EastEnders

Axing most of the young cast does not help. We have seen so many young characters leave, especially Johnny Carter, who I always liked in the soap. As someone who does not watch soaps much, I tuned back into Eastenders over Christmas, and dear God it looked like I was not missing much. The Christmas Day ending was the best in the whole Christmas period I watched.

Corrie seem to have a lot more young characters than EastEnders right now, and that's a soap that's always been traditionally seen as trending older.

I agree with the points about the Wilmott Brown storyline. It did seem to finally be getting good at the start of December, just after SOC's name disappeared from the credits, and I thought that the new regime were bringing it to a climax...but then it just completely petered out. To make an audience sit through that for nearly a year and then not do justice to it is insulting, far worse than the odd storyline being binned which we had during previous turbulent times.

In particular the Jay's Dad story resolution was very poor, given Jay didn't seem particularly bothered, and there was no explanation as to why Max did it in the first place. There is also no particular reason why Max would have been keen to get the Carters out of the Vic as he had no history with them, as I think was even touched upon in one scene between Mick and Max last month.

I can see the intention with the Aidan storyline was to quickly kick off new strands for some key cast members - Mick with the sort-of-rescuing of the Vic (although why that wasn't covered by the same miaculous property resolutions as everyone else seemed to get, I'm not sure), Billy losing his job, Vincent handing over the Albert, Phil having the money stolen by Sharon (which is largely still to come in terms of resolution) and reintroducing Mel. But the original heist was just terribly done, and confusingly plotted. Let's not even mention Halfway, who some suspect was supposed to be Lee returning given how he was given a job at the Vic and went on dates with Whitney despite shooting Mick.

The saddest thing unlike the 2004 kidney-gate iffy period is that no-one seems to care now. There hasn't been a massive amount of comment in the press about how the show has gone to the dogs, and it's a real chore to sit through now.

I hear they've been popping hotpots.

Betty will be spinning in her grave.

Did you never wonder why Betty's Hotpots were so popular?

Hot pot . It's right there in the name.

Betty's been selling reefer?

Been a while since anything TVforum-noteworthy happened on Eastenders, but I wonder if this counts...

A mobile phone number appeared on a phone onscreen on tonight's episode, at about 10 minutes in, but it wasn't in the Ofcom-reserved-for-drama 07700 9xxxxx range. It seems to be an active O2 number with a mailbox. Any ideas why the BBC would use a real number? It wasn't part of the big stabbing story that's happening this week.

Possibly for realism, possibly for a quick, easy and cheap way of visualising a phone ringing without having to pay a graphic designer / video editor / post production person to simulate a phone ringing graphic, especially one so obviously Android.

07732 056723

The number will just be a pay as you go SIM that's been removed from the phone now. Wonder how many texts and voicemails it has now though!!

PAYG Numbers get repurposed don't they if they're inactive for a few months?

If the person who gets that number still has access to the voicemail that'll be interesting.