Include me out, Eastenders
I HAVE endured many indignities from Britain’s most popular TV soap but the Granny Who Needs A Wee is one tick too many on the Eastenders diversity list.
The show’s creators bend over backwards to be “inclusive”, showcasing ethnic minorities and all manner of social and health problems in stories of murder, deceit and fractured love lives that make Albert Square the misery capital of the UK.
There are tales to make the most tortured lives of viewers seem like a bed of roses by comparison…
A councillor has vanished after being poisoned by a friend whose son he left to drown at a boat party. A convicted killer son of the square’s gangster-in-chief (three times married, seven lovers, three children, one of whom tried to shoot him dead) is set to marry a gay police officer. One of the Square’s many “mouthy cows” is behind bars, wrongly accused of causing another to have a miscarriage by pushing her downstairs. The prisoner’s lawyer, however, is a free man, despite having beaten his wife to death, strangled the bisexual client he framed for a crime and thrown a “grass” under a train.
The mother of a Down’s Syndrome girl is in love with the young man her ex-husband treated as a son. An undertaker is trying to find a surrogate mum, a schoolgirl has run away from home rather than burden her hard-up dad, and a bipolar neighbour is dying of cancer.
A woman who gave her son up for adoption has him back after the adoptive parents died in a car crash and the old West Indian gent she thought was her father has a son with schizophrenia. The publican is married to an alcoholic. He’s discovered the (deaf) daughter who had been kept a secret by the social worker who abused him as a child.
And a Sikh mum who sent her son to prison with lies because she disapproved of his girlfriend has since slept with the boyfriend of her daughter, who’d previously had a relationship with a lesbian Muslim.
Hardly surprising that there’s no room on the scriptwriters’ inclusivity list for that cultural oddity, the happy straight couple with two children born in wedlock.
I can forgive them for all of the above, and more. But did they really have to introduce a bladderbusting old lady this week? The granny had only just turned up at the gay cop’s home when she headed for the loo, saying: “I need to wet my lettuce, that coffee’s gone straight through me.”
Ew, I thought. And then she returned with the news that “you can’t beat three-ply, it’s like being tickled with a feather”.
I can do without that vision over my fish and chips, thank you very much.