End of an earring as Big Pat departs Albert Square

Date Published: {J}

The wonder wasn’t how Big Pat bit the dust so quickly on Eastenders – it was that she’d lived so long in the first place. What with four marriages, a string of affairs, a career as a prostitute, more offspring than a prize bull – she certainly didn’t leave too many stones unturned.

And in the end, death came swiftly – one day she was drinking gin and tonic in that sitting room tailored to look like a gypsy’s caravan; the next day she was drawing her last breath as one of the doctors from Holby City sat at the end of her bed.

Only this man wasn’t a doctor at all – that’s a different soap – but it was her errant son David Wicks, back from whatever sewer he had supposedly spent the last decade or so.

If only Pat ever watched the telly, she might have caught him carrying out open heart surgery and she could have asked him for a second opinion.

Pat Beale/Wicks/Butcher/Evans had been a fixture on Albert Square almost from its very inception, arriving a quarter of a century ago, just a year into the soap’s life.

And in a world where events must move at the speed of light, she probably got away lightly with just four marriages – but the actress Pam St Clement made it clear that she was growing increasingly more weary of the pace of the plots that long since failed to bear any semblance of reality to normal life.

So once she decided it was time to pack her earrings into her valise, the producers opted for the big ending – and tied it in with Christmas just to cheer us all up.

The pity was that she went so quickly, because such a fine actress could have milked this one for a whole lot more; not just because she was one of the few remaining stalwarts, but because cancer is such a sensitive issue and to see her disappear overnight did something of an injustice to the plot and the actress herself.

The problem now with Eastenders is that there are so few remaining touchstones, and if you miss it for a week or two there appears to be a whole new set of teenagers in control of every business around the Square.

And while there are more new arrivals than you’d expect at Shannon Airport the day before Christmas Eve, the old favourites are left to merely smile and sigh in the Queen Vic.

When was the last time that Dot or Alfie had anything more to do than drink sherry or call time?

And in the desperate search for more bizarre dramatic turns, you have wife swapping like normal streets would have bin collections – and there’s hardly a week goes by that one of the Brannings isn’t either terminally ill, insane, in trouble with the law or creditors or knocked up.

Pat belonged to a different era on Eastenders when it was a little square with a market and a pub and characters like Arthur and Pauline and Den and Angie and Ethel and Lou and Pete and Cathy – not a miniature version of Sicily with a crime rate that would put the Mafia in the ha’penny place.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.