My Christmas guest post is by SOMEBODY FAMOUS. His name is Stuart Heritage and he WRITES FOR THE GUARDIAN. Even more importantly, he writes about tele, and he’s written about tele for us, too, so below is something of an exclusive.
(Please comment. Please. He is used to 900 comments on his Guardian X Factor Live Blogs).
Enjoy!
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Christmas is so terribly subjective, isn’t it? Some people define their Christmas by the glass of champagne they wake up to, and others by the glowing look of unbridled glee on the faces of their children as they tear the paper off the gift they’ve been secretly yearning after for months.
But not me.
I define my Christmas by the EastEnders Christmas special.
I’m sorry, but it’s true. Christmas day just isn’t Christmas day unless I can spend between thirty and sixty minutes of it watching a gaggle of bedraggled paupers unleash an uninterrupted torrent of abject misery upon each other. Lord alone knows why this is. It’s either because the slate grey glumness of the EastEnders Christmas special forms an ironic counterpoint to a traditionally joyful day, or it’s because I’m a wanker. The jury’s out on that one, to be fair.
But anyway, look, I love it, so shut up. I’m writing this before Christmas day, so I have no idea what’ll actually happen this year. If the rumours are true then Stacey Slater – driven into a terminal spiral of despair by the revelation that she bludgeoned her rapist to death with a chunk of ceramic exactly a year ago – will hurl herself off a roof onto the frozen pavement below, at which point her skull and entrails will splatter outwards and form the entire lyrics to No Surprises by Radiohead across all of Albert Square. Even better, on New Year’s Eve a baby will die and it’s grief-stricken mother will secretly switch its corpse for another newborn baby because she can’t bear to be alone in the world. Brilliant!
But the question is this: is this really as depressing as it can get? I mean both of these things are unquestionably depressing, but can the writers and producers really look themselves in the eye and truthfully say that they’ve managed to ruin everyone’s Christmas to the best of their ability? Really? Probably not, and that’s why I’ve taken the liberty of putting some ideas together for the 2011 EastEnders Christmas special. Ideally all of these will be put into action, but frankly even one of them would be awesome:
IDEA 1: Phil Mitchell has a crack relapse and shits himself during a discussion about real-life atrocities with Alfie Moon, who has inexplicably contracted millions of wriggling coldsores around his mouth and genitals.
IDEA 2: The Vic burns down. Admittedly The Vic already burns down with such astonishing regularity that it must be effectively uninsurable by now, but this is different. This time, every single EastEnders character is in the pub as it burns down, and they all die. They will exclusively be replaced by weeping agoraphobic orphans with clear emotional issues.
IDEA 3: Ian Beale walks past a glazer’s flatbed truck, probably on the way to a funeral or something, as it explodes. The full episode will consist of nothing but uncomfortable close-ups of razor-sharp shards of red-hot glass slicing through Ian Beale’s torso and face in super slow motion. In, dunno, Rwanda or something.
Oh, you’re welcome EastEnders.
