Madeleine McCann Fact And Fiction: EastEnders Sorts It Out
MADELEINE McCann continues to attract media coverage.
The theft of Madeleine McCann has always been a single thread story. Remove the speculation and it is the story of one girl’s disappearance.
But it is real. The story is “every parent’s worst nightmare”. Parents watch the McCanns with pity, sorrow and anger. Footballers appeal for help. MPs wear yellow ribbons and Gordon Brown has tears in his eyes.
But the story is running out of steam. Only one tabloid paper, the Sun, makes any mention of Madeleine McCann on its front page. And it does so to tell us: “ENDERS CANCEL MADDIE PLOT.”
Readers will recall a similar move by Coronation Street. That soap opera was to feature a plot in which Claire Peacock’s baby Freddie was abducted.
A spokesman for the show explained: “We are aware that there are some similarities in future storylines to the events surrounding the disappearance if Madeleine McCann. We would not wish to add to the family’s anguish at this terrible time.”
The show wanted to tell us how it understood the power of soap opera fiction and what it could do to the McCanns. The McCanns had lost their daughter and could surely not cope with the hammer blow of a soap opera storyline. The plot was shelved. The McCanns would not be made to endure further ordeal, providing Corrie is even broadcast in Portugal and that the parents of a missing girl are watching anything but the rolling news.
Coronation Street was doing it bit to show how much it cared.
And now EastEnders does the same. In the show, Dawn Swann was to have had her newborn baby taken by the wife of the baby’s father. Wife had paid mother to have the child and than found to her great horror that surrogate and husband had been having an illicit affair in hotel rooms after mother had been hired to pretend to be another man’s wife.
Indeed, the similarities between this plot and the McCanns ordeal cannot be overstated.
So EastEnders will settle back to its key plot drivers – “Sort it”, “You’re a Mitchell!” and “It’s all about family!” and Ian Beale’s beige jacket.
An EastEnders spokeswoman tells the Sun: “It was felt any storyline that included a child abduction was inappropriate and could cause distress.”
If the show is now sensitive to the real world, can EastEnders see fit to stop any stories involving fighting, guns and shootings, murder, rapes and all love interest stories involving Phil Mitchell lest they cause a dip in the national birth rate.
Oh, and get the writers to make it so that Madeleine McCann is found alive and well…
Posted: 23rd, May 2007 | In: Madeleine McCann Comments (19) | TrackBack | Permalink
