Soap operas are brilliant, aren’t they? They all give a retrospective insight into life in the various locations where they are all filmed.
In Emmerdale for instance, all the characters belong to rival farming tribes and live in the middle of nowhere. Coronation Street is full of a variety of characters, from the old, young and transsexual. But the best has to be EastEnders. It's attempt at showing murky gangster activity is hilarious. All these soaps also have one thing in common.
It doesn't matter how legendary a soap character is, as soon as they've been killed off they'll never work on television again. For one unlucky EastEnders character, their 14-year stint is soon to be over. But who is it? Find out after the jump.
The most obvious EastEnders character to drown in a mouldy beer keg or vat of boiling chip fat would be serial lady loser Ian Beale. Over the years he’s married various women, had sex with prostitutes and had all sorts of arguments with resident hardman Phil Mitchell. We would have said Grant Mitchell, but he was off filming badly made programs on gangs at the time.
So we’ve kept you in suspense for long enough, who is going to the unfortunate character to be given the chop? Well it’s someone who has never really had a home and has been passed from family to family in Albert Square. But he is no tramp or student. His storylines have seen him run over, kidnapped and, recently, traded for a pineapple.
Whilst Pat Butcher would have been a reasonable guess, it is actually Wellard the dog.
Starting off life with the annoying Robbie Jackson, played by the really annoying Dean Gaffney, this loveable pooch occasionally pops up in the odd episode to randomly bark at strangers, dry-hump people's legs, steal sausages from the butchers and terrorise old people. Sonia and Gus have since been in charge of looking after him, but they got bored of having to clean up dog shit and passed him onto some other naive cockney resident of the square.
Despite the show announcing the death of Wellard, it doesn’t mean he won’t come back in twenty years time as a ghost dog. Remember Dirty Den? Apparently he got shot, fell in a lake and died a bloody death. The truth of the matter is that Dirty Den is immune to bullets and didn’t die. People who say he was brought back to boost ratings are just cynical.
When he wasn’t wanking on the internet, Den came back to try and run the square. This failed and he ended up being killed again and buried in the pub cellar. We expect to see him again in 2046.
So how will Wellard die? Details haven’t been released yet, but we are willing to bet that a Korean restaurant will buy Ian Beale’s cafe and transform it in to a snack bar using Wellard as the filling for a sandwich.
Or he’ll just die, take your pick.