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A brief tribute to Dame Barbara Windsor
Barbara never ran away from her roots. She was unashamedly working-class. Brash and bubbly and occasionally bawdy (she once told Larry Lamb “we’re all the same size lying down” and asked Boris Johnson for a kiss), she was friends with the Kray twins and married a man decades her junior. Sod what anyone thought, from where I stand she always seemed to live life on her own terms, right up until the end.
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I am anti-fascist. Trump thinks that makes me a terrorist
When Donald Trump was first elected, I joked to my family that should I disappear, they ought to look for me in a gulag in the Utah desert. I was convinced a man with authoritarian leanings would attempt to crack down on free speech, especially from those of us opposed to his racist regime. It […]
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Killing All The Right People
In a 1987 episode of Designing Women, a show about four interior decorators in Atlanta, the titular characters discover a good friend is gay and dying of AIDS. They are naturally distraught, but one of their customers is smug and satisfied. In a diatribe about how AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality, the bigoted belle […]
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Words on Walford: Fortnight of 13 – 24 April 2020
Has the pandemic changed the way anyone else watches EastEnders? I used to watch every night, but lately I’ve been saving up four episodes (or what would be a week’s worth in normal times) and binging them at the weekend. In some ways this is nice—Friday night was spent in Walford, for example, and I […]
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Reading my teenage blog: “If I Had One Wish (Prom 2004)”
In the midst of the pandemic, proms are being cancelled left, right, and centre. Thinking of all the high school seniors who are missing out on their senior proms had me thinking about my own. I feel bad for these kids, because for many of them prom was something they have been looking forward to […]
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Words on Walford: Weeks of 30 March – 10 April
It’s been almost a month since my last Words on Walford blog. The truth is, like the rest of the world, coronavirus quarantine had me a bit down. Rather than watching something as grim as EastEnders (and make no mistake—grim is why we love it), I’ve been tuning into cherished sitcoms like Are You […]
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How Modern Family changed American television
When Modern Family won the 2010 Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series, I was livid. A derivative show which mashed the mocumentary-style of The Office up with the formulaic family sitcom (a la Everybody Loves Raymond), I couldn’t see how it could it could possibly rank as more “outstanding” than Glee, another nominee in its first […]
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Skylar’s Favourite Self-Isolation Entertainment
It has now been more than three weeks since I left the house, and like many people around the world, I’m starting to go a little stir crazy. Rather than climb the walls, I thought I would share with you all some of the ways I’ve been entertaining myself since self-isolation began (and before). […]
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Words on Walford: Week of 9 – 13 March 2020
Love in the age of coronavirus is brutal. At least, it is in Walford. This week EastEnders gave us to not one but two disastrous proposals as Lola socially distanced herself from Jay by jumping into bed with Peter and Stuart found out that Rainie did not want to self-quarantine with him in holy matrimony. […]
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In the face of coronavirus, we need a little Blitz Spirit – but not in the way you think
“Well, it’s a national emergency,” I said to my grandmother yesterday as she lamented that she couldn’t find toilet paper (Brits read: loo roll) at the supermarket. “People need to stop hoarding and start realizing that we might have shortages. We might need to ration. America needs a little Blitz Spirit.” For those unfamiliar with […]
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Welcome to the personal website of writer Skylar Baker-Jordan 