Eastenders: In Yorke we Trust?

Ever had a bad couple of months that you wished you could just flush down the toilet? If only you were part of a soap opera. Eastenders, to be specific. If you’re just a casual viewer, you might be a little confused at what’s going on at the moment. Since Christmas Day, the soap has seemed barking mad at times. It’s just a readjustment period though, everything is going to be okay.

To understand what’s going on in the world of Albert Square, we’ve got to go back to Summer 2016 in the real world. Dominic Treadwell-Collins exits as executive producer with Sean O’Connor taking the reins. O’Connor was most famous for his work on The Arches. It’s a long running radio drama that gained a lot of praise for a storyline he developed around domestic abuse.

The trouble is that the pace and drama expected of a prime time TV soap is not the same as one that airs on Radio 4. Perhaps the writing was on the wall from then. O’Connor decided that the soap would take a back to basics approach. I was willing to get in on that. I wrote last December that I was excited he was making the soap less fantasy and more realistic.

I stand by that. It shouldn’t be forgotten that he brought in one of the best families to join the square in recent times. The Taylors are a family written off as scum, scroungers and cheats but at their heart, they’re a close knitted unit just trying to get by. They worked because they were given time to fit into the fabric of the square. O’Connor’s mistake all too often was he’d jump far too fast without laying the groundwork. So all of the sudden Denise Fox has no money and can’t even afford a biscuit. It wasn’t bad or unrealistic but it came out of nowhere and so didn’t work. Denise also wasn’t acting in a way that made sense to her character by not reaching out to those close to her. He was choosing social realism over believable characters which reduced its effectiveness.

His treatment of fan favourites was also pretty diabolical. It is true that O’Connor couldn’t help Kellie Bright going on maternity leave therefore requiring Linda to be off screen by last Christmas but the way that the Carter family acted in her absence was just random and unbelievable. The defining feature of the Carter couple was that they would never cheat on each other and then all of a sudden Mick might be shagging his son’s fiancée?

It wasn’t going well. O’Connor seemed to be doubling down. He brought in this slow burn storyline about Max trying to bring down the square. The fact that it was a slow burn wasn’t the problem. Slow burn storylines can work excellently, curating realistic characters reacting to decisions and spiralling into a situation that a few short months ago wouldn’t have made sense. The reintroduction of Wilmott-Brown, the rapist of Kathy Beale, did work very well in one way. It reinvigorated the character of Kathy, making her an indispensable part of the Square once again.

But for every good character decision, we were treated to three or four terrible ones which were to facilitate the Wilmott-Brown storyline. Basically that storyline involved the rich Wilmott-Brown buying up everything in the square so that he could tear them all down and build stylish flats no one there could afford therefore destroying the community spirit of Walford. It’s not a bad storyline but it became all encompassing. For example, an ill thought out plot that had Phil confess to killing Jay’s Dad – who wasn’t who Jay thought he was – was done simply so that Jay would have a reason to sell a plot of land to the son of Wilmott-Brown.

This led to O’Connor almost certainly being fired from his position though the official line is that he left early to focus on films that he is working on. John Yorke, famous for his work on the Who shot Phil? Storyline, effectively replaced him as executive consultant. Whilst his first credited episode was Monday 27^th November, it was over the Christmas period that he really began to make his mark. He did this by systematically undoing all the work that had been set up by O’Connor.

In early December, Wilmott-Brown was suddenly revealed to have a terminal illness that had never been mentioned before. His son, Luke was ‘dealt with’ by Phil. By that I mean that we saw him being thrown into a van by a couple of goons and he was never mentioned again. Wilmott-Brown suffered some type of stroke and his daughter, Sophie, decided to sell back all the deeds to the rightful owners.

This led to a very strange New Year’s episode. Max, whose two daughters fell off the Queen Vic roof on Christmas Day spent the first day of the New Year negotiating the return of deeds to their rightful owners. It didn’t really make sense since he probably should have been at the bedside of his children but it did signal an end to the O’Conor storyline. In one hilarious scene, Max told Jay in one sentence that the stuff about his Dad was all nonsense dreamt up to make him not like Phil. Just like that, the storyline was thrown into the trash.

Things are looking up for Eastenders now. Yorke is now at the point that he’s got a clean slate to paint his own picture. It appears that he’s putting a lot of his efforts into a new storyline focusing on a heist carried out on New Year’s Day which was led by fan favourites. I’m excited to see what he has planned for the year to come. Can we trust in Yorke to restore the Square to its former glory? Only time will tell.