Friday, 18 January 2008
Soap springs eternal
My impression of Dagenham is that everyone there seems to spend most of their time miserably yelling their heads off at each other. Admittedly, I've never actually been to Dagenham, so there's every chance that this impression has been formed solely by watching Eastenders.
Eastenders is infamous for its spectacularly angry and depressing Christmas episodes, in which someone always dies horribly and a formal public announcement is made in the Queen Vic that they were carrying on a torrid affair with three of their grandparents. Everyone gets a massive benny on and someone wrestles emotionally with a Christmas tree.
Dagenham & Redbridge FC have followed the festive form of their local soap, with a recent slump dragging the side to the brink of relegation. There wasn't actually a creepy affair or a tearful pine-flinging exhibition, but a 4-0 defeat at Shrewsbury must be football's closest equivalent.
Despite the furious rages Eastenders characters are given to, none of them ever swear. This is because people who watch Eastenders are irredeemably delicate souls who would expire in a faint if they ever hear an oath more forceful than "you bleedin' toerag".
It is uncertain whether Town fans visiting Victoria Road tomorrow will be spared the horrors of foul language, but we should at least forewarn ourselves with the knowledge that Bamass Lettejallow is not an Essex expletive but the name of a Dagenham & Redbridge centre-forward.
In Eastenders, being northern is a kind of shorthand for criminality. Every northern character turns out to be some kind of thug, thief, rapist or drug dealer. This may be the reason why London football fans sing songs about their opponents being dirty northerners. Although, bizarrely, they still seem to sing them when their team is playing Coventry or Leicester.
Every so often the writers of Eastenders decide to make one of their characters into a big football fan. With no real knowledge of the culture they're writing about, they presumably type "football" and "east London" into Google and come up with West Ham, with the result that Albert Square is populated by people who are passionate Hammers fans for about two weeks of every year.
Given that Dagenham are struggling to attract 2,000 fans this season, you can't help suspecting that most of the population supports its local club on a similar basis.
It would be unfair, of course, to dismiss an entire football club as dodgy Cockney barrowboys on the basis of one ropey TV soap. At the same time, though, I have it on good authority that when a Dagenham manager resigns, rather than present the assistant with a formal written invitation to act as caretaker, the chairman simply asks him: "'Ere, can yer look awfter me stall fer a minute?"
Eastenders is infamous for its spectacularly angry and depressing Christmas episodes, in which someone always dies horribly and a formal public announcement is made in the Queen Vic that they were carrying on a torrid affair with three of their grandparents. Everyone gets a massive benny on and someone wrestles emotionally with a Christmas tree.
Dagenham & Redbridge FC have followed the festive form of their local soap, with a recent slump dragging the side to the brink of relegation. There wasn't actually a creepy affair or a tearful pine-flinging exhibition, but a 4-0 defeat at Shrewsbury must be football's closest equivalent.
Despite the furious rages Eastenders characters are given to, none of them ever swear. This is because people who watch Eastenders are irredeemably delicate souls who would expire in a faint if they ever hear an oath more forceful than "you bleedin' toerag".
It is uncertain whether Town fans visiting Victoria Road tomorrow will be spared the horrors of foul language, but we should at least forewarn ourselves with the knowledge that Bamass Lettejallow is not an Essex expletive but the name of a Dagenham & Redbridge centre-forward.
In Eastenders, being northern is a kind of shorthand for criminality. Every northern character turns out to be some kind of thug, thief, rapist or drug dealer. This may be the reason why London football fans sing songs about their opponents being dirty northerners. Although, bizarrely, they still seem to sing them when their team is playing Coventry or Leicester.
Every so often the writers of Eastenders decide to make one of their characters into a big football fan. With no real knowledge of the culture they're writing about, they presumably type "football" and "east London" into Google and come up with West Ham, with the result that Albert Square is populated by people who are passionate Hammers fans for about two weeks of every year.
Given that Dagenham are struggling to attract 2,000 fans this season, you can't help suspecting that most of the population supports its local club on a similar basis.
It would be unfair, of course, to dismiss an entire football club as dodgy Cockney barrowboys on the basis of one ropey TV soap. At the same time, though, I have it on good authority that when a Dagenham manager resigns, rather than present the assistant with a formal written invitation to act as caretaker, the chairman simply asks him: "'Ere, can yer look awfter me stall fer a minute?"
Labels: christmas, dagenham, eastenders, london, north, soap, south, swearing
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