EastEnders

What on earth have the writers of EastEnders got against Gus and his elderly dog, Wellard? Over the last few weeks they have decided to hand him over to monstrous psychopath, Sean – a cartoon character that belongs in a low-grade horror movie. Why?

Gus, who regular viewers of ‘Enders know as a happy-go-lucky, poetic road sweeper has been prodded, poked, imprisoned, and now tortured by Sean. His dog, Wellard, has been threatened with a stick, yanked around the square in a way you just shouldn’t treat old dogs, and locked in a cupboard without food or water for what seemed like the best part of the day. This has bewildered me.

Have the writers been taking their cues from Hostel or the Saw movies? Who thought this horrible, uncomfortable, and downright nasty storyline was right for an early-evening family soap opera? “Things have got stale in the square,” someone says, “let’s torture Gus.”

In the twenty-odd years I’ve been watching this show, there have been plenty of dreadful and unpleasant storylines: Stella’s bullying of Ben that left you feeling dirty after watching it, the disasterous Ferera family of Asian stereotypes, Kevin being gut-punched by the engine block of a Ford Focus, Pat naked in bed with Frank, but Gus’s trip down the rabbithole of Sean’s one dimensional psychosis takes the biscuit.

This storyline is vile. It interrupts the flow of the show. It lands in peril two minor characters that you felt assured weren’t there to be put in peril. And certainly not by brutal shitbags like Sean – the most badly handled character the show has ever produced.

I don’t want to see Gus being tied up, beaten, bullied, and imprisoned. I feel cheated by the EastEnders writers. I was so angry with the treatment of Wellard, I wrote the BBC a letter. That’s right - a letter. Good, if ultimately useless characters like Gus aren’t there to be shown the instruments by bad and completely useless characters like Sean. They’re there to attend stag nights, fill out the numbers in the Vic, and drink the health of more important characters when they either marry, or die.

What next? Phil battering Keith and Ghenghis to death with a pool cue?

cheestrings

The cocky little fucker walking about the school with his hand filled with ‘cheestring’. The angry teacher wishing to know more about this child’s cheesy comestible…

’What’s that?’ the angry teacher fumes, pointing at the yellow bendy lump of gittery in the infants callous hand. Both he and the boy look down ‘pon the item in question.

‘Well…’ says the boy, an expression of assured knowingness, before we’re hit with a baffling five scene montage. Sped up footage of green, green grass growing out of the soil under an azure blue sky. A cow’s gob munching on said grass, milk spunking into a bucket. A factory with huge cubes of cheese passing on a conveyor, then suddenly a packet of cheestrings materialises.

Sorry? What was the bit between the cow’s milk and these massive lumps of symmetrical cheese and now this miniscule bundle of cheesy hair? Some devilry has taken place - alchemy - and the first three aspects of the montage are supposed to justify the last? I beg to differ.

Like the witch employing subterfuge in order to carry out maleficia, nature has been exchanged for a packet of… well. What? What the fuck is it? It would seem that it is made from ‘100% cheese’ but something had been done to it make its texture akin to muscle sinew. Something unholy, something evil…

The advertisers are trying to present cheese as healthy and natural. Whilst delicious cheese is a processed and unhealthy foodstuff, it’s a lump of fucking fat. In this form it has been reprocessed into something you could stick a wick in and set fire to.

After being blasted in the face with this ludicrous short we return to the cheeky young cunt in front of the scowling teacher.

‘Cheese’ the little bastard says, like he’s just got one over on the ‘The Man’, like he’s stuck it to ‘The Man’ by eating some fucking cheese and he saunters off looking all smug and suchlike.

Since when has any act of teenage rebellion involved cheese? Waving a knife about, trespassing and killing a dog are all bona fide run-of-the-mill acts of rebellious expression in the young. I accept that. But eating fucked-up cheese in the corridor at break time?

I have every sympathy for the teacher. Way before he’d a chance to get a word in I’d have run up soundlessly to the little tyke, landed a flying kick to his neck and, when down, pounded the living shit out of him before saying ‘what’s that? what’s that?’ ad infinatum, referring to the bit of yellow protruding out of his broken fingers. The advert would end with a cow being slaughtered by naked Viet Cong and topped off with a single shot of a man’s hat.

Let’s face it; it has more of bearing on reality than the fuck presented by these, erm, fucks.

Next week, The Renault Clio, an external sign of inner paedophilia.

Nostalgia / laziness

While I wait for someone other than me to write an article, here’s a link to where it all began, before we were even Mothers.

Curled Wup was a football blog about the World Cup of 2006, written by some people who like football, some people who barely know football exists and some people who hate the game.

Some of it’s actually not weathered too badly with the passing of time.