Catharsis in Walford

Another week in the Square begins; Ronnie (right) is still holding the baby and the Moons are about to bury the dead infant that they believe is their own. And in the real world actress Samantha Womack is apparently giving up the role of Ronnie because the reactions of people to her in the street have been ruining her life, and media arguments continue about the veracity and poor taste of the story-line. Apparently the BBC, bowing to pressure, are to cut short the story of the changeling baby in the spring.

What nonsense all this is. The most unexpected people suddenly stop watching the programme, or write letters or post their ire on websites. People are upset to find this sort of thing in their living-rooms, and Mumsnet is raging. What's going on?

Classically, the purpose of drama - and particularly of tragedy - is catharsis: the purging of pity and terror. You watch the drama unfold, you become involved, you suspend disbelief, you weep, rage, gasp, feel fear and relief - and by the end, if it's been well done, you feel wrung out, devoid of all emotion. Judged by this set of criteria, EastEnders has got it about right, I'd say - except that people have forgotten the rules.

A few weeks ago I watched Patrick Stewart as Macbeth, in a strangely bleak production of Shakespeare's tragedy. For anyone who has forgotten the plot, Macbeth, a soldier, acts on the urgings of some strange women and murders his king. He then becomes king, but fears his best pal Banquo may suspect, so has him bumped off. He is more than somewhat annoyed that the inept thugs who do this for him fail to murder Banquo's wee boy. Later he has the wife and children of one of his former friends horribly murdered in their house as the children are getting ready for bed. That last bit is particularly horrid. I wasn't aware of cries of horror and demands that the play should never be put on again.

Or what about Hamlet, whom Shakespeare has plotting to murder his uncle for the whole length of a long play? In the course of trying to find the perfect moment, Hamlet bumps off the father of his girlfriend without knowing or caring who he is, sends his two best chums from school to certain death in a foreign country and acts in a totally unsuitable way towards his silly mother. Do people write angry letters about the portrayal of life with a step-father?

Course they don't. It's only a play, silly. So why do they think EastEnders is any different? Ronnie has been an unstable character for years - of course she's not going to get to be happy and fulfilled. Nor is she going to accept her lot if there's a chance of doing the dirty on someone else - we know this; we've been prepared for it. No-one would leave an hours-old baby in its cot in the care of its grandpa? Well yes, they would. People are wary of passing around a newborn - there's a sort of mystique, a fragility that binds a new baby to its mother, and if the mother is suddenly taken ill it's an alarming prospect for even the most gung-ho stranger to look after this tiny infant. And it was Hogmanay, and they were all drinking and Alfie is good-hearted but inept and Charlie has never been the most savvy of men.

If I were an EastEnders producer, I'd be thinking I'd succeeded here. Everyone's talking about it, it's on the news programmes and radio chat shows and in the serious Sundays as well as the red-tops. What more could they ask? So people seem to think it has to fulfil a public service role and show bereaved Ronnie behaving well and bravely - where's the mileage in that? This way, the story has legs. Jessie Wallace gets to act her socks off. It's not real life, whatever people have come to assume. It's a play. Fiction. Drama. Either watch it, or hit the remote.

THE END

Controversial nativity?

I was looking for an illustration to this post when I came upon this story. Apparently the BBC production which has just ended, The Nativity, is being attacked as being anti-Jewish. I didn't clock that, but after wondering early in the week if this drama was going to work, despite the appealing casting of Mary and the atmospheric setting, I found tonight's climax extremely moving and well done.

I suppose the difficulty is that the story is so well known. How do you explore the characters of people who have been household names for 2,000 years? And we know the ending, don't we? How do you surprise and grip an audience with the best known story in the Western world? (I think I'm being careful here). In the end, I think they did it by concentrating on the humanity of Mary and Joseph, on Mary's extreme youth and Joseph's understandable misgivings. All these dreams - who among us wouldn't say "It was only a bad dream" and sulk off? Did you not find yourself begging Joseph to take Mary's hand as she begged him? Did you not sit up in your seat and will them to find somewhere to stay, even though you knew they would? Suffer through that labour in the filth of the stable? Smile "At last" as Joseph reached for Mary at the moment of birth?

There were moments that took me outside the circle of the drama: I couldn't take that quietly-spoken Irish Gabriel, and I wanted wings like drifted snow and eyes as flame, not to mention the heavenly host. I kept spotting Tucker under the admirable strength of one of the Magi, and I marvelled at the awfulness of Herod with his pale eyes and the ghastly sweating illness that perhaps Art Malik might have cured if he'd still been at Holby City. But these are the dangers of all dramatic production, and my willing suspension of disbelief kicked in with a vengeance tonight.

And I loved the gradual convergence of planets and star to form that wonderful celestial light at the critical moment, shining down into the mess and confusion of a shed full of troubled shepherds and men who had travelled such a long way. This birth was hard and bitter agony for us ...


Maybe the controversy arose because there is no way of telling this story and making it blandly acceptable to everyone.

Grim occupation

What a powerful drama Occupation (BBC1, this week) has been - and what good actors we have in this country. I don't know which aspect of the three-parter struck me most forcibly - the edgy, hand-held camera work, the bleak realism of the scenes set in the UK, the evocation of emotion kept under control until that control snapped under the tension - but the overall result had me gripped, tearful and shocked at what we do to people.

I thought for the umpteenth time how impossible it is for soldiers to return to what the rest of us call normality, how unreal civilian life must seem, how difficult it is for their families - in fact, how impossible it is that soldiers should have families at all, given the lives they have to lead. And it makes no difference where or when that soldiering takes place - after reading Conn Iggulden's excellent "Emperor" series I felt that the soldiers who served with Caesar in Gaul must have felt lost among the back streets of Rome.

Much of my recent thinking has been about the volunteers in the trenches of World War 1, but I can't help wondering if all soldiers see and experience things which make them different for the rest of their lives - if they survive. I always knew there were things my father never told me about his war in the Western Desert, and by the time I was sufficiently mature to ask the questions he was no longer there to answer them. But I feel the questions returning after this week. Can I find a soldier who will anwer them?

Surviving Survivors

I wasn't sure that I wanted to watch Survivors on BBC last night. I was riveted to the original 1975 series - or two series, I recall, which ran till 1977 - and had recently had the joy of revisiting it on DVD. To be sure, the characters in the original now seem amazingly posh, with the occasional roughneck showing up as socially unequal, perhaps possessed of some helpful attribute but never to become a member of the inner circle, and the leading female, Abby Grant (Caroline Seymour) had the kind of cut glass accent rarely heard these days outside the Queen's Christmas broadcast, but there was a terrifying bleakness about the comfortably rural isolation of her home as she began to realise the extent of the plague sweeping the country. And I remember clearly wondering how she had the hot water in which she showered after her recovery - but at the same time I approved of the gesture which led her to cut off her long hair and appear ready for action; the resulting crop was far too elegant to be the result of an amateur hacking with scissors but the symbolism was potent.

But I did watch last night's first episode of the remake, and I enjoyed it, though it didn't really feel like the same show. The frenzied activity of the outbreak of "flu" contrasted with the distancing of much of the original, maybe in a true reflection of our interconnectedness these days (no-one Twittering about it, though - that would've been something), and the ethnic mix of the survivors so far is an obvious nod to our multi-racial present. And it wasn't long before all modern communications were wiped out anyway - taking us back to the premises of the original series. I'll be interested to see if a vicar makes himself known to all by turning round his collar as happened the first time - maybe a step too irrelevant these days?

Dramatisations apart, I was aware this time round of how much more likely the scenario felt. In the 70s, we'd just come through the 3-day week and the telly going off air at 10pm, so we were used to the idea that candles really were a poor substitute and that Things Could Go Wrong, but now, what with bird flu and such nasties, we seem to be more aware of the potential for an unknown virus to arrive at Heathrow, and this lends an edge to the drama. I found the final broadcast by the Home Secretary as the epidemic took hold strangely moving, pointing up the inability of government to do anything at all. And the news that flu jabs were merely given to stop panic rang horribly true.

I'm looking forward to the next episode (must check when it is) and then I'm going back to the DVDs. And then I'm going to indulge in some serious hypochondria ... have I got swollen glands?