ANOTHER week, another high-profile bust-up on the set of EastEnders. This time, the show’s producer, Kathleen Hutchinson, has left through a combination, one gathers, of the show still being awful and Wendy Richard not liking her.

While not being liked by Wendy Richard isn’t automatically a fatal blow, the show still being awful is. Audience viewing figures are down to record lows — 6.3 million before Christmas, against Coronation Street’s 11.4 million — and cast members seem to come and go through a revolving door.

Additionally, the plotting has been absurd for so long that, in a moment that should have been a warning sign, Dirty Den coming back from the grave didn’t seem all that bizarre.

The main problem is that when EastEnders expanded to four episodes a week to keep up with Coronation Street it got its pacing all wrong. Rather than keeping to its old, reliable rhythm EastEnders, somewhat incongruously, sped up, as if all it had to run on was adrenalin. The most pertinent, and catastrophic, example of this was in the storyline involving the relationship between Kat (Jessie Wallace) and Alfie (Shane Richie). Their chemistry was the kind of thing soaps get only once a decade and the amusing, heartwarming pairing should have been the rock around which the rest of the soap was built, like a Cockney Jack and Vera Duckworth.

Instead, Kat and Alfie got married unsatisfyingly quickly, just to make a good Christmas Day episode, and then plunged into a series of ludicrous rows, infidelities, tussles with gangsters and episodes of alcoholism.

They are currently separated, much like EastEnders and a sizeable portion of its audience.

Simply exploring a relationship between two strong characters isn’t enough for the speed-freak EastEnders any more. There’s very little acting to be done in there these days.

It’s been replaced by shouting, setting fire to things, crying and having sex; a lifestyle which, while quite diverting to live, becomes very tiresome to watch four times a week.

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