Features

As part of a special feature “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” investigating the enduring appeal of the blonde woman, “anthropologist” Grant McCracken(!) expounds his theory about the 7 species of blonde: Dumb, Dangerous, Sunny, Rebellious, Brassy and Cool. In this excerpt, razor-sharp TV columnist Jim Shelley explains why Helen’s Brookside character Georgia was the ultimate Cool Blonde.
(see the photo gallery on this site for the super-cool photo that accompanied it)

“It’s hard to avoid the fact that for many men, Georgia’s appeal lay largely in the fact that she was having sex with her brother. Located in the dire, suburban setting of Brookside Close, this suggested not only an exotic, rather petulant disregard for convention, but a voracious sexual appetite. Given that the brother concerned was the totally gormless plonker, Nat Simpson, we could only conclude that the sex kept occuring simply because she just couldn’t wait. Nat just happened to be the nearest male available.
She (obviously) just didn’t care. No matter what she was doing and no matter who knew about it, Georgia kept her (considerable) cool throughout, despite the family fall-outs and public scandal, passionately defending the affair and at the same time coldly refusing to be touched by it; beautifully blase as if somehow none of it was her fault. The contradictions of Georgia’s nature made her irresistably intriguing, enigmatic. She never had any friends, any hobbies or obvious employment. Her knowingly superior disdain for the scummy Scousers all around her was also a massive turn-on.
Georgia was calculating, never relaxed, one of those blondes who is happy to let their feigned, dizzy dumbness deflect attention from the fact that you can never tell them what to do. She was also the sort of Cool Blonde whose cool simply signifies that when she finally does let her (blonde) hair down, she goes like a rocket. You couldn’t help get a frisson from the suspicion that she maintained the affair because (like all blondes) she insisted on being the centre of everyone’s attention.
All in all: Georgia was kinky, stroppy, sophisticated to the point of incest and interior design (which, in Brookside, trust me, is pretty bloody sophisticated), and above all, blonde. Fabulous.

All of Wednesday’s Brookside is devoted to Family Therapy Day - more self-help for the Simpsons. Even Danny is there. (Danny is, as Chris Morris would say, as mad as a lorry; Tapehead’s tip for the first serial killer on the Close.)

“What’s he doing here?” demands a typically belligerent Nat, obviously worried that Danny might make a move on their sweet sister, Georgia.

“I’m fed up on being left out,” Danny argues, possibly angling for a threesome. The bell rings and it’s round one of Ollie versus Bel: This Time It’s Personal.

Ollie is still raging about Bel’s allegation that he or his father must have interfered with Nat and Georgia.
“For God’s sake,” Bel squeals, “it has to be faced up to ! It’s the only explanation.”

The shrink turns up the heat by siding with Bel -pointing out, “the one thing we do know about sibling incest is that one or other of the siblings has probably been abused.”
(Tapehead’s hunch: what if it was Danny all along?)

Nat, that intellectual Titan, then throws a massive curve ball, describing the whole affair as “kids’ stuff” with his defence (”We’d just moved to the new house”) surely ranking as one of the most unusual excuses for slipping it to your sister that anyone’s given, and as such, the most imaginative thing Nat has ever said.

“So,” says the shrink, “one day it changed from childish curiosity to penetrative sex.”

At which point Bel predictably explodes. Again.

Danny insists on staying (and who wouldn’t ?), pointing out, “I’m older now than they were when they first started.” (Good point.) So presumably, he’s saying, he can now join in.

When the shrink refers to incest as “the most profound human taboo”, Danny interjects, “I thought that was cannibalism,” thus becoming the prime suspect of the inevitable future storyline.

Ollie raises the stakes casually lobbing in the child-molesting-at-work accusation. Bel is, once again, aghast, but Danny is nothing, if not reassuring. “It’s all right,” he says, “Dad’s told me about that as well.”

Bel retaliates by raging, “why not tell him that, sexually speaking, I’m a plank of wood?”
(Actually, they can be quite deceptive, in the right light. With a touch of varnish, they can come up nicely.)

Georgia chips in with “We could have sorted the baby out. You know, brought it up together.”

Ollie goes ballistic, demanding answers. Sadly (for Ollie), Georgia has them. “No other relationship comes anywhere near it.”
Sex with anyone less, she says, was “just a pale imitation”.

Danny listens intently, obviously bearing it in mind for the future. His attitude is a combination of prurient voyeurism and knowing superiority, as he virtually yawns throughout.

Such calm in the face of evil is the sort of thing you usually only see in Millennium. His head is going to start spinning and chanting Latin any day now.

Even Ollie starts getting spooked. “And before you say anything,” he screams, rampaging around the room, “I am not running sway. I am leaving now, because this” - he points at Danny - “is macabre.”

It is all utterly unmissable. By the end, Georgia, her eyes puffed beautifully by tears, has never looked hornier.
(Nat obviously agrees.) The one thing you can say with certainly is this: the therapy isn’t working.

Tapehead has been straight for months now, but this week, he has once again succumbed to temptation, quit the cake, and gone back on the soap.

A Coronation Street-style cull is well overdue on EastEnders.

Get rid of Pauline, Ted Hills, and George, Peggy’s fake-gangster boyfriend. Get rid of the pirate-radio boys (whatever their names are), the whitest black jungle DJ and the Welshest Welshman on television. As for Martin, only days after his first speaking role he’s already on the rob. If we don’t get rid of him soon, he’ll be raping and pillaging. Send him off to borstal - for some Sleepers treatment.

As for Alistair the God Squad Snogger, and Frankie The Man-Killing Lizard (who’s not good-looking enough to tempt with heterosexuals, gays or clergymen), they can to too, preferably together. In tomorrow’s omnibus, Alistair’s followers give him a birthday cake covered with candles.

“Now blow !” Frankie tells him, with the sort of ease that only comes from experience.

Getting rid of Lorraine, or, as we call her in Tapehead’s household, That-Bitch-Lorraine, is more difficult. This week, Lorraine is not sure if shoe should worry about Joe reading the Bible.
“It’s good to see him having an interest,” she witters brightly, prompting Tapehead to give her some advice. Where Joe is concerned, if in doubt, worry. It’s good for him to have an interest that’s NORMAL not PSYCHOTIC.

Taking after his dim-witted, bleating bitch of a mother, Joe is also worrying: “How will I know if I do start getting ill again ?”

Well…Motorways, window ledges, mirrors and TV screens covered in tin foil and gaffer tape, rocking back and forward next to the Zanussi…You know. Okay ?

This week, Tiff and Bianca are reunited. Tiff is ready to drop. Grant rakes the plunge, and Sanjay and Gita consider IVF treatment. (Is it any wonder Sanjay can’t get it up when he’s married to his grandmother ? Get rid of Gita Sanjay.) Tony comes over all maternal - but still reckons he might not be gay after all.

“What are you doing?” Tony groans the morning after a heavy night out. “Bad head ?” jeers Simon.
“No, I quite enjoyed it actually…”

The big question is: will Tiff’s baby make it through he first episode ? Have your hankie ready.

More tears and traumas in Brookside as the Corkhills finally get to bury Our Little Jimmy. Jackie drops the bombshell.

There’s no culling necessary in Brookside (although Jack Sullivan, Cassie and Our Elaine can go) and his month, the whole cast go into therapy (and so do the audience).

Even therapy doesn’t stop Bel from moaning.
“It’s like the whole family’s on trial,” she clucks. Looking as if she’s speaking with a piece of rotten lemon in her mouth as always, “We’re all in the dock,” she gasps, even though she’s the one accusing Ollie and Ollie’s dad of corrupting Nat and Georgia (as if such a thing were possible).

Now we know why Ollie’s got that train set in the garage. (”Would you like come and play with my train set ?”)

The big question in this family of sex maniac is: who will Ollie molest next ?

“I’ve just been watching a horde of teenage boys building up a sweat,” he mocks, with rather more fervour than can be wise, really. He doth protest too much, Tapehead thinks, and so does she.

They are both after Daniel.
“Don’t tell me I’m not old enough to understand,” he whines to Ollie, “I am old enough” - a dangerous declaration in the circumstances.

“Come here,” coos Bel, giving him a hug (a rather big hug) after Daniel asks if Ollie’s moved out because he’s having an affair. (With Matthew ? Or Emily ?)

Daniel is the one to watch from now on (the albino rabbit impersonation will stop).

Already the most fucked-up member of the whole family, in years (or months?) to come, Daniel will make Nat and Georgia look like amateurs.

Soap stars are getting younger and sexier by the day. Today’s bunch who spend as much time modelling as acting are a far cry from Annie Walker and Betty Turpin…..

Hot, steamy and soapy. It was all go along Coronation Street in 1970. Albert Tatlock locked himself in his house and refused to come out so Minnie Caldwell called the police to break down his door. Elsie Tannergot married again, Audrey and Dickie Fleming’s marriage was on the rocks, and a young barmaid called Bet Lynch arrived at the Rovers Return. And, to bring a touch of glamour to those wet cobbled streets, a youngish photographer called Terry O’Neill was recruited to take some glossy publicity shots. O’Neill was back last month to take some more photographs of the cast after the producers of Coronation Street decided to show off their new modern image. “We needed to raise awareness of the programme’s funky, good-looking cast,” said Janice Troup, spokeswoman for the Street. Funky and good-looking are not the adjectives that are usually connected with Coronation Street. In the early years, the best-known character on the Street was Ena Sharples, a stout lady of firm opinions with a hairnet and a face like a bag of spanners. If Ena Sharples was ever on the front cover of Tatler, I must have missed it. By contrast, the new, young cast members make the Spice Girls look dowdy and mousy. The contemporary pictures were shot in a studio with Weatherfield’s bright young things wearing black singlets and sparkly skirts. Fiona Middleton (played by Angela Griffin) is pouting provocatively, while Maxine the hairdressers’assistant strikes a catwalk pose and barmaid Samantha (Tina Hobley) looks like a young Raquel Welch. It is a long way from 81-year-old Ena Sharples and 88-year-old Albert Tatlock. It’s not that the oldies have gone for ever. EastEnders isactually bringing back Dot Cotton, elderly siren of the launderette, and both it and Coronation Street speak proudly of their mixed-age casts. But there is no getting away from it: youth and glamour is becoming ever more important in the world of soap opera, a world that has rarely been more competitive. EastEnders and Coronation Street are fighting neck and neck with about 17m viewers per episode, while Emmerdale has become a strong rival. Once all whippets and wellingtons, the rural soap now makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like the Rip Van Winkle home for retired narcoleptics. It has not only featured armed sieges and lesbianism the common currency of modern soap opera but also had a strong storyline about sex tourism in the Far East. Its ratings have risen in four years from about 9m to nearly 13.5m.It is certainly the young stars who are commanding all the attention. The new status of the young soapees was confirmed in January when three of them were pictured in that month’s edition of Vogue, usually the haunt of thin girls with long names and posh frocks (sweetie daaaaaahling).
In an issue that celebrated the English woman, 23-year-old Tracy Shaw (Maxine Heavey of Coronation Street), 25-year-old Helen Grace (Georgia Simpson of Brookside) and 24-year-old Patsy Palmer (Bianca Jackson of EastEnders) were pictured sitting on a washing machine and covered in soap suds (soap, you see; how we chuckled), dressed only in white towels. They are, proclaims the magazine, “Britain’s sassiest new television heroines”. Over the page, they were pictured wearing smart black frocks, wind blowing romantically through their hair. It is not just Vogue. The fashionable magazines (retch) and some rather less fashionable have been falling over themselves to interview soap stars. In December, “The Face” featured sultry pictures of Martine McCutcheon and Patsy Palmer and declared: “There isn’t really anyone more famous than the cast of EastEnders ….. no pop star who’s been large across a cover in the last year comes even halfway near.”

(excerpt)

….Now that summer is over, at least Georgia from Brookside is no longer allowed to pursue her fashion faux pas any more (ie, those denim shorts……) Nice chunky winter jumpers are a much better look. Not exactly dressing to kill, but still…

“Why do you have to be so intolerant?” she pouted last week, accusing Max of forcing his morality on everyone else.

Has anyone worked out if we are meant to sympathise with her and Nat ?

This week: worries that Georgia might be up the duff, and about to produce the first two-headed baby on the Close. Another Brookside breakthrough. At least it won’t be as gormless as its father.

Still, an incestuous pregnancy: how fashionable is that ?