The soap to end them all

This column is about Eastenders.

I thought I’d mention it right at the start so that straight men can turn the page, just as they walk out of the room when they walk into it to find a red-faced Phil Mitchell bickering in The Queen Vic, and just as they switch channels when they hear that signature tune, which is a siren call to large numbers of women who drop everything between 2015 hours and 2045 hours – unless they live in the sort of household where there is a television set in the kitchen and supper can be fixed while Tanya walks out on Max after the bailiffs come calling.

Eastenders is not quite in the Dallas league. Twenty-five years ago we watched Dallas because there was precious little else to look at on Xandir Malta, but mainly because that soap about the lives and loves of a family of oil-magnates in Texas had taken the world by storm.

Dallas was everywhere, in all the newspapers and magazines. When J R Ewing was shot, the international coverage was like that of a real-life news event. I still watch Dallas sometimes on Hallmark, mainly for the childish thrill of seeing Pam and Bobby, Sue Ellen and Miss Ellie in colour rather than dull old black and white, and also to wax nostalgic about the clothes: the all-in-one jumpsuits in royal blue silk with what dressmakers used to call a ‘self’ pattern, the tight white jeans which fastened above your belly-button, the big hair and bigger earrings, the swim-suits cut straight up from the inner thigh to the waist, and best of all, the large telephones brought to the restaurant table (“A call for you, Mister Ewing”) at the end of a roll of cable.

I look at the plain wicker furniture dumped straight onto the untreated ground outside a ranch-house that looks like something which might sell for redevelopment in Marsascala, at the green-and-white striped awnings and the really basic swimming-pool, and I wonder at the fact that the whole world revelled in the glamorous way of life of the 1980s Texas zillionaire.

Eastenders doesn’t get anywhere near that kind of coverage. It airs four nights a week. It has run for 25 years so far. The cast of characters conspicuously lacks glamour and inhabits a constricted world centred round the same few houses, one public house, one Indian restaurant, one café, and a beauty salon – though the bailiffs have just pulled this last one apart after the owner’s husband, a small-time cheat (and what’s more, one with red hair), lied, stole and slept his way to the bottom.

Also, Eastenders is peculiarly English. There is no way it is ever going to cross cultures – though it strikes a cultural chord in this former colony.

And do we love it, ladies? Yes, we do. For half an hour every evening from Monday to Thursday (and with a full run of the week’s offerings between 1000 hours and midday on Saturday morning, just in case you’ve been out in the week or were otherwise interrupted by men being sarcastic) we’re glued to that screen, watching strangely familiar people bitch, yell, scream and howl their way through life.

Unlike those South American soaps in which impossibly beautiful people swan around in patently false scenarios, unlike those Maltese soaps in which the dialogue is stilted and the clothes worn by the characters are nothing like the clothes worn in real Maltese life, Eastenders is so very……..Maltese.

Yes, Maltese. Men and women in Eastenders dress like men and women in Malta. They behave like people in Malta, too. We sometimes forget just how much the Grand Harbour community and its immediate neighbours have in common with certain aspects of British social culture.

Eastenders is synthesised, whittled down, paraphrased for consumption in small bites, but we can relate to it in a way that we just can’t relate to soap operas featuring Italians living an Italian life, or Americans living an American life, and still less Brazilians living the high life in Rio.

Dallas we watched as spectators sitting on the outside, through a glass wall. With Eastenders, we can get involved. We know what they’re talking about, what they’re getting so upset about. We can relate to their communication style. It’s normal in a way that many Maltese people understand it – just oh, so exaggerated because it’s designed to make us feel better about our own lives.

Maltese Eastenders aficionados have just one complaint: that BBC Entertainment’s schedule is two weeks behind that of BBC 1, so during a really ‘hot’ run we’ve got to log onto the internet, to all those sites where Eastenders is discussed, to find out what happens next, when it has happened already.

Because of this, we don’t get to share in that great British tradition of watching the Eastenders Christmas episode to find out who gets killed on Christmas Day, when one of the key characters is invariably dispatched dramatically to the afterlife. This year, or so the internet tells me, it’s Archie Mitchell. This episode, still to air on BBC Entertainment, drew 45.9 per cent of Britain’s total television audience a couple of days ago.

That, I imagine, would be all the women in Britain, bar some, while all the men left the room in irritation and headed for the turkey sandwiches.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.