End of a Mitchell

I'd read the reviews and people had warned me, but nothing could really prepare me for my first sight of crack-addicted Phil Mitchell. Joining EastEnders for the post Queen Vic conflagration to see Phil transfigured fully into a Klingon I searched wikipedia for the alien hybridisation plotline that I'd been missing out on.

Sadly I was missing out on nothing so preternatural, which is a pretty achievement for a show that bears fewer causal relations with the world than your average episode of Star Trek or Doctor Who. This is, after all, a programme in which child abusers are routinely transformed into the comedic light relief after a few months and which recently had a character so evil, he turned Peggy Mitchell into a robot.

EastEnders gets everything the wrong way around. In the real world the tiny differences (who left the milk out, who laughed inappropriately at somebody's girlfriend) are the causes for all-out war; whereas the really big things (who's got a crack addiction, who's been sleeping with somebody's wife, who kidnapped so-and-so's daughter and then blackmailed thingumabob's family because whatsherface is actually a man and is also thingy's dad) cause human beings, at most, to sit around awkwardly discussing the weather or the carpet. Rarely if ever do the important things led to the sort of apocalyptic confrontations seen week after week on your average soap opera.

So rather than Phil's crack habit being the cause for some discrete coughs and tangential conversation openers, it somewhat more improbably leads to an inferno of such intensity not even the powers of the diminutive tribal elder, Peggy, could defeat it. Instead she was left squawking and flapping about like a canary in a mining disaster.

They threw all the pyrotechnics at the demise of the Queen Vic, the realisation of which played out about as authentically as the crack addiction that precipitated it – which, in spite of all the apparent research and involvement of various charities, basically involved a red-faced Phil vigorously rubbing his arms whilst listening to The Who. McFadden, bless him, has all the nuance of a twelve year old playing a drunk in a Gang Show sketch.

EastEnders would like to be a dark, Dickensian depiction of working class London. The first episode even opened with the discovery of a body, a modern day Our Mutual Friend. But the demands of being a continuing serial with no endpoint always work to defeat this possibility. Peggy should have roasted, screaming Lear-like at the flames. Instead she wanders off, tracked by a wobbly handheld camera to a gooey synth, destined to return when the ratings haemorrhage. Soap operas can never really be good TV because good TV shows will always finally die.

But if it does transpire that Phil Mitchell is incubating an alien baby and has designs of terraforming Walford then I'll start watching immediately.

Related Posts