Complaining about the lack of realism in EastEnders is like moaning that Monster Munch crisps don't taste of monsters
I'm not entirely certain I can pinpoint the moment I first realised EastEnders isn't a documentary. Maybe it was when Den Watts was assassinated by a bunch of daffodils. Or when he came back from the dead and then got killed again. Or when Steve Owen's mother tried to French-kiss him on her deathbed. Or when Ricky Butcher became a speedway champion for one week. Or when Melanie Healy slept with Phil Mitchell on Christmas Day. Or when Max Branning got buried alive. Or when Janine pushed Barry off a cliff. Or when Janine got so agoraphobic she sat indoors eating dog food. Or when Janine ran over Danielle in a car. Or when Janine framed Stacey by stabbing herself on Christmas Day. Or when Janine slept with Ian Beale and then blackmailed him by threatening to tell his third wife, Laura. Or when Janine slept with Ian Beale and then blackmailed him by threatening to tell his fourth wife, Jane. Or when, while Googling a list of Janine's crimes, I realised Beale had managed to convince four whole women to marry him.
Somewhere along the way I must have twigged that none of these people were real, possibly during the bit at the end where the names of the actors who play them floated up the screen accompanied by theme music.
Contrary to popular opinion, EastEnders isn't set in London, or even Britain, or even the world – it's situated in an absurd alternate universe overseen by a malicious, tinkering God with an hilarious sense of timing. Each wedding, anniversary, national holiday or mid-sized social gathering is visited by major tragedy. The most familiar noise in Albert Square is the sound of party poppers being drowned out by sobbing. Quickly followed by some pulsing electronic drums.
Over the last few weeks God was at it again. Having given both Kat Slater and Ronnie Branning newborn offspring to enjoy, God capriciously decided to kill Ronnie's baby on New Year's Eve. As midnight neared, she wandered the square in a stunned daze, unnoticed by revellers and clutching the body of her deceased child – until, alerted by the sound of Kat's baby crying from an open window, she snuck into the Queen Vic and swapped the two infants, in a scene that looked more like a Tramadol Nights sketch than the heartbreaking drama it was presumably intended to be.
And now there's an entirely predictable storm of protest; predictable, apparently, to everyone except the EastEnders production team, who seem to have failed to anticipate the sheer size of the furore – which is odd, since their job largely consists of hypothesising about all the different ways in which people can unwittingly stumble their way to an acrimonious row.
The usual excuse for any soap opera planning a headline-grabbing plotline is that they're "helping to build awareness" of some social ill, as though the average citizen can only truly come to terms with drug abuse after seeing Phil Mitchell smoke crack.
Of course, you only "build awareness" by depicting events with some degree of accuracy, which is why the soaps often proudly announce that they collaborated closely with charities to ensure that Steve McFadden's portrayal of the dark spiral of addiction would be as harrowingly authentic as possible, especially the bit where he smashed through a door like Jack Nicholson in The Shining and burned the Queen Vic to the ground.
EastEnders would never screen an episode in which Ian Beale has a breakdown and decides to walk around the Square with a dead baby balanced on his head like a hat, although that would "explore the issue" of bereavement and mental health just as effectively as the current child-swap storyline, which is equally unrealistic, yet has to be presented as a hard-hitting study of bereavement because the alternative is to admit that EastEnders is mindless entertainment – with the occasional dead infant thrown in for your amusement.
There's a basic rule in drama that the audience can suspend disbelief only long enough to accommodate one extreme event at a time. A cot death is one extreme. A baby-swap is another. Combining the two events at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve was the scriptwriters' first big mistake. Trying to pull all of this off within the context of a populist soap was the second. A self-consciously weighty one-off ITV drama-of-the-week with an A-list cast and lots of sombre camerawork would probably have got away with it, unless they did something totally crazy such as casting Jedward as the swapped babies.
Still, if broadcasting the storyline was fairly crazy, complaining to Ofcom about the lack of realism in EastEnders doesn't seem much saner – almost on a par with threatening to sue the manufacturers of Monster Munch because their crisps don't taste of monsters.
Nonetheless, the BBC appears to have backed down and the storyline, in a weird reflection of itself, will be laid to rest prematurely. The mad God of Walford originally wanted the zany saga to reach a festive climax next Christmas Day, typically. But now the whole thing will apparently be rewritten to accommodate a viewer-friendly "happy ending".
Yes: that's a cot-death-baby-swap storyline – with a happy ending. Now there's a script meeting I'd like to sit in on.
Charlie Brooker - Guardian
