Well good evening all and welcome to another year of bitching and general grumpiness that pervades my life like a relentless dementor. I hope we all had a suitably refreshing New Year (well except anyone who spent New Years where I did of course, anything but peaceful!) but to the rest of youhere’s hoping it was a good one.
I suppose logically though there is only one thing I can really talk of that has truly got me foaming around the chops this past week and that is the furore over the cynical Eastenders plot twist for new year that saw the blonde one who used to be Samantha Janus and looks like her face has been chiselled out of someone much more attractive switching her stillborn baby with that of Kat Slater the modern day Bet Lynch. Now at last count there were, as far as I can recall over 8,000 complaints lodged with the BBC aout this incident, why????? Do these people not comprehend the idea of fiction? This has not actually happened people there’s a handy hint at the end of an episode when a list of people scrolls along the screen not one of whom shares their name with the character they’re playing! Seems to me that if the storyline has engrossed you enough that you actally believe all this is real then you should be commending the BBC for hiring such good quality actors as to make you suspend your disbelief enough to genuinely think all this has happened.
Okay maybe it could be seen as a cynical and exploitative storyline but is that not what these writers are paid for? Would these people prefer Eastenders was more like Lark Rise To Candleford or something “Oh Peggy what’s Phil up to?” “I don’t know Pat but he’s doing it wearing riding breeches, but his stovepipe hat is all askew!” “Oh my we must inform the church elders immediately!” OH COME ON!!!! The only reason any of us watch dramas is pure escapism we know it’s not true you don’t get people watching Spooks going “Hmmm well I’m not certain blowing up London for the 14th time this series is all that appropriate” because that’s what you have come to expect from that show and the same should be true of Eastenders. If you want to watch it all power to you but we all know that soaps and reality shows are the big ticket numbers in terms of viewers hence the writers have to come up with more and more outlandish plot lines, after all this Christmas must be the first one in years without a death in Albert Square and even then it ended up with Janine knifing herself in the gut then limping to the pub and out again (Then again if I got to the pub and found Pat doing karaoke I might be inclined to crawl back onto the street to die as well!).
Perhaps though what is even more cringeing in the BBC response to he pathetic whiners, if we do some (admittedly very unscientific) maths the Eastenders Christmas special was watched by just over 11,000,000 people this year and 8,000 have complained over this storyline, that means that less than 1 in every thousand people who watched Eastenders saw fit to complain and yet the BBC feels the need to pander to these over-zealous middle-Englanders, why? So they won’t watch next year and you’ll have to make to with 10,992,000 viewers instead (Will still beat ITV’s rubbish by a country mile) or, as is more likely, these trogladytes will be busy complaining but still be sure to join in for the conclusion of the storyline, why does the beeb bend over backwards to these psychopaths who have nothing better to do that sit around the breakfast table reading the Daily Mail with their faces turning various shades of puce as they spout bigotry towards their tweed-coated wives and children.
Lets look at some of the other examples of “complaints” the BBC has seen fit to apoloise for. Songs Of Praise being pre-recorded for Easter and Christmas, why? Did it make a difference? Okay if the Easter Sunday service got broadcast on the final Sunday of Advent then I can judge grounds for mild complaint but just because the producers chose to get the big services right we feel this divine need to launch a vitriolic campaign of complaint?
Another complaint (which I loved) was when an emotional episode of Dr Who (I know it’s an oxymoron) came to a close ad BBC ran a trail for the next programme underneath and people felt the need to complain about this? By all means tsk to the person next to about how awful it is but what kind of person reacts to this mildest piece of provocation by writing to the BBC to complain? It’s not like the beeb was broadcasting hardcore pornography across the bottom of the screen it was just a reminder of what was on next, get a grip people!
I suppose what I am ultimately getting at is that if you, as a consumer, feel that a programme has deeply offended you then by all means use the legitimate means of protest but if your complaint is that something you knew full well would be happening (after all this storyline had been in all the papers beforehand) then the only person you can blame is yourself. Look at the most infamous example of all the “Brandgate” affair. After that show was broadcast there were 2 complaints and even of those 2 only 1 actually referred to the now infamous answerphone messages. By the time the hoo-haa had finally abated there were over 30,000 registered complaints now seriously I ask you should we apologise to these people? These are evidently people who became offended after the event as such they either failed to listen to the broadcast and were just somehow “offended by proxy” or, as is more likely, chose to listen again to be offended. If you do this we should not be pandering to you. If I was to walk into your house and beat myself about the head with you rolling pin there would be no justification in me complaining to you that you had left the rolling pin in so easy-to-reach a place, no you placed the offending object there but I went into the event knowing full well what I was doing, if I get hurt then it’s my own damn fault and it’s the same with these moaners.
Ridiculously now the BBC is planning to “end the storyline early” how’s that going to work put the (fictional) baby into a shoebox, hurl it into the canal and move on? People should realise the danger of what complaining does, it stifles the creativity of scriptwriters and maybe Lark Rise To Walford won’t be so very far away and Christmas “explosive” storylines involving Dot going to church without a bonnet and Ian Beale’s exciting new ironmongery business will be the norm!
This week Matt:
- Returned to his desk after the Xmas break to find nothing had changed..... as ever.
- Began planning his 2011 social calendar - so many cultural highlights to look forward to.
- Began to make sense of New Years Eve - Eastenders has nothing on us!
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