Monday, January 16, 2017

Bumface's Baby Boy - Review:- Friday 13.01.2017

Everything happens on Friday the 13th. You get a birthday and a baby you don't want.

This episode represented everything I hate at the moment about EastEnders, the representation of women as weak-willed, subservient creatures, willing to give up a future at the expense of a man, casual misogyny, and circular characters, not to mention characters who have been drinking in the last chance saloon for so long, it's become a way of life for them.

The Christ Child. This episode, more than any, brought home to me how much I hate Denise and most of her family that surrounds her - specifically, the effetely snobbish Libby, the caricatured stereotypical shuck'n'jive black woman, and tonight we got introduced to Medusa Ada AKA Emerald Fox, Denise's snake-haired, big-mouthed mother. Another stereotype. The West Indies by way of Walford, another mother-in-law from hell, this time for Vincent, who's settled nicely into the role of emasculated male, having graduated from his Oedipal complex. How many months until this creature is bonking Patrick and he's leering at her crossing the Square and going ...

Y-eee-aahhhhh, mon ... she a fiiiiiiine woman.

Honestly, who writes his dialogue, a descendant of the woman who wrote Gone With the Wind

Patrick is a great character, the patriarch of the Square, and I'd go as far as saying, the natural successor to Pat, but in many ways, he's a token stereotype - the rum-loving, life-loving atypical West Indian man, just as much as Kim is the screeching black woman.

Apart from Patrick, they were an embarrassment tonight. What hospital would countenance the shouting, hectoring overreaction in the hallway of the maternity ward such as what we saw tonight exhibited by Kim and that putrid mother of hers? There would be complaints, and they would be asked to leave.

I know Diane Parish has her fanbase, but I don't think she's anymore than an average actress, a soap actress who can't progress beyond the soap genre because it's easy money, and because she's in the midst of a gaggle of ethnic characters who fulfill a quota imposed by the BBC on this programme. She lost relevance years ago, when the divine Don Gilet left originally.

Since 2010, TPTB have struggled to know what to do with this character. They tried her as Zainab's wingman, and Zainab moved on to greener pastures. They attempted a love triangle between the odious Kim, her fella played by Chuckie Venn, and Denise, and it never got further than an elicit kiss. They tried a cougar affair between Denise and Fatboy, and that actually worked ... for a few episodes. It also worked last year between her and Kush, until Sean O'Connor decided to push the envelope toward a Mitchell pregnancy.

I blame Lorraine Newman. She came up with the idea of making Denise relevant by associating her with an established Walford family, and made her Ian Beale's fiancée. They were an unbelievable couple with no chemistry whatsoever. When DTC returned to the fold, he brought Jane back to the Beale dynamic, and from that moment on, the way Ian treated Denise verged on subtle racism - from the "vaguely racist" oven gloves he gave her for Christmas, to not wanting her in a family picture advertising Beales' to nudging her, Libby and Patrick aside from the family cortege at Lucy's funeral.

But O'Connor picked up the possibility of linking Denise with an established Walford family and ran with it. DTC planted the "little bomb" of a possible pregnancy as a result of a drunken one night stand Denise spent having a pity party with Phil. 

It didn't have to be.

At the time she discovered her pregnancy, she was heavily involved in another cougar affair, this time with Kush, the son of her best friend, who was, herself, at that time going through a midlife crisis. Instead, O'Connor embraced the idea of making Denise relevant by linking her indelibly with an established Walford family - but not just any family: the Mitchells.

She's having Phil Mitchell's baby, but there's just one slight glitch.

Phil has a wife.

So all through this fiasco, we've been asked to feel sympathy for Denise - oh, because she's so popular with the fanbois. Good actress, my arse! She's got by like so many others - by gurning (her speciality is the bumfaced grimace of disapproval) and by shouting people down. Every storyline has a whiff of romcom or sitcom about it.

Tonight's show centred around the nobility of Denise going through with giving the baby up for adoption - ostensibly, because she wants to proceed with getting her GCSE in English literature (let's hope Michelle doesn't tutor her in grammar), but I wonder how much of this is fear that, not only Phil, but Sharon, will find out.

Sharon was present at her baby shower, and even sat at the table with her in the pub the other night. How can Denise be so fucking shameless? Even when she confessed to Shirley that Phil was the father of her baby, she was more concerned with sparing Shirley's feelings than even thinking about Sharon.

Of course, Sharon is bound to come out the bitch in this situation, even though she's as much a victim in this as Denise. Tonight she told NuMichelle that she knew Phil was messing around when they were separated, because she found the condom he intended on using when he slept with Bumface.

Also, Sharon's avowel tonight that she would "take care of Denise" foreshadowed the fact that she's going to be made out to be the bitch in this instance, when O'Connor should be doing everything in his power to salvage the character of Sharon, an iconic and original character, when her character has been mangled since Simon Ashdown made her subservient to Tanya's friendship, left her stranded at the altar by Jack Branning and popping painkillers. Lorraine Newmant largely ignored her, but DTC drew her into the irredeemable web of people protecting Bobby Beale, and that was totally unforgivable.

I will say this: If a character like Denise has to be linked irretrievably with an established family, especially if the only way to make her relevant is by making her the mother of Phil Mitchell's baby, another in a long line of women who've had Mitchell children - nay, Mitchell boys - then it's time for her to go.

Seriously.

What happens next? Because by all intentions tonight, either Denise will change her mind about the adoption or Snakehead, Kim and the idiot savant Libby will conspire to talk her around. I hated all of that shit tonight about "my grandson being raised by strangers" and Kim spouting statistics about "black boys" being left in social care. (Dimwit, Denise's baby is bi-racial, even though it was obvious he was being "portrayed" by a white baby. Go figure that one). I hated all the emotional blackmail and the bullying, but I knew that eventually we'd see what was supposed to be a touching scene between the martyr Denise and the baby in question.

So what does happen next? With Phil as yet unknowing, he told Sharon, he didn't want any more children, thinking he'd done badly by Ben and Louise. (He has). But Phil doesn't know about this child, and why did Sharon decide, when she knew the baby was being adopted, to tell Phil? I hope she doesn't go off on this Mitchell tangent about family and wanting this child to get to know his family here. I hope the reference made by Phil to Sharon and NuMichelle being a lot like Peggy and Auntie Sal wasn't some sort of foreshadowing.

In apposition to Denise's po-faced bumdom, I still think that Letitia Dean has the most evocatively expressive face on the show. The pain and gried in her face, the sad resignation in her eyes as she watched Honey and the insipid Carmel fuss about Denise as she went off to be induced, was heart-breaking.

If she keeps this baby, I can see Phil bonding with her over it and Sharon and Dennis being shoved aside, because the boy isn't a blood Mitchell, and Sharon isn't the mother of a blood Mitchell. Just like what happened with Wicksy and Cindy when Wicksy was with Sharon. It looks, however, that Sharon is going to fight for her family. I hope she lamps Denise.

This has got to be one of the most unnecessary, trite and unpopular storylines of all time. 

O'Connor should have kept Roxy Mitchell and sent Denise away. For good. With Kim, Libby and the snake-headed mother in tow. Vincent, Patrick and Pearl can stay. The others are toxic.

Weak Women and Open Misogynists. It's nice to see that female man-dependency and open, hateful misogyny is alive and well amongst the younger generation in EastEnders. 

This group of teens was bad enough; then we got Keegan. Another aggressive, Afro-Caribbean male being depicted as an open bully, an ardent misogynist and someone who revels in being tactless and cruel.

Rebecca is a weak, stupid girl. She began the episode by insisting on going to a music school to get a BTech diploma, but Martin and Michelle, enlisted by Martin, work on her to get her to stay at Walford High and get her A-Levels. Since when did Walford High have a Sixth Form? Everyone who lasted beyond GCSEs went to a Sixth Form College. Abi Branning did.

It's true that Rebecca would "have more options" if she stayed in Walford. She'd have more options for hanging around with the unintelligible Shakil and maybe letting him in her knickers again. Interesting that she seemed to be intent on going to the music college, even after Michelle spoke to her, but once she'd encountered the piece of shit known as Keegan, with his highly offensive remarks - about Shakil could do better than Rebecca, again about Louise's supposed frigidity and at last, flippantly asking if Louise was "on the rag."

EastEnders has been on a misogynist bend lately, but they doubled back on that because after that encounter, the silly bitch decides to stay in Walford ... because she'll have more "options." The sly smile she gave as she slinked out of the room away from Martin and Stacey gave us the real reason she wanted to stay in Walford. The stupid girl will never do anything with music. The only ding-dong she wants to play with is Shakil's dick. 

It'll all end in tears. And soon, I hope.

Lordy, Lordy, Look Who's Forty. I'd be concerned about Whitney if I were Lee. Anyone casually watching tonight would have thought her more romantically inclined toward Mick. The gift she gave him for his understated fortieth indicated that. 

She knew that she and Lee were in dire straits financially, and yet, unbeknownst to him, she bought an expensively framed limited edition photo of the Boleyn Ground to present to Mick as his main birthday present. Babe sussed right away that Lee knew nothing about the gift, and for once, she was right in assailing Whitney about the needless extravagance. I was a bit disappointed that she didn't take it one step further and accuse Whitney of being just a tad too fond of Mick for the public eye.

Babe was also right about Whitney frittering away money, and I thought it rich of Whitney to pin the blame of their suffering on Lee, when a lot of what Lee did was to satisfy her expensive tastes. (For two women without a pot in which to piss, Denise and Whitney sure do have expensively manicured nails).

The poor excuse of a fortieth birthday party was a contrivance for Babe to take a well-needed pop at Whitney, who defended herself by saying that whilst Babe hung around like a bad smell, Whitney actually was needed - by Lee, by Mick and by Ollie. 

Big mistake.

You don't do that to Babe.

I still say there will be something brewing with her re Mick. When she looked in on him sleeping off his drunk, I thought for a moment she was going to crawl into bed and cuddle him. 

Slut.



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