ricky and Bianca was very good.

Bianca's children are so annoying -- they are either constantly lifeless/depressed (Whitney, Liam, Morgan) or acting like they are on a perpetual audition for Annie (Tiffany). At least Max got something different to do.

I wish they would have less of ROXY SHOUTING. And if they want to do a story about her being young and hip, avoid closeups.

Masood and Christian have good chemistry. I wish that had been the forbidden love story.

Edited January 26, 201015 yr by CarlD2

Anita Dobson singing the show's theme tune, Anyone Can Fall in Love. Not much of a singer, but Angie was one of the show's iconic characters, back when they had strong characters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIlCAtNK0Bg

I totally think it was Glenda who offed Archie. She is one shady lady.

Sgt. Peppers meets Eastenders.

http://www.digitalspy.com/soaps/s2/eastenders/scoop/a200774/radio-times-celebrates-eastenders-25th-year.html

lol that reminds me of when the cast actually did SGT Peppers for Children in Need in 2007...wonder if that is still on youtube?

What's it all about?

http://www.digitalspy.com/soaps/s2/eastenders/news/a201855/shane-richie-returns-to-eastenders.html

<p>

<span style="font-size:19.5pt;"><font face="Verdana">25 years of EastEnders women</font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Verdana">A live episode revealing who killed Archie Mitchell will show how key the soap’s leading ladies are to its success</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">Tim Teeman</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><font face="Georgia">Immersing yourself in 25 years of EastEnders cliffhangers on YouTube is best enjoyed with a glass of wine. You surf from Den Watts serving wife Angie with divorce papers on Christmas Day 1986 to Tiffany Mitchell dying on New Year’s Eve — seasonal greetings usually come with spiked eggnog in Albert Square — after being knocked over by Frank Butcher, while trying to stop her abusive husband Grant from stealing their daughter Courtney. My favourite “doof-doof”, as the BBC insists we define them (because of the climactic EastEnders drum beats at the end of every episode), features Peggy Mitchell interrupting Den Watts’s second funeral (yes, he returned from the dead) to knock his wife, and killer, Chrissy Watts into his grave. Chrissy had framed Peggy’s daughter Sam for the crime. “Murderer,” Peggy bellows in that croaky goblin rasp of hers. “Tell Den you’re sorry.”

You see what happens when you try to explain anything that happens in EastEnders? Sentences spool; complicated plots refuse to be marshalled. But at the centre of this show, set in a square with possibly the highest murder and adultery rates in the country, are its women: Dot Cotton, Pat Butcher, Peggy Mitchell, Pauline Fowler, Angie Watts, Sharon Watts, Jane Beale, Zainab Masood, Janine Butcher, Ronnie Mitchell — if not feminists, then vivid caricatures of extreme female endurance.

These are women who suffer, and just when you think life has them beat, it beats them some more. They will survive. Or die dramatically and, if they are really lucky, get “Julia’s Theme”, a tinkly motif reserved for special births, deaths and marriages named after Julia Smith, one of the show’s creators. If EastEnders is known for anything, then it is its bleakness in contrast to the warmth of its great rival, Coronation Street, although its executive producer, Diederick Santer, denies that it is miserable, and claims it “celebrates the human spirit — characters who go through a lot but who ultimately survive. It’s a never-ending story, and that’s why people watch it.”

EastEnders began, in 1985, as it meant to go on: the body of pensioner Reg Cox was discovered by Den Watts, who uttered the show’s first line: “Cor, stinks a bit in here.” The litany of misery and controversy (rape, abortion, domestic violence, paedophilia) has been relentless: a typical day for an Albert Square resident will begin with a hangover, progress to a mid-morning blackmail attempt, and end with them being dumped by an incandescent loved one just before lights out, as they sit in a cell having been arrested for murder. This seems to be a winning feel-bad combination: it was announced over the weekend that EastEnders has become Britain’s most-watched drama, beating Corrie for the first time in three years.

The strong woman, the matriarch, the survivor, the gin-soaked trollop with a heart of gold: all are familiar female soap archetypes and the most recurrent aspect of EastEnders — an amalgam of suffering and strength heralding back to the likes of Mildred Pierce. British soap has long been ruled by women. Annie Walker presided over the bar of the Rovers Return in Coronation Street like a dowager, Elsie Tanner was for many years the volatile fulcrum of Weatherfield, with a ridiculously turbulent private life, cloud of red hair and battery of cigarettes.

The endless hand-wringing over their children and bounds of mother love are particularly evident in the suffering women of soap. Dot Cotton in EastEnders was blessed with the racist, drug-dealing “Nasty” Nick Cotton for a son: he once tried to poison her, then fleece her of her savings. For years, she has wept over her Bible about her failures as a mother.

Pauline Fowler once rightly pointed out that Peggy’s Mitchell’s children were “two thugs and a slapper”. Pauline’s own son, Mark, was HIV positive, her daughter Michelle was a teen mum and her other son, Martin, hated her after she tried to interfere in his marriage to Sonia Jackson, a former lesbian. Pauline died in the middle of the Square, in a snowstorm, beside a bench dedicated to her beloved Arthur. EastEnders is hailed for its gritty realism but, when necessary, it embraces the melodramatic with camp gusto.

Nina Wadia plays Zainab Masood, who is currently desperately trying to keep her son Syed in the closet to avoid bringing shame on her family. “Everyday drama, which is what soaps are, is about women,” she says. “If men need to sort something out, they go to the pub, talk it out. That would be very boring to watch. Women hold grudges, there’s more drama around them. When my little daughter comes home from school, she’ll tell me who she has fallen out with that day. When my son comes in, he’ll say, ‘Momma, snack’. That’s the difference. When you meet husbands and wives on the street, he’ll always say, ‘I only watch it because she has it on.’ And you know men do watch it!”

Men, though, are not incidental to women’s ascendancy in soaps: their misdeeds or goodness are an essential foil for the women with whom they are paired. On the occasion of EastEnders’ birthday on February 19, for the first time in its history, it will play out a live episode in which the identity of Archie Mitchell’s murderer will be revealed, just after Ricky and Bianca remarry (or will they?).

At the heart of Archie’s storyline was his attempts to control Peggy (Barbara Windsor, for a while, started wearing pie-crust collars and flattening her hair down) and his lie to his daughter Ronnie that her daughter Danielle had died — she hadn’t but when Danielle came to Albert Square she didn’t reveal herself, and Archie helped to keep mother and daughter apart until the latter was tragically killed. As with any major storyline in a soap, this was a clotted mix of scheming, recriminations and tragedy. One of Santer’s most controversial moves was to kill Danielle. “But we had to. Ronnie’s story would have ended had we let them be happily reunited,” he says. “My girlfriend punched me on the arm when it happened, and I knew that punch was really from millions of other people.”

Coronation Street will mark its own (50th)anniversary later this year with a storyline focusing on two major female characters. Gail McIntyre will be enmeshed into the messy aftermath after her latest husband Joe’s botched plan to fake his own death — and the Street’s Queen of Mean, Tracy Barlow, will return.

Secrecy around EastEnders’ live episode is paramount. Santer reveals that even the actor playing the murderer won’t know it is him or her until the night of the episode. Eight possible endings are being rehearsed from this week and, says Santer, “Only on the night will we whisper to the real perpetrator, ‘It’s you’ and, bam, they will play the revelation live on air.”

Finally, we will discover who brought the bust of Queen Victoria down on Archie’s head. “The killer may be revealed to the audience rather than the Square,” says Santer. This would make sense as the crew has been filming episodes to be transmitted after the live one. “It has been very hard,” says Charlie Brooks, who plays the villainous Janine. “In the episodes to be shown afterwards, you’re being told to look or speak a certain way, but not why.”

Santer smiles ruefully. “It’s been a challenge for the cast. They are as desperate to know who did it as the viewers.” The actors got the scripts for the episode (minus the murderer’s true identity) on Friday: Wadia tells me she, “like a few of the actors, was disappointed yet relieved to find that we didn’t have speaking roles. You want to be in it, but not to mess it up.”

Santer shows me the exterior set. The first surprise is how tiny Albert Square is. Stepping on to it, you feel a bit of a giant. The Victorian houses of EastEnders are the right number of storeys — the inspiration was Fassett Square in Hackney — but too small, so everything appears slightly Toytown-ish. Did Phil Mitchell really tumble down those steps when he was shot? He would have just grazed himself. The park in the middle of the Square where Pauline Fowler dropped dead, where Arthur’s bench stands, where Owen has been buried by the murderous Lucas? Titchy!

Only the Queen Vic feels like it could be a proper pub, with its red livery and swinging sign. The hairdressers has been renamed Roxy’s, implying that the Square’s recent multi-millionairess may be about to expand her empire.

There may be curtains and blinds in the windows of the other houses, but they are just shells — actors balance from gantries if they’re required to shout from a casement. The market is also cramped and incredibly small; only the Tube station, Walford East, is built to a believable scale. And we are not in the East End at all, but Elstree in Hertfordshire. Behind the set are lovely suburban houses, although a tower block looms on one side of the Square for a bit of Hackney-esque verisimilitude.

“Guess what?” says Santer. “One of our 25th birthday surprises is that soon we’ll have real trains running over that bridge!” Ah, the EastEnders trains, we hear their wheezes and parps punctuate every dramatic revelation. “They’ll be CGI, of course, the bridge starts and stops here, but the trains look really good.” And surely, in time, one will fall on Beale’s cafe and hopefully squash Phil Mitchell.

The demands of filming four episodes a week take their toll. Santer, who has been a brilliant executive producer, bringing wit and warmth to the Square, is looking forward “reclaiming my life” when he passes the baton to Bryan Kirkwood after the live episode. Brooks says that she left the show for a while when she felt that “the character had gone through so much — drugs, prostitution, agoraphobia.”

Janine is now one of its standout characters, a fizzing mixture of vivacious and vicious, a loser clawing for every chance she can get; nasty yet fun. “You know that you’d have a good night out with her,” laughs Brooks. “I think it’s important that while she’s bitchy, that’s not the only thing she does or it would become too boring.”

When Janine was particularly vile, years ago, Brooks was cornered by gangs. Now, after she has slept with Ian Beale and blackmailed him, or told Ronnie Mitchell that she doesn’t have such a great track record with children (two have died), people stop her in the supermarket and say “How could you?”

Nitin Ganatra, who plays Masood, Zainab’s postman husband, was taking his two young children to nursery when two older children shouted, “Oi, where’s our post, Masood?” Ganatra gets this a lot, as well as people patting him on the back saying, “I don’t know how you put up with her.” On lunch breaks with Wadia, people ask them if they are married for real.

“Walford women, like Zainab, get knocked down, get up, learn from that mistake, but then maybe make it all over again. That’s what being a woman in soap is all about,” says Wadia. “You have to keep a character moving, while staying true to who they are. There’s a traumatic birth for Zainab coming up. She is a Muslim, so obviously she can’t drink and so I would love her to be drunk in a few episodes. I want the writers to ask why she is the lynchpin of this family. Why do they all want to please her when she is so awful? I would love to be kidnapped. The kidnapper would probably end up paying to have her returned. I want to see Zainab accept her son as gay and accept Christian as his partner. I long for the scene where Christian calls Zainab ‘Mum’ ... but, of course, they’ll put us through hell before we get there.”

Of course they will. This is EastEnders.</font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">http://bit.ly/bcxzMH</font></b></span></p>

I love how they almost make it sound like Sonia was a lesbian when Martin got involved with her.

I'm glad Charlie Brooks isn't being harassed by fans anymore but I can't say she is a standout to the show these days. Janine is bad camp and I feel like the show is often laughing at her and uses her only to get the plot rolling along. Supposedly the actress who played Suzy Branning got into major conflicts with other cast members and had to be abruptly written out. Janine then inherited some of her stories, like running over Danielle.

I can't say there's a lot of wit in today's Walford (unless you count Phil as the comic drunk or two years of fat jokes and ugly jokes for Heather), or gritty realism either. The show if anything has become too aware of its own universe. The "duff duff" overly staged cliffhangers, the pointless returns, the fancy music montages. I think there are some very solid points about Eastenders these days -- strong acting, interesting characters, standout solo episodes -- but I can't say wit or realism are among them. Or strong women at the moment.

The men are weak in Walford these days but I'm not sure if that's about strong women or just casting which seems to always cast men with stringy hair, no personalities, big sad eyes, and gaunt physiques.

Many of the women tend to be baby-obsessed, or obsessed with men who aren't worth the effort. Some of them are very loud and like to yell, but that's not strength.

Carl, then something for you!

<p>

<span style="font-size:19.5pt;"><font face="Verdana">EastEnders is 25 - but not loved by everyone</font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Verdana">Where’s the wit, the vitality, the heart? David Quantick finds the soap’s image of London utterly dishonest. </font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:9pt;"><font face="Verdana">On Friday the BBC will celebrate 25 years of EastEnders with a special live episode. For about the past seven years I’ve watched the soap almost every day. Not because I want to, but because it’s my job. I’m a programme associate on Harry Hill’s TV Burp, meaning that I sit down every week and watch as much British television as I can. Which includes EastEnders, all two and a half doomy, gloomy, laughless hours of it.

If you’d said to me, a quarter of a century ago, that one day watching EastEnders might be my job, I doubt I’d have believed you. I can still remember sitting down with my flatmates to watch the first episode. We didn’t think it was an historical event or anything like that, but we’d seen the first Brookside, which we loved, and it would be something to talk about in the pub. As it turned out, it wasn’t; although better than Albion Market, ITV’s glumfest of the time, the new BBC primetime soap was a curiously muddy affair, in which everything seemed brown and grey and lacked both the easy edge of Brookside and the warmth of Coronation Street. There was a funny-looking old man called Doctor Legg, who seemed to be the main character. We shrugged, wondered if it would be as unpopular as Albion Market, and went to the pub, where we didn’t talk about EastEnders.

It seems we were in a minority. EastEnders became hugely popular, an uneasy mix of glued-on social comment – there were gay people, black people, and most controversial of all, middle-class people – and shouting. Angie and Den Watts did the most shouting, although later on the Mitchell brothers did even more (when, finally, matters between Den Watts and Phil Mitchell came to a head, the whole thing was frankly deafening). And, apart from the odd 80s waistcoat or jazz tie, EastEnders remained resolutely, grimly, grey.

I’m not a Londoner but I have lived in the city for 30 years. Fifteen of those years were spent in Hackney, about half a mile from the real-life model for Albert Square and its market, Fassett Square and Ridley Road. I even lived opposite Walford Road for a while. None of which made me a Cockney or even a middle-class EastEnder, but all of which confirmed at first hand that the show was the most negative portrayal of the East End since Gustav Doré’s London: A Pilgrimage. Other soaps – Brookside, Coronation Street and the cosy Emmerdale Farm (later Emmerdale) – stereotyped their occupants, but they did so through pints of rose-tinted Northern bitter. Scousers were committed, passionate socialist wits. Mancunians were warm-hearted Alan Bennetty matriarchs. Even the villagers of Emmerdale Farm’s Beckindale were unusually friendly and chatty for Yorkshire folk.

But EastEnders decided that we didn’t need to see the wit, the raucousness and the vitality of Londoners, that unique brand of vulgarity and cleverness that people in the capital are famous for, the surreal wit that infuses everyone raised there from Charles Dickens to Dizzee Rascal. And if that sounds like a PC rewrite of the Cockney character, then it should be said EastEnders was also signally short of Alf Garnetts, dodgy builders, wrong-headed cab drivers, and people of ethnic origin who weren’t saints. (Some of us remember with a shudder the Ferreiras, the Asian family who were so devoid of any characteristics at all that we never found out if they were Hindu, Muslim or Reformed Church of Scotland.) EastEnders presented the people of East London as murderous, cold, dishonest, humourless killers, adulterers and nutcases. And, while it may sometimes feel that way down the Old Kent Road on a Monday night, really it’s just not the case.

Amazingly, this was the Golden Age of EastEnders, when Wicksy had hit singles, when Anita Dobson was loved by toddlers, and when Arthur Fowler’s shenanigans with the Christmas Club money were a worry to us all. Then EastEnders went to two, then four episodes a week, and, cracking under the strain, it went mad. Dirty Den was killed, then returned from the dead. He may have done this two or three times, but by the mid 1990s, EastEnders’ habit of introducing The Return Of The Villain with a shot of a black cab stopping and a pair of sinister feet stepping out meant that you knew just what was going to happen as soon as the taxi turned its yellow light back on.

After that, it was open house. The show began to resemble a pantomime, as anyone showbizzy with a vaguely London background was stuffed into it. Shane Ritchie, Mike Reid and Barbara Windsor (who admittedly has made Peggy Mitchell one of the show’s best characters) all joined, and with them came a kind of farcical British messing about which is more like a substitute for humour than the real thing. The social commentary and reflections of reality which had been present in early EastEnders and which, I have to be honest, were new to mainstream British soap opera were now replaced with extreme farce and absurd violence. No episode was complete without at least one form of mugging.

Soap operas, I realise, are not meant to be realistic. In the hands of some of its worst writers, Coronation Street comes over like a bad sitcom, while Emmerdale can sometimes make The Archers look like Assault on Precinct 13. But EastEnders’ great crime is that it poses as an honest, open look at life in the 21st century, reflecting both the downside and the upside of what it is to live now. Yet it is nothing like that; it’s still relentlessly grim and grey, it’s still nails-on-a-blackboard painful when it tries to be funny, and – despite its rigorously clichéd and mindless obsession with “fambly” – a stranger to any sense of love or community.

Which I’d say is the real trouble with EastEnders. It has no heart. Instead of a heart, it offers a cold, nasty market and the Queen Vic, a pub so violent and glum that the Kray Twins wouldn’t meet their accountant there for a work-related coffee, let alone have some fun on “curry night” or one of the other uninspired, unfunny pseudo-events that this comedy-drained, cynical, heartless horror likes to pretend are what people do when they’re not killing or cheating on each other.

If they took it off tomorrow, I’d be more than happy. I can’t see that happening, though. It would be like cancelling Hell.

- EastEnders’s live episode is on Friday, 19 February on BBC One at 8pm </font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/7187809/EastEnders-is-25---but-not-loved-by-everyone.html</font></b></span></p>