EastEnders (BBC2)
Rating: Four out of five stars
Ronni Ancona won a Bafta playing Peggy Mitchell, landlady of the Old Vic… or, more precisely, sending up Dame Barbara Windsor in the role.
That was 25 years ago, in her sketch show The Big Impression with former boyfriend and fellow impressionist Alistair McGowan (who played both Dot and Nick Cotton).
So it’s slightly surreal to see her in Albert Square for real, as the demented Bea Pollard, a woman so intent on wreaking havoc that she’s now turned to witchcraft.
I’m not sure how seriously to take Bea. For one thing, she’s obsessed with Honey (Emma Barton), which has to be a scriptwriter’s name-gag.
For another, she appears to have wandered in from a horror movie, wielding some sort of hypnotic hold over Honey’s free will.
Summoning her from the Vic, she lured her to the allotments for a dark magic ritual around a brazier.
‘My Wicca book explains everything,’ she explained. ‘It’s like a form of modern witchcraft, but not like scary Halloween stuff. It honours the empowerment of women.’
Then she produced a T-shirt stolen from her arch-enemy, Honey’s husband, Billy.
Ronni Ancona joined the cast of the EastEnders in January 2026 as the mysterious and unstable Bea Pollard
Ronni Ancona’s character Bea Pollard is obsessed with Honey Mitchell (pictured), played by Emma Barton
‘That’s the 97 away shirt,’ Honey yelped, but it was too late. Priceless football memorabilia consigned to the flames.
For a spine-chilling moment, I thought they were about to recite the lyrics of Anita Dobson’s Anyone Can Fall In Love, backwards — a pagan rite believed to invoke the unquiet spirit of Dirty Den.
It’s all rendered more strange by the way EastEnders currently exists outside its usual time and space… shunted to 9pm on BBC2.
Max Branning and Cindy Beale (Jake Wood and Michelle Collins) threw an engagement party in the pub, with both her ex-husbands, Ian and George, present — sharing a small table, like a two-man Cindy Beale Survivors Club.
Cindy, of course, is the ultimate survivor, since her marriage to Ian (Adam Woodyatt) ended in 1998 when she ‘died during childbirth’.
A quarter of a century later, we discovered she’d actually been in hiding, under the witness protection programme — during which time she’d married George (Colin Salmon), had two daughters with him, and disappeared again.
George and the girls then moved to Walford, unaware it was Cindy’s former home. What are the chances?
When Cindy returned, she endeared herself to absolutely no one by having an affair with George’s married son Junior — while also sleeping with Ian.
Small wonder her former mother-in-law, Kathy (Gillian Taylforth), smacked her over the head with a shovel one Christmas night, leaving her in a coma for a fortnight.
Kathy is another character who died-but-didn’t. She was out of the show for 15 years, during which time she was reportedly killed in a car crash in South Africa.
All this makes me suspect that EastEnders, like the cop shop in Life On Mars, is some kind of soap afterlife. Perhaps they’re all dead, and just don’t know it.
