'Eastenders' General Thread.

Dirty Den slammed me in the pooper!

R1 = Wicksy.

The actress who played Dot could never completely erase her classical training. There was a season where her son, Nick Cotton, brought home his son, Dot's grandson. His name was Ashley. And every time she said his name, it was always posh. "Ahhh-shley." She was about as EastEnd as the Queen Mother.

They need to get rid of ALL the Slaters.

Shut the fuck up Serial Asshole you mentally ill loser!

.....

Is that old fossil Dot still on the show?

R7 No. Dot is currently living in Galway, Ireland with her grandson, Charlie Jr. and his family. Charlie has his own little boy named Matthew, whose bio-mother is the late Ronnie Mitchell. Charlie is married to a woman named Liz.

In principle Dot could make a reappearance. She's not dead. She was there last season, was it. Back from Ireland, appeared with Dr Legg (was on episode one and prominent in the early years.) He left Dot a bit of money. The actress who plays her, June Brown, reportedly said she wasn't happy with the undeveloped part for Dot in the return and indicates she wasn't intending to come back. But things change. She was a very important character at one point. As is Ian.

I watched Eastenders when it first came to the states in the 1980s. It was on every night weekdays at 11pm - can't remember if it was one or two episodes - on DC PBS channel. That was the only,time I had time to watch TV in those days. But, of course, it became a must watch. I watched it for a few years and only recently watched it again on one of our PBS channels 2 episodes on Friday late afternoons. I know it was never great tv but it was fun. The recent watching either showed me I had no idea how bad it was back then - story lines, acting - or it has gotten even worse. It is really pure trash even for a soap opera. I can see how it hooks people but so many of these characters are so, how shall I put it, unappetizing and creepy.

What is also amusing is how Dot has become such a legend everyone likes. She was considered the clownish busybody nobody liked. I guess after I stopped watching they decided or maybe Brown insisted she be given a better characterization. Good for her.

And that idiot Ian is still nothing but an idiot. How does he ever get any woman?

Dot "grew" or changed. She was a Christian freak with the usual prejudices at first. But comes to accept the gay character. Then later the AIDS character. Even early on she defends the prostitute who wants to keep her baby because she didn't have an abortion. The backstory three is Dot had been forced to have an abortion herself when younger by her abusive husband.

Thanks for the tea, R11. A decades long gap is a lot to make up.

But Ian is still Ian.

Haven’t watched for about three years. Is Ben still with Callum? I like(d) the Ben character, but I can’t stand that boring Halfwit. How EE made a gay storyline between an earnest cop and a recidivist felon/ex-killer so boring and so twee, I will never understand.

They shouldn’t have killed off Steven Beale so early; sociopathic bisexuals are awful IRL, but they make for fantastic drama in soaps. I loved watching his SLs both in the 00s and more recently, insane as they were. They need another dark young pretty gay/bi guy like he was to stir the pot.

Will Johnny Carter be coming back any time soon? That ought to gee Ben up a bit, he was lusting after Johnny for years and they were becoming close friends the last we saw. And it will put Mick in a tailspin, who I loathe—win-win.

[quote] They shouldn’t have killed off Steven Beale so early

They shouldn't have killed him off, period. .. I miss Steven quite a bit, especially given that I find the current incarnations of the other two Beale Boys relatively dull. .. Seriously doubt DTC wouldn't have killed Steven off. When departing, he left that little chestnut showing serious eye contact between Steven and Johnny as spark for O'Connor to potentially carry on with, but that immediate chemistry between the two was basically ignored.

Kat informing Filth that "she's had better" was rather eye-rolling, since she's just come off a relationship with Kush, the HOTTEST guy on the Square.

I mean, seriously, from Kush to Phil ... what a decline!

Why is he nude for child depression awareness?

I watched EastEnders in the U S. off and on fora couple decades with long gaps, first on PBS when it was confusingly about two years behind the UK series, on BBC America when that network was new and promising, then on Britbox and various subscriber based platforms.

For a few years I watched it only in the UK. It was always a guilty pleasure, a stupid series to have on in the background, looking up now and again, punctuated by the opening/closing music which sounded like a worn out audio take yet had a certain pull. Dot was horrifying at first but eventually became a highlight. It was all a bit off after Pat Butcher was gone. I dropped out completely when the Vic went under township of s whole new lot and every week it was someone in jail and others about to land there. The pervasiveness and depth of criminality was too ridiculous, and by this time all the more so as they were all living in million £+ properties and selling cheap out from market stalls. A new family of some exotic stripe was moving in and out of the square with escalating regularity. I suppose today it's a high caste Bangalore refugee trans family of siphoning money from Covid vaccine manufacturers, a few old Mitchells and Brakes, and Sharon, back again whenever the actress needs some new shoes.

[quote]Why is he nude for child depression awareness?

He's beautiful, but it makes me depressed that I don't look like that. Hopefully his body will lift the spirits of Britain's depressed childen.

R14 yes, agree totally. While soaps are at heart domestic dramas, they should know by now that people don’t tune in for the slice-of-life upstanding citizens being put through the ringer. This is fiction, we want dark ambiguous amoral leads! EE was always at its best with the shady elements of urban life, and at its most popular then too.

Seeing that moment again brought back memories. Actually, it’s one of the last EE moments and ‘seeds’ I ever enjoyed and found interesting/exciting, wondering if it would lead anywhere (and if so where?). A year of tedious programming and boring shallow kitchen-sink rubbish after that, and I no longer cared and was gone for good.

My parents stopped watching around the same time, and they’d been viewers since the start. The number of loyal viewers lost in the five-to-ten years alone must be staggering. I say put it out to pasture, along with Corrie & Emmerdale (might as well shoot Hollyoaks, it’s been taken over by T & SJW loons on the writing staff).

Btw does anyone have any gay Danny Dyer tea? I’m convinced he’s at least bi, but no one else believes it.

The girl who plays sharon is terrific

[post redacted because independent.co.uk thinks that links to their ridiculous rag are a bad thing. Somebody might want to tell them how the internet works. Or not. We don't really care. They do suck though. Our advice is that you should not click on the link and whatever you do, don't read their truly terrible articles.]

^^^ What I wrote before the stupid DL redact was:

I think Dyer is just a big tease and learned early on that appealing to gays could increase his popularity. He did the Attitude magazine shoot 15 years ago.

R16 That photo was originally part of Davood's pictorial that he did for Attitude magazine's naked issue and had nothing to do with the subject of "childhood depression." .. Unnoticed by me, the url source I used to link the photo was from someone's personal blog, and they seem to have high interest in that subject. And the way Datalounge displays photos now, it includes all kinds of extraneous text info attached to the photo, so I'm guessing that's why it's showing that.

Another downer development: Isaac is schizophrenic.

So. Nobody else wanted to fuck Robbie?

Isaac is fugly. And his speaking voice is atrocious.

I still want Ross Kemp in me quite deeply.

This is from a very interesting interview with soap agent turned novelist Melanie Blake:

And look at Ronnie and Roxy in EastEnders – truly one of the biggest mistakes ever in the history of soap – that should never have been allowed to happen, I still can’t believe no one stepped in to stop it. Talking of Eastenders, nobody knows this as I have never told this story before but Kathy wasn’t meant to be killed off. Gillian always intended to return at some point but Adam Woodyatt went to the bosses and said he was tired of the stuff he was getting and wanted something juicy so came up with the idea of killing off his mum off screen and that was that.

It took 15 years of pitching to get around that mistake. And not only is she still a fabulous actress, but doesn’t she look amazing, she hasn’t changed a bit – Ian Beale looks like her dad! It’s dog eat dog, they’re best of friends but it’s dog eat dog. If it hadn’t been for me pitching over and over to get Kathy back It wasn’t easy – it was only after they saw her in Hollyoaks that they realised how much EastEnders was missing her and hired her, by then I wasn’t actually working with Gillian as she’d taken some time out after moving back from Liverpool where she’d been filming Hollyoaks so they called her direct – but it was my idea.

The fraus at WW are in deep denial that their precious little Adam could have had anything to do with getting Kathy killed off screen. Idiots.

What happened to Toby Alexander Smith? He's not nearly as good-looking as when he started.

Toby still looks good to me. One of the hottest men in the square.

He is but he hasn’t got a lot of competition.

Great clip about 12 minutes in about a little show called EastEnders: