Eastenders – 10.12.08

Eastenders bosses saw sense, eventually. Rather than drag out the paedophile story until Christmas day for a freaky, festive finale, they opted to have Tony leg it a couple of weeks early. They also spared child-of-the-damned Lauren from his sneaky clutches, mercifully. Not sure how, but Lauren manages to be a realistic character, despite the fact the girl who plays her is somewhat dead around the eyes. Saying that, having your Dad cheating on your Mum with a girl less than half his age and then having your Uncle shack up with Mum as soon as she’s separated, dated an ex-squaddie half her age and tried to bury Dad alive in an urban forest, I suppose your senses might be a little numb.

Tony went out with a bang in an episode focused on Pat’s house. For one of the poorest threads in Eastenders history, it was surprising that the game was upped and the revelation episode was, in fact, genuinely affecting. If you didn’t see it, you won’t believe it, but Patsy Palmer – that shouting, rust-headed, walking mardy put in a bravura performance for once in her life. Bianca and Whitney’s interactions were horrifically believable, and Tony’s blank-faced nastiness went down well too.

I say ‘went down well’, but that’s hardly the right phrase. The thirty minutes left the audience nauseous as Bianca had what was occurring spelled out to her multiple times. When Tony’s amusing attempts to wriggle free failed (causing a cheer in my house), Bianca ran to the toilet to vomit copiously, just as I popped a roast potato into my mouth. Don’t they realise this is tea-time telly?

When Bianca pleaded with Tony, asking her to reveal if he’d touched little Tiff, he stalled when asked ‘why not?’. I can’t have been alone in wondering if he was going to specify the girl’s hair colour as the reason for his not advancing on her. It was even possible that he might have used the ‘Paedogedden’ reason given by Simon Pegg on Chris Morris’s Brass Eye special that he simply ‘didn’t fancy her’, but he left it, vaguely, at ‘that wouldn’t be my style’.

Making light of it is easy, so I’ll stop as this was actually a moving episode. Bianca’s character reacted exactly as the audience has come to expect – at first entirely selfishly and then, ultimately, believably sympathetic. It reminded us why she’s got such a strong role in a leading soap.

Tony was chased off at the end after making a crucial but mistimed return to the scene of the crime to pick up his passport and it’s genuinely good to see the back of him. At first the whole plotline was little short of comical, before turning more credible as Tony began to ‘go off’ his young prey as he watched her mature.

Despite Chris Coghill’s good showing, I’m glad we can move on from the era in which Eastenders became Beastenders.

All that revolting conversation at a time when me and the missus are settling down to dinner. What kind of time’s that to be airing such nastiness?

It’s a bloody disgrace.

Just A Thought – EastEnders

Have you noticed anything familiar about the storyline that’s unfolding in the Jackson household at the moment? No? Then let me enlighten you …

1999 – Carol Jackson returns to the square with a new man in tow called Dan. Carol has had several children, all by different fathers. Carol is blissfully happy until she discovers Dan has been fucking about with her daughter behind her back. The shit hits the fan.

2008 – Bianca Jackson, daughter of Carol, returns to the square with a new man in tow called Tony. Bianca has had several children, all by different fathers. Bianca is blissfully happy until she discovers Tony has been fucking about with her step-daughter behind her back. The shit (presumably) hits the fan.

A coincidence? A lesson to us all that the child is destined to repeat the mistakes of the parent?

Or just the lazy sods that write EastEnders recycling exactly the same fucking storyline a decade later and hoping nobody will notice?

You decide.

To Catch A Predator – Murphy, Texas

After reading Charlie Brooker’s description of this bizarre slice of mainstream American television, I had to tune in. And after 20 minutes of tuning in, I had to tune out. This is the lowest piece of disturbing muck I think I’ve ever seen transmitted. Take your Big Brother gangster threats and race wars, take the inoffensive Heinz advert and shove those teacup-storms where the sun don’t shine – for ‘To Catch A Predator’ is the television show we should really be complaining about.

Brooker outlines the premise above, but to recap, it goes as follows:

• A fake 13 year old girl profile is set up by a group called Perverted Justice – a sensitively named pressure group who want to crush paedophiles.
• Weirdos respond to the profile.
• These frankly pathetic men indulge in sex talk with the fake individual who tells them her house is free of adults for the weekend.
• The ‘predator’ turns up at house and is lured in by a ‘petite 18 year old’ who is all sweetness and light.
• The minute the door is closed, Chris Hansen (who looks like the child-rapist in Happiness, by the way) assaults them with a barrage of their own sex talk from print outs of their online conversations.
• They try to escape and walk straight into the gun-sights of real American law enforcers.
• Unbelievably, we then see our new friends interviewed at the cop shop.
• Even more incredibly, we then see them up in front of a judge being sentenced to hard labour.
• We then move on to the next wannabe kiddy-diddler.

In the section I saw, Dallasbadboy2002 (oh how they revel in mocking their internet pseudonyms) – a father of two – was busted and a cock-ring found in his car – along with the standard discovery of rubber johnnys and lube.

Next up was Itnew2me – a 52 year old who went from claiming he was just going to sit and wait till the girl’s Mommy arrived home to be sure she was safe, to saying he was working for Jesus before settling on the fact that he may have a bit of a mental problem. Watching Itnew2me pour himself an icy cola as he went from one rationalisation to another was deeply unconfortable viewing.

Before I switched off I caught Rockandrollrule0281 who admitted in his online banter that he’d seen the show before. He still turned up, thinking it was an asian girl he was talking to, presumably assuming that in previous shows a caucasian girl had been used as the decoy. When he got inside he realised the girl wasn’t the asian he’d been promised and was busted immediately. His expression fell from worry to a kind of deep depression and realisation in a second. It was as though his impulse had been stemmed and he hadn’t a clue where he’d just been.

To be honest, if you weren’t aware of how he’d got hiomself in that situation then you might have felt a smidgen of sympathy for him. But then you recall that he had just married, only three weeks previously, and was in this situation as he was hoping to bone a child. It was hard to know what to make of him. Mr. Hyde was definitely superceding Dr. Jekyll that day, on a massive scale.

What got me about the whole exercise wasn’t so much the aspect of entrapment – American law is not something we can do much about, as viewers. I also felt numb to the ‘predators’. We’ve seen these kinds of people before and despite the fact they’re dangerous, sneaky, idiots who live their double lives in complete denial, there isn’t too much depth to them. They’re cowards, to put it simply.

The truly worrying facet of this stinking crapshow isn’t the legal point of view or the subject matter. It’s the glee ringmaster Chris Hansen appears to take in snaring the ‘predators’. He bathes in the glory of his position, using the enormous flaws in the twats he questions to get himself off.

It seems we’ve arrived at a point where we’re are so numb to the idea of children being abused that we’re prepared to allow the exploitation of the very notion of paedophilia to go on. Is it possible that by making mainstream shows which are so superficial in any exploration of the condition and are so over the top in every way that we’re making the crime in some way more acceptable? The more it’s discussed by morons on the TV and in the newspapers, the longer the issue is in the hands of idiots rather than experts. Most importantly, capturing sex criminals by any method simply isn’t the job of TV producers. The fact that the police collude with the TV network to make TCAP is beyond belief.

Anyone who watches this show and punches the air everytime a paedophile gets captured is a fucking idiot – and the show itself is pretty much as deplorable as the people it sets out to counter.

Truly depressing stuff.