EASTENDERS - A POST-TRAUMATIC MEMORY

Ever feel like you’ve been landed on the wrong planet? God knows I was!

I’ve never found soap-operas particularly good viewing, not when involving chaps on horseback in tweed, nor desperate and insufferably dull housewives. But the sordidness confronting me on watching EastEnders surpassed even my worst expectations - and that was some ten years ago. Or rather, it took me all of ten years to recover and get over its post-traumatic wretchedness. Less inspirational a setting or more narrow a space for imagination cannot be imagined. Certainly, one place in dire need of ethnic cleansing is Albert Square, the administrative headquarters of this particular Soap.

Pardon my hubris, but so far as the male cast are concerned, all I
remember is a couple of shavepate potato-headed gets who posed as the local
domestic heartthrobs - something, and here I mean absolutely no offence,
resembling a pair of anthropoid apes. Nor do you have to change a Chimpanzee's
brain pattern at all for it to discern that EastEnders portrays the worst of all
possible worlds on this here planet of the apes. And why, for the life of me,
anybody would want to wallow, on a daily basis, it in all its grimy
manifestations and indescribable piggery, is entirely beyond me.

But who am I to be picky?

I always thought soaps were all about escapism, not intellectual
bondage. The moral side of it does not bother me particularly, but this curious
borderline oppression inevitably has its effects on the public’s mind, which
then becomes further impregnated with the bigoted, limited outlook of the East
End community with their pro-alcoholic and anti-social aberrations. Wittingly or
unwittingly, the human being is here revealed in his ultimate dissipation.

So, why the hell should I be sympathetic?

Bondage, as you may not know, is a matter of neural synapses and
altered psychological states - not too difficult to either implement or inflict
by a director with the requisite gift of loathsomeness and the basic touch of
hidden dereliction. In its most effective form, it is an ideology that perverts
reality. In fact, studies have revealed that unconscious cultural assumptions
and prejudices emerge from such sordid social serializations. And this addictive
pattern is superimposed electronically on the matrix of your frontal lobes,
while at the same time you are drawn more and more deeply into the virtual life
- with the result that your horizon narrows until it seems to fill the whole of
your daily existence. Which particular condition, incidentally, was well
described by the excellent Gordon McCabe when - in a different
context - he concluded that...

“...The internal system begins to decay and fail. The reproductive
drive shrivels. The layers of linguistic understanding erode, and eventually
even the kernel of self-awareness becomes brittle. Thought evaporates, and only
feeling and experience remain. At the end, you are without knowing that you are.
Beyond, there is nothing.”

And so EastEnders grinds on for another indistinctive, unmemorable
issues...

Dreamy