Would you take her advice?

Some of the events in this week’s EastEnders were – unlike the characters – a bit rich.
Lola received some advice on pulling herself together from Sharon.
Sharon was branded an addict - by Phil.
And Lauren was warned about becoming too reliant on drink by Tanya and Patrick.

Troubled: Lauren Branning (Jacqueline Jossa) is boozing again... alone... in a shed

Lauren also had a lecture on muvvering from, of all people, Cora, who gave away one of her children, and was persona non grata to Tanya for years.
‘Now listen to me young lady,’ Cora admonished her. ‘You’re going to be a muvver yourself one day. And you’re going to worry yourself sick about your kids. You’re going to be consumed with worry. You’re going to worry when they’re tiny and they get a cold. And worry when they grow up and they get cancer.’
Look on the bright side eh ?

 

Hardly surprisingly most of their words weren’t particularly effective. 
Admittedly, Lola did win supervision of Lexi – poor thing. (Lexi that is, although in time, the same could probably be said for her too.)
This was, supposedly, partly down to Abi, who lent Lola a teddy bear charm.
‘I’ve had him since I’ve been little and he’s lucky,’ Abi beamed, although you couldn’t really say Abi’s life has seemed blessed with much luck.
‘Whenever I’ve been worrying about exams he’s been there,’ she continued, although this was because he was chained to a key ring.

Pot calling the kettle? Phil Mitchell (Steve McFadden) calls Sharon Rickman (Letitia Dean) an addict

The fact that Lola ended up so grateful to Sharon was also slightly ironic – or nonsensical.

The last time Lola was in court, Phil ended up winning custody of her baby, partly because Sharon had connived with him to paint a picture of his happy home life. 
And over the last month, Lola has been agonising over her discovery that Sharon was ‘off her ‘ead’ on pills while she was looking after Lexi.
Then this week, when Phil told her that Sharon wasn’t attending the hearing, rather than seeing it as a vindication, she treated it as a disaster.
Inevitably, Sharon – veering between Walford’s rock with a heart of gold and a duplicitous basket case – turned up and saved the day. So did Phil.
‘I couldn’t think of anyone who could do a better job,’ he told the court about Lola’s capability to look after Lexi, although that wasn’t saying much when the alternative was him and Sharon.
He had found Baby Lexi looking after Sharon’s pills for her while she had ‘passed aht’. Phil had then gone suitably ballistic - although this is his stock response to most things.
He took Lexi to Lola’s, sent Denny off on a sleep-over and then set about interrogating Sharon, dismantling her excuses in a manner that suggested all his years being questioned by the police had paid dividends. 

Heartbroken: Lauren's ex-boyfriend Joey isn't interested in them reconciling

Sharon confounded her crime by protesting too much. She claimed the pills were only painkillers and also that they had sent her to sleep.
‘They’ve never ‘ad this effect on me before !’ she cried and certainly they seemed to have made her acting worse than ever.
‘You weren’t asleep, you wuz out of it !’ accused Phil, before moving his cross examination on to the fact that, as the bottle had no label, they were clearly not prescription drugs.
Shar' tried to adopt the moral high ground (‘what’s with all the questions ? I feel like I’m getting the third degree here and I don’t like it !’) but frankly she did herself no favours.
She admitted the pills hadn’t come from a doctor, even an American one. 
‘I met this bloke down the club and he said he could get me some’ wasn't the best defence.
She added: ‘he’s not a dealer and these ain’t drugs, not really.’
In what way ?!
Detective Inspector Mitchell shattered her offer to flush them away by telling her he used to do the same thing when he was an addict.

‘Do you know why ? Cos all the time I had a load more waiting for me.’
Then, like a big bald sniffer dog, he tipped her bag out and found more.
He accused her of being an addict – to pills as well as the lip gloss.
‘I ain’t doing it Sharon. I lived with a junkie once...’
‘I’m not a junkie !’ she cried.
‘I lived with a junkie who told everyone else that he wasn’t a junkie...’ he countered. ‘I want you aht.’
And with that, despite her rather desperate impression of John McEnroe (‘you can’t be serious’), he pushed her out into the square.
Meanwhile, people were queuing up to lay into Lauren, like that scene in Airplane with the nuns.
Joey, Abi, Cora... they all had a go.
‘You’re a bright girl Lauren,’ her Uncle Jack reassured her. ‘You’re really talented.’
Yeah, at drinking!
Tanya asked Lauren if she remembered the night before, and her mum holding her hair back while Lauren was sick on bathroom floor. Happy days!
But Tanya’s concern didn’t last long.

Drinking pal: Lauren ends up playing truth or dare with Patrick

She told Jack Lauren’s drinking was ‘just teenage stuff’...When I was her age, I was always on the lash.’
She still is!
When Lauren went out for dinner at her imaginary friend Hannah’s house, intelligently Tanya gave her some money - for some chocolates, she suggested, adding brightly, ‘or a nice bottle of wine.’
Any bottle of wine is a nice bottle of wine to Lauren !
‘Lauren’s a good girl,’ Tanya told Sharon later (as they had a drink at The Vic). ‘I think she’s really turned a corner.’

This at least was true. She had turned the corner at the end of the square and instead of her imaginary friend Hannah’s house, headed for her grandad’s old shed to neck her bottle of wine, only to find out this was where Patrick went for a quiet drink too.
It was like a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in there – except we knew who they were and they weren’t trying to give up. On the contrary, they gathered together to have a big drink.
Like contestants on Big Brother, within minutes Lauren and Patrick were playing Truth Or Dare.
Lauren explained why she drank so heavily. She had just broken up with the boy she was in love with, he wouldn’t return her calls and she had no friends.

‘My whole life is rubbish really.’
Apart from that, things were fine.Maybe she should have borrowed her sister’s lucky teddy.
There was a rare shot of someone in EastEnders (Patrick) pouring away alcohol - mind you he had probably had some rum on him.
Lauren went home to confess all to her mother.
‘Have you been drinking ?’ Tanya asked, sharp as a tack.
‘Everyone has a drink,’ Lauren argued, which was a fair point – especially in this series.
‘Not on their own, in a shed they don’t !’ Tanya pointed out  – which was too.
‘Lauren, are you sure this isn’t a problem ?’ her mother demanded. ‘Why are you doing this ?’
‘Because I want to ! It’s my choice,’ Lauren reasoned. ‘And I like it. I’m not going to stop and there’s nothing you can do about it !’
And so it was official. Lauren drinks too much.
As bombshells go, unlike all the alcohol they had all had, it was pretty weak stuff.