TV review

Published Monday 23 June 2008 at 14:10 by Harry Venning

After a significant absence, I returned to EastEnders this week to find everything in Albert Square as normal. That is to say, normal for Albert Square. A madwoman called Dr May was running amok with a crowbar, taking hostages, trying to kidnap a baby and blowing herself up in a gas explosion.

What drove her to commit such terrible acts? Who cares? The reassuring thing about EastEnders is that, although the characters may change, their behaviour never does. For example, the last time I looked in on this cheeky cockney community, a husband was being buried alive by his wife.

Truth is, Dr May is mad because it is her turn to be mad, simple as that. Although, to be frank, I can’t remember anybody ever being quite as mad as her.

Towards the end of the episode, Mickey, Dawn and baby Summer had taken refuge in a bedroom, but it was a short-lived sanctuary, as the door soon shattered beneath a hail of crowbar blows. A clear reference to The Shining if ever I saw one. And perhaps, pursuing the theme, the director encouraged Amanda Drew, playing Dr May, to “Nicholson up” her performance. Whatever the reason, we were served up a slice of unadulterated ham, unprecedented even in the annals of Albert Square, and that’s saying something.

Turn down the volume and you could have been watching a German expressionist film of the twenties, as Dr May’s eyes rolled dementedly around like a fairground ride, pausing only to stare maniacally into the middle distance. Drew didn’t so much chew the scenery as swallow it whole, regurgitate it and vomit it all over the viewer.

All subtlety went flying out of the window. As, indeed, did baby Summer in the inspired episode that followed. Thrown from the upper floor of the burning building, Summer was patriotically caught in a Union Jack. Illustrating, once again, EastEnders’ unerring ability to swing between the ridiculous and the sublime.

In the third and final part of Alexei Sayle’s Liverpool, the writer and comic went in search of the legendary Scouse spirit, characterised in popular imagination as a vibrant combination of humour, light fingeredness and belligerent violence. His investigations led him to second-hand record shops, the local radio station, boxing gyms, a stately home, Anfield - both the football stadium and the impoverished district it overshadows - and his mum’s house.

Sayle, not a man prepared to give up the limelight without a struggle, was comprehensively upstaged by his sprightly ninety-something mum Molly .

“Liar! Liar!” screamed Molly as her son tried to pass off parts of his stand-up routine as authentic childhood reminiscences. “I’ll sue!”

Having lived in the city all her life, Liverpool belongs to Molly far more than it does to Alexei, who made no bones of the fact that he got out at the first possible opportunity. But it’s this detachment that has made Sayle such a great guide, being from Liverpool, yet not of it, affectionate without being infatuated, aware of its mythologies but not overwhelmed by them. Plus, Sayle’s sense of humour proved as sharp and surreal as ever.

“Writers lead hard lives, too,” he told a quartet of boxing brothers. “We have to go to HayFest.”

DETAILS

EastEnders - BBC1, Wednesday, June 18, 8pm

Alexei Sayle’s Liverpool - BBC2, Friday, June 20, 9pm