Easties Awards: Part One

Welcome to the Queen Vic, your venue for this evening’s glittering awards ceremony! The bar’s stocked; the tables have been cleaned FOR ONCE, SHIRLEY; Jim’s pissed and his eye’s gone even more wonky than usual; Pat and Yolande are having an evils contest; Sean’s eyeing up some totty and making Miss Hacksaw jealous (shut up); and Genghis hasn’t even got to the spread yet.

Thanks to the wonderful Ms Baroque and Dandelion for their nominations – quite a fantastic selection. Dandelion’s in particular reached back into the heyday of EastEnders, and unfortunately not even Wikipedia can help me out with some of them. Still, much like EastEnders itself, I’ll bluster through and hope it all comes out in the wash (with Dot’s fag ash all over it.)

On with the awards! These are going to be done over a number of posts, as chances are proceedings will be interrupted by a fight and the QV bust being swung at someone.

Category #1: Silliest Brookside-esque Storyline

EastEnders is great at stupid storylines. Isn’t that the whole point of soaps? Of course, they’ve not reached Brookside stringing-up-paedos-in-the-street levels yet, but give it time. In order for an EE storyline to reach the dizzy heights of being completely insane it must tick a number of boxes, including rampaging on for at least six months, having more twists and turns than a twisty turny thing, getting the inept Walford coppers involved and Pat doing some amateur sleuthing, preferably with the hindrance of a comedy sidekick such as Billy or Genghis.

Nominations for this category include:

1. The nobbling of the annoying Saskia with an ashtray, subsequent breakdowns of those involved, boring court case and too many scenes featuring Paul Nicholls rotting in prison wearing a netball sash.

2. Max and Stacey. Balding shyster who can’t keep his plonker in his pants ignoring his hot up-for-it wife in favour of gobby vodka swilling teenager caked in Collection 2000. Completely unbelievable, and it’s not even over with yet.

3. Dawn Swann pretending to be Ian Beale’s wife for sinister, Masonic Lodge type reasons that I can’t even remember, meeting smooooth, strangely hairlined Rob, shagging his brains out, getting pregnant, finding out the smoooothster is married to the very nice new GP, very nice new GP finding out about that her patient is knocked up by her husband, going completely batshit crazy, threatening to perform a caesarean with a butter knife and getting taken away to a bouncy room by those inept coppers. Then we all had to suffer the insufferable Carly Wicks singing songs from Annie during the labour. I felt like I’d been in labour for nine months after sitting through this storyline.

4. Mental, wife beating Owen kidnapping dorky tween Squiggle (sorry, sorry, Libby – we don’t want a Button style strop on our hands) and essentially trying to kill her, for reasons that even after a trip to Wikipedia I am unsure of. As ever, the inept coppers eventually turned up after what seemed like years of failing to get involved and the baddie was arrested. They all lived happily ever after, except for Libby who then had to move in with KEVIN “Parklife” WICKS!, and Owen, who is presumably now spending his days playing Boggle with various inmates in the House of Batshit.

And the winner is (drumroll please while Peggy replenishes various glasses of Unspecific)……..

It’s Dawn, Rob and May! It kind of had to be, seeing as the episode with the threatened caesarian was the one that inspired this glittering ceremony. To quote, er, me: “[it] included all the traditional soap stalwarts of hysteria, insanity, tears, blood and scalpels.” Starting off as a comedy storyline based around Beale’s relentless social climbing and pottering off on various tangents along the way (including an obligatory real girlfriend turns up, charms the pants off everyone and Beale looks like an arse scene) it suddenly turned itself on its head and viewers were left scratching their heads wondering why all this blacking-one’s-own-eye capery had been going on if May and Rob had been in cahoots all along. Jimmy Corkhill would be proud.

Next up: Category #2: The Phil Daniels Award for Shoddy Acting!