| |
|
Do you actually/have you ever watched it regularly, Tom? because it doesn't sound like it.
Basically I think this is bollocks but to avoid trollishness, I'll have a go at explaining why.
(Gypsy, the thing you're talking is, I suspect, Shameless which I might argue is a much better candidate for Tom's pornography thesis.)
How on earth is Eastenders romanticising anything? It's depressing, people have horrible times, every time a cliche of 'we all pull togevver round ere' is set up, which it *is* guilty of doing pretty often, it's trashed as something else falls apart.
Is the portait of life a la Albert Square one that *anyone* wants to step into?
So, to you it's damned if it does portray aspirational/connectivity-provoking elements, as presumably this is pornographic, romanticising and sucks the plebs into its evil web.
But it's damned if it doesn't, as it pornographically makes its characters miserable for our enjoyment.
And this second is the nature of a hell of alot of television, comics, films, etc. How about Chris Morris/Jam? Or Human Remains? Marion and Geoff? Alan Partidge? The Office?
What's the difference? Are they all pornographic? So why use Eastenders as your example. What's distinctively 'immoral' about it?
These fictional characters are driven by their relationship to money, sex, family, love, location, power, jobs, study etc... Which are things that no real people ever relate to, oh no. Please note that I'm not saying I think it's realistic.
So what if the pace is turned up rather, we don't tend to enjoy watching television that accurately reflects the slow/uneventful pace of most of our lives minute-by-minute, oddly enough. Again, name me shows that operate on a long-term basis that don't do that. We'd die of boredom otherwise. And it's a general rule that we find grim things more interesting, that's not Eastenders fault, any more than it's
And people do move on/escape, it's just, again a soap convention(presumably due to production costs), we don't follow them when they do. They pass out of the show's purlieu when they do.
Good things do happen. We had a person who'd desperately wanted to get into their chosen career getting into college and then passing exams, an ongoing will they/won't they couple finally spit it out and become a happy couple...
Basically, I think you're waaaaay overstating this, and doing yourself out of some potentially useful arguments as to why Eastenders is crap along the way. Or yr critique might be better applied to the soap genre in general, which as Flowers points out has limitations of all sorts, and pops up in varying media.
Me, I like it, on and off. The quality of writing/acting varies incredibly, and when bad it's awful, but when good it can be some of the best British drama on TV.
I think this is a soapsnob thing, to a huge extent. I also think you're making some horrendously patronising assumptions about why people might watch it, and making class distinction alot simple than it actually is. |
|
|
