Why are some media outlets so excited about something that happens every few years?
Some of us are old enough to remember Emmerdale when it was called Emmerdale Farm, went out in the afternoons and was regarded as the least eventful programme on television.
Months could pass without anything of any significance whatsoever happening.
It follows, then, that some of us are also old enough to remember when EastEnders was good.
The very first episode on February 19, 1985 – which opened with the discovery of the first of the soap’s many dead bodies – blew through the TV schedules like a gale-force wind, knocking spots off Coronation Street.
Corrie, like many of its cast, had grown old and stale. It was rooted in a cosy, cobblestoned vision of Manchester as it used to be in the 1960s, not as it was in Thatcher’s Britain.
In contrast, the new soap on the block was brash, edgy and full of energy. Where Corrie was overwhelmingly white, the original cast of EastEnders seemed to reflect London’s multicultural make-up.
It even introduced a couple of gay characters, something Corrie wouldn’t get around to doing until 2003.
In so far as any soap opera can feel like it has one foot planted in reality, that’s how early EastEnders felt, even when serving up a melodramatic storyline such as Den Watts presenting wife Angie with divorce papers on Christmas Day, 1986.
For my money, the point at which EastEnders stopped being good was when the Mitchell brothers, or the “Mitchow bruvvers” if you prefer, Grant and Phil (Ross Kemp and Steve McFadden), arrived in Albert Square.
The bullet-headed siblings – who were introduced as a kind of pound shop version of the Krays, with less hair and poorer dress sense – dominated the storylines over the next few years, pushing the soap ever further away from the original concept.
Phil Mitchell (Steve McFadden) looking as happy as ever in EastEnders. Photo: BBC
The more prominence the Mitchells received, the smaller and sillier the storylines became. Remember 1994, when Grant discovered his wife Sharon was having an affair with Phil and tried to murder his brother?
Things got even worse that year with the second coming of matriarch Peggy “Gerourramypub” Mitchell, previously played (briefly) in 1991 by Jo Warne, but now reincarnated as the well-upholstered Carry On regular and friend of the actual Krays, Barbara Windsor. Or as we used to call her in my house, “Bawbwa Windsah”.
Ross Kemp, who has carved out a second career presenting action-man documentaries, has quit EastEnders multiple times over the years, vowing never to return. If anything, he’s never stopped returning. He pops up for short stints every few years, most recently in 2016.
Phil is still there, of course, still scowling and growling and threatening people while simultaneously battling whatever personal demon is assailing him this month
Which makes it all the more strange that his latest return for another of those stints – to mark the soap’s 40th anniversary next month – is being greeted with a baffling degree of excitement by certain sections of the media.
Columnists in The Guardian and The Sun, newspapers that would usually agree on nothing, separately described Grant’s return as “genius”. Overreacting much?
It’s not like EastEnders is running short of Mitchells. Phil is still there, of course, still scowling and growling and threatening people while simultaneously battling whatever personal demon is assailing him this month.
In fact, Albert Square is swarming with several generations of Mitchells, a clan that seems to procreate like mice on Viagra.
Bringing Grant back (again) is presumably designed to inject some freshness into EastEnders. I’m all in favour of giving this miserable soap a shot in the arm. Preferably potassium chloride.
