Barbara Windsor Ruined My Life

The unthinkable has happened. Anyone who has ever met me can tell you that I am an ardent fan of British soap operas. And if push came to shove, if a gun was held at my head and I simply had to choose, my number one soap opera would quite easily be - without a shadow of a doubt - the BBC's flagship show, EastEnders.

For three years I wrote an acidic soap column for my uni's weekly paper; I've also worked at all three of England's soap opera magazines and had the pleasure of asking Gary Lucy what his favourite pudding was. And I've also made a three-panelled screen covered in autographed postcards of the stars of every British soap over a 10 year period (categorised into soap, and then into family groupings). This is an indication of how sad I am, without touching on my encyclopaedic knowledge of EastEnders past and present.

But on Monday night, at 8pm, I was about to switch on the TV and watch EastEnders when I realised... no, I didn't want to! After the horrors and trauma of seeing Scum-Of-The-Earth, Devil-Incarnate Windsor gargling like a cat on fire as she ruined Frank Sinatra's classic hit "My Way" last week... I realised I'd rather not watch EastEnders, possibly ever again, until the wicked old witch has been duly sacked from the programme and forced to apologise to every single licence payer personally for the misery and upset she has caused.

(As further proof of my love for EastEnders, let me share a tale with you from 1996 - a time in my life when I was hankering after a certain GN. It was a weekday evening, I was watching EastEnders, I even remember which episode - Mad Joe Wicks, Mad Christian Sarah and her gay brother Tony, his wannabe boyfriend SImon and Simon's cockney sparra sister Tiff had all headed off to Brighton for a jolly, when Mad Christian Sarah had her drink spiked with ecstasy and Mad Joe Wicks was suddenly made to seem not so mad after all in the face of her increased insanity. Anyway, after the programme finished I went into the kitchen where my mother informed me that one GN had rung - but she'd told him I was watching EastEnders and he'd have to ring back later... and he'd quite understood. THAT is an indication of where EastEnders USED to stand in my priorities. But that was in the days before Witch Windsor took the programme by the neck and utterly destroyed it.).