2 good things

The first is a story I heard on AM yesterday ["Good Morning, I'm Tony Eastley"]. It seems some of the fundo loons in the states, the same ones that re-elected the monkey king, have actually come to their senses and realised that the end of the world is not nigh, and that perhaps, it is not actually their God's will that we should use it like the town bike. Although they have to eschew terms like "environmentalism" because to the untrained ear, that sounds all too similar to "darwinist" or "evolution", they have come up with their own twee term for people who care about their planet [ooh, that might be just to close to evolutionism itself— how does the Bible justify the universe, you know, planets and stuff? Hang on, I've always wanted to know how it explains dinosaurs, too.] and that term is... creation carers. Doesn't that sound like fun? Well it does to me because apparently it wasn't meant to happen like this and it's got Karl Rove screaming down the phones to his moles in the ministries, pleading for them to stop the rot—they can't have the electoral base thinking for itself now can we? Suck dogs' balls Rove.

The second good thing is that tomorrow, Britain's first supersoap Eastenders, turns 20. That's be Feb 19, 1985 it hit the airwaves. And Neighbours is to follow, hitting the double-decade on March 18.

I first came across Easties in Fallowfield in Manchester, sleeping on the couch in some friends' lounge room while she and her flatmates all piled in on Sunday for the omnibus. Oh, what a joy an ominbus is: two-an-a-quarter hours of soap in a row, with no ads! And not just any soap, but the gritty, grimy, depressing lives of a bunch of poor east end sods.

The storyline that made me appreciate the show, lying there hungover in a grotty Mancunian student flat, was the Tiffany Mitchell exit plotline—no driving off a cliff on your wedding day here. What happens is that she finds out that her mum and her husband have been at it by no other medium than overhearing them talking about it on the baby monitor. Yes, the baby monitor. She rushes up the stairs, falls down them, and ends up in hospital, unconscious and badly injured. Did bovver-boy husband Grant push her? Did she fall? Did cuckolding mother Lousie push her? But lo, she doesn't die. She recovers, and is able to leave the hospital on Xmas day, what joy!—the soap opera Chrissie day episode is something of a tradition over there I hear—and so she does. Only to be mowed down by her father-in-law—one of the finest soap characers of all time, Frank Butcher—on his way back "down the mo'away from Manchestahh". Ah, wonderful stuff.

The 20th anniversary double length ep involves two separate murders—Andy Hunter and Dirty Den Watts to breathe their last. It's be the second time for Den, who had been shot multiple times and left for dead in a canal, only to resurface again 11 years later. He surely has to be one of the nastiest, most sinister, lecherous characters soap has seen. And we think Paul Robinson is bad. Pah!