What is it with EastEnders (BBC One) and car crashes? Do they sit around at story meetings and defer to a dementia-afflicted script editor in the corner who shouts the phrase “Car crash!” every time the resolution of a plot point is under discussion? So far we’ve witnessed – to name but a tiny few from the genuine road safety cataclysm that is Albert Square – the brothers Mitchell harbour splashdown, the Mitchell-Beale road roll followed by lakeside plunge, the Steve Owen wall smash, and the fatal Tiffany Mitchell bumper cruncher. Even, it seems, when beloved characters, such as Gillian Taylforth’s Kathy Beale, are terminated far from camera, what is it that gets them in the end? Cancer? Heart attack? Hell no, screams the rabid story guru, “Car crash!”

Thus the moment Kevin Wicks (Phil Daniels) anxiously announced, half to camera, that his three new motors were less than roadworthy (“Deff traps!” I believe, was the phrase), we knew that it was only a matter of time before some luckless Walford regular would be bouncing hysterically across our screens and straight out of the series. The question of who exactly would get one final ride in Wicks’s lethal “Cut’n’ Shuts” (welded postcollision Frankenstein cars) was answered last night with a neat poetic twist when Wicks himself spun his own lemon through a climactic roll that left a suspiciously well-positioned iron bar sticking into his lower intestine.

The heavy foreshadowing of the car climax, however (“They’re deff traps, I tell you! Deff traps!”), seemed to somehow lessen the dramatic impact of just about every other plotline on the show. The alleged erotic tension between Ronnie Mitchell (Samantha Janus) and Jack Branning (Scott Maslen) was so underplayed as to be invisible. The question of how Shabnam (Zahra Ahmadi) would get to the New Year’s Eve bash in Jack’s hugely crappy nightclub (seven people, a purple light and a mirror – nice!) without her mother’s permission wasn’t exactly compelling. While the slow seduction of dimwit Vinnie (Bobby Davro) by ancient kohl-eyed harridan Shirley Carter (Linda Henry) was on the wrong side of slightly creepy.

Shirley, nonetheless, did play a pivotal part in the automotive denouement. In the space of two relatively short and strangely uneven scenes, she called ex-hubby Kevin a “plonker” 20 times, threatened to phone the police, forced him to kidnap her, tried to fight him off, then relented, found him massively attractive, and eventually goaded him into doing hand-break turns in a deserted wrecker’s yard – during one of which the car’s bonnet popped open, which naturally forced the entire vehicle to do a crazy EastEnders-patented flip and spin, resulting in the aforementioned intestinal trauma.

It was all near titter-inducing stuff, but nothing that a few well-placed beats of Simon May’s closing track couldn’t elide. Although the sheer preposterousness of the climax, and the emotional and dramaturgical hoops that the story had to jump through just to get there, suggests that the car crash resolution is not just a tired device, but a debilitating one, too.

Meanwhile, the James Dreyfus comedy Double Time (ITV1) seems to be screaming out for an acrid “car crash telly” pun. And given that it was rapaciously derivative and that it starred Larry Grayson redux Dreyfus doing his gurning Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie shtick as an effete actor who goes undercover into a high security prison, it was hardly a televisual highlight of the Christmas season. Yet it was also a triumphant example of palatable and unambitious family-friendly comedy at its most banal.

The hook, of course, was that the multitalented Dreyfus was playing not just the hilariously camp thespian, but also his rough Glaswegian double and hardman convict George McCabe. Typically, the plot was arbitrary and undercooked, and concerned itself only with the orchestration of the central life-swap kernel (gay actor pretends to be hardman; hardman pretends to be gay actor. Hysteria ensues). At times it borrowed from John Woo’s Face/Off, and at others it nodded to the Jean-Claude Van Damme classicDouble Impact. It had an underworked Claire Rushbrook in support, and some Blist actors mangling Z-list lines. But mostly what it needed badly, in all departments, was some creative va-va-voom. And no, sadly, car crashes don’t count here either.

Out of the box

The daytime TV double act Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan have been engaging in a spot of self-promotion concerning their famed top flight inquisitorial skills. The pair, in a recent magazine interview, cruelly queried the spate of Lady McCartney TV confessions (McCartney, interestingly, declined to appear on their show), suggesting that she would have had a rougher time under their unforgiving spotlight. “I would have loved to have interviewed her,” Madeley said. “I would have asked if she ever steps back from herself to look at how she’s behaving.” Wow, now THAT would have made great telly.

Meanwhile, bad news for fans of honest emotion and short TV shows: the Oscar Telecast producer Gil Cates says that, despite the ongoing writers’ strike in the US, the Academy Awards ceremony this year will still go ahead. Yay!

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