A collection of writing

This article was originally featured on StudentPunch.com, which is a student online magazine that I write TV articles for. I will be archiving all of my articles that that were featured on Student Punch— Andrew.

Recently, for the first time in its 25 year history, Eastenders broadcasted a live episode of the show. Yours truly spent the week watching the show in the lead up to the live episode, as well as the episode itself, to see if this was a special event in television history, which is what I kept hearing/reading before the show had aired.

I have a loose knowledge of Eastenders, for reasons that I am unsure of, so I managed to pick up the story quickly enough for the week, so by the end of the week, I was fully up-to-date with the events unfolding on the show. Firstly, the show throughout the week consisted of completely convoluted stories in order to hype up the live show approaching. Naturally, as a British soap, the storylines are, of course, completely unrealistic, especially when they have a ‘big’ storyline that they are embarking on. The live show was the big reveal of Archie’s (somebody who was murdered a few months ago) killer, so in order to create tension, the shows during the week were just building and building each of the potential killers up, making them all just as plausible as the next. Obviously, they would never want to hint at the true killer before the big reveal, but some of the things that happened in order to give them all equal standing were ridiculous: for instance, somebody tries to set somebody else up and so the show points to that person as the killer and the only hint that it gives us is that this person wears woolly gloves, so, naturally, each of the prime suspects starts wearing similar gloves from that point on. Yes, tension must be created, but come on!

Another thing that Eastenders highlighted during the entire week was that the soap was approaching an anniversary. There were several characters that made a re-appearance this week, under the guise of a wedding, that were thrown in to mainly serve as a memory of times gone by. Given the circumstance of the wedding, this all fits in contextually, but, unfortunately, this ‘nostalgia effect’ is made too obvious in a scene during the live show when Ian and Dot, two of the oldest-serving characters, watch an old homemade video from the early years of the soap. This moment was meant to be emotional for the characters, and perhaps any long-standing fans, but the writers’ true intentions were so transparent throughout this scene that they might as well have flashed a message up on the screen along the lines of “Happy Anniversary, Eastenders!”

Moving on to the live show itself and, honestly, it wasn’t that bad. The best thing I could say about it is that it was an episode of Eastenders, but that statement also happens to be the worst thing about it too. There were no major mistakes that occurred throughout the live show, which is impressive. I noticed a few camera focusing issues, and a few actor mistakes, but nothing that the casual viewer would notice. The acting, which is what the episode really tried to focus on by having very intimate scenes, was acceptable throughout. The solid production of the show, however, is made less impressive once you started to notice a pattern: the scenes never lasted for too long and would constantly switch around in a rotation, which clearly reduced the chances of any mistakes occurring, which is understandable, but, again, very obvious to anybody paying enough attention. Apart from this, though, it was just like an episode of Eastenders, and the bearing of it being live really had no long-lasting effect. In fact, because the actors had already shot the episodes that were to directly follow the live episode, it was clear that the story was going to tame down again and not deal with the specific issues raised in the live episode.

I think, in the end, the live episode was a success for the show itself. 16+ million people tuned in to watch the show at one point or another. The live show also got people talking about Eastenders again, raising the show’s profile and raising a bit of money too. However, the live show was not anything special outside of the Eastenders world, and I’m sure the event will be completely forgotten about soon enough, and, instead, the monotony element of the soap will take back its rightful place.

The original article can be found at http://studentpunch.com/eastenders.html