I can make you hate by Charlie Brooker

Author:Charlie Brooker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2012-10-02T05:00:00+00:00

PART SIX

In which EastEnders is revealed to be a work of fiction, Nick Clegg worries about human beings with feet, and a teenager incurs the wrath of the internet for singing a bad song badly.

EastEnders and Monster Munch

10/01/2011

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 Ian 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 a 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, Ronnie 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

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