Hed: Going Back to Walford
By A.S. Berman
Stepping off the double-decker omnibus of the mind, what struck me most about my return to the world of Albert Square wasn't the sea of new faces that I encountered, but the many I recognized from years ago. It had been nearly 10 years since I left the Walford Gazette-my first professional writing job-and ceased eavesdropping on the lives of those in Walford so as to finally begin a life of my own.
In July, Editor/Publisher Larry Jaffee suggested I watch a couple of recent episodes that he'd taped in New York, curious to see what the Walford of today looked like to someone who had not seen every seismic shift that had gotten it to the state it now finds itself in.
What I expected to see was the same old plotlines: a Mitchell in trouble, somebody sleeping with somebody else's wife, a Robbie Jackson-like character pimple-deep in some comic relief subplot-repeat until 30 minutes has passed. What I found was a storyline that hit uncomfortably close to home.
When I switched EastEnders off for the last time in 1996 or thereabouts, Frank Butcher had just returned to Albert Square, Arthur Fowler had died in prison, and my own life was just starting to get interesting. At 24, after three years of writing for and laying out the Walford Gazette and British Television magazine, I landed a reporting gig at The Journal Newspapers in the Washington, D.C., suburbs.
Within a few months, instead of watching car-lot arsons and murders take place on the Elstree Studios lot, I was checking them out firsthand in my own neck of the woods as part of my job.
In the intervening years, I went to work as a writer and editor for USA Today and got married, tuning in to the show once or twice when I could find it. WETA's constant fiddling with the schedule had always made finding the program something of a challenge.
During this time, my life, as lives are wont to do, got more complicated. It was a lesson I had learned well, watching life unfold in Albert Square.
When I sat down to watch EastEnders again in July, I did so camped out in the living room of a sublet that I'd managed to finagle for the summer, waiting out a six month separation before qualifying to file for divorce. The furniture around me was strange, the town was strange, and most of my life was crammed in a 10 x 10 storage unit a few miles down the road.
During my separation, I'd found myself increasingly dipping into old interests from the past: music from my high school days, books I hadn't read for a while, etc. It seemed only fitting that I should return, if only for a couple of episodes, to a show that had been such a large part of my life at one time.
Dipping into the first episode, I saw the familiar face of Natalie Price and had to smile. During her brief stint on EastEnders in the '90s, she'd been one of my favorite denizens of Albert Square. This probably had as much to do with the time I interviewed actress Lucy Speed for the Gazette as anything else. Her admission that she and her mates used to frolic around the Albert Square set after hours had always led me to smile when I saw her in a serious scene onscreen thereafter.
In this most recent episode, it quickly became apparent that Natalie was:
a) in the club (not surprising)
b) married to Barry Evans (very surprising, indeed) and,
c) unhappy (never surprising for those in Walford).
As the episode unfolded, I quickly relearned the rhythm of the show: that flitting fly-on-the-wall casualness in Walford wherein the camera never stays with one group of people for more than five minutes. I'd forgotten just how effective that technique was for moving an episode along.
After Natalie, there came a parade of new faces: Lisa (a pleasant surprise to see Press Gang's Julie all grown up), Terry, Margaret, Janine (good heavens, is that Frank's girl?) among them. But there were also a number of familiar ones: Sonia, Ian, Mark, Pauline, Dot Cotton, Phil, and...what had they done to Sharon? (Certainly I realize Britain's in the common market now, but is that any reason to do Letitia Dean up as a German serving wench? Hasn't the poor girl suffered enough?)
Life remained a series of ups and downs in the Square. Phil being Phil was mixed up in an upcoming court trial, Ian was trying to launch another entrepreneurial endeavor in the form of a traveling fish n' chips wagon. And Mark, ever the master of the slow burn, seethed when Phil swung by to talk to wife Lisa about the aforementioned trial. I was amazed to see that during this scene, actor Todd Carty, hunch-shouldered and unshaven, resembled Bill Treacher in an oft-printed publicity still from around the time that Arthur was wrestling with a mental breakdown in 1985.
But it was Natalie's storyline that I couldn't get past. Jilted by Ricky years back and still obviously affected by her selfish, resentful mother, the girl who had first appeared in Walford in a Raggedy Ann outfit that sartorially summed up her existence thus far, had opted to marry bumbling-but-unthreatening Barry Evans.
Now she was three months along and, as she told her doctor, felt like "this alien's invaded my body and I just want it to go away.... Everyone's telling me how natural this is and how great it's going to be but I just don't feel that way."
I turned the tape off and looked around the living room that wasn't mine.
One of the things that sparked my separation and the divorce to follow was my wife's desperate desire to have a child, and my equal desperation to avoid parenthood at all costs.
Hitting PLAY again, I recognized it all: Barry's enthusiasm, Natalie's depression, and the countless paeans friends and strangers constantly sing to parenthood. One scene struck me as particularly familiar.
Natalie is walking through the Square, attempting to come to terms with what she's feeling, perhaps even trying to talk herself into having the child after all. At that moment she happens upon a mother trying to rein in her own screaming brood, and the look on Natalie's face tells you that she realizes then that this isn't a case of nerves, it's a complete rebellion of the soul at the very idea of becoming a parent. I'd seen that look a few times before. In the mirror. Certainly things have changed in Albert Square since I last sat glued to the set nearly a decade ago. The plotlines have gotten slightly more daring (the Kit/Zoe/Uncle Harry relationship one-ups the Michelle/Dirty Den/Vicki familial train wreck nicely), and there are a few more incidences of grievous bodily harm than I remember.
The one thing that hasn't changed is EastEnders' ability to reflect the truism that there are really only three states of life: We are either wading through a crisis, have just emerged from one, or are about to be plunged into another. Yet it also shows us that our neighbors are in precisely the same boat, which somehow makes it all bearable, and our perseverance, in the end, that much more beautiful.
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