Evening All...

If I were to wade into an Internet forum this evening and voice my opinion, I fear the Internet may explode, or at least my IP address be traced, and a march of outraged adults descend upon my house, with flaming torches.. urging that I perhaps ought be burnt alive for neglecting to glibly say

" its outrageous, it needs to be resolved immediately and some lovely happy story lines brought in quick to dissolve the tension this whole debacle has caused"

Here we go again, Fanylions been watching Eastenders...

So...

lets outline the facts of real life that have been used in a storyline

fact one

babies die.

fact two

when grieving and in shock people often behave in a manner they have no actual control over, or recollection of immediately afterwards


So... and whilst yes its pushing things a bit in the old tolerance pre-watershed stakes, and has taken a bit of a swerve from its usual accurate portrayals of human behaviour when under significant distress.. I think perhaps a little perspective is needed...

Soap Operas tend to go for hard hitting story lines, its how they capture, and indeed alienate their audiences over time, they usually base these stories on extremes of human behaviour, they very rarely generalise, and certainly don't portray things as they wold normally happen in the vast majority of cases... precisely WHO would watch 29 minutes of inter cut scenes of folk having Shepherds Pie for dinner, playing on the Wii or nipping down to Sainsbury's for milk and fags?


So, its far from sick then, to portray a cot death... and indeed someone so far removed from reality by grief, shock,and frankly some kind of mental disturbance anyway behaving in what is yes an utterly reprehensible manner in a split second of madness.. what everyone's glossing over is this character tried to return the baby when she realised what she had done.. only it was too late, then her fictional husband turned up from Dubai and with no reason to suggest otherwise assumed this was his baby.. and well its spiralling out of control...

Remember whilst you sit and judge.. that you have a perspective all but one fictional character in this soap opera doesn't you KNOW the truth... you have the third eye on all proceedings..

Look for a moment at the research that has gone in, and the acting that is being displayed... the grief is palpable, the shock and sense of 'what have I done' is gut wrenching, nauseating, you will watch the guilty party unravel... and if they do something terribly predictable like a soap opera suicide following the big reveal.. oh you'll all be up in arms about that as well...

The same kind of storyline is payed out in dross, soft focus made for TV movies screened on Channel 5, no ones outraged by that..

A similar plot is found in the critically acclaimed Memory Keepers Daughter though obviously that didn't involve a direct swap - nah just someone suggesting a baby be disposed of because it was disabled, which isn't a great deal better morally is it?