EastEnders is a weird place to be at the moment. Now that zombie Kathy Beale has returned to Albert Square, magically imbued with the mystical voodoo ability to coax actual sentences from Tracey the barmaid’s mouth, all bets are off.
With the series lobbing out storylines this spurious, literally anything could happen. Perhaps the corpse of Pauline Fowler will jerk back to life as well. Perhaps Lucy Beale’s real murderer will be revealed as the three other actors who’ve previously played Lucy Beale, and they’ll subsequently go on a rampage killing all the other characters who’ve been mercilessly recast. Perhaps all of EastEnders from now on will simply be a loop of Tiffany singing Firestarter. If EastEnders can bring Kathy back, it can pretty much do anything.
And that, apparently, includes bringing back Grant Mitchell. EastEnders stars have been dropping hints like mad that Ross Kemp is about to return to the Square and, if true, it’s terrific news. Obviously it makes no sense whatsoever – why on Earth would anyone return to the place where they discovered that their brother was having an affair with their wife, or where they impregnated their wife’s best friend, or watched their new wife get murdered in a hit and run, or crashed a car into a river, or where they were taken out to the woods and almost murdered right before having a nightmarishly ill-advised affair with Ian Beale’s wife? – but it’s terrific news nonetheless.
Because Grant Mitchell is an all-time EastEnders superhero. For years we’ve had to lumber on with Phil Mitchell as the Square’s aggressive Boohbah wildcard, which has always felt like a flimsy stopgap. In truth, Phil was always the moderating force in the relationship; the sensitive soul who spent his life trailing around in Grant’s wake, apologising for his behaviour. After all, it was Grant who failed the army psych test and Grant who torched the Queen Vic. In a true and just world, all of Phil Mitchell’s best storylines – the violence, the crack addiction, the time he flushed Ian Beale’s head down the toilet – should have been Grant’s.
However, this isn’t the first time that Grant Mitchell has returned to EastEnders. After leaving in 1999, he briefly returned in 2005 as a much-changed figure. The new Grant Mitchell was basically a ridiculous, invincible superhero, charged with righting some of the wrong’uns that had sprung up in his wake. This was a bizarre Terminator 2 version of Grant, where the guy you should have been most scared of somehow became a warped hero, and it didn’t really work.
Hopefully the 2015 version of Grant Mitchell will obliterate all trace of this ugly respectability before he returns to the screen. Nobody wants to see Grant the twinkly-eyed mummy’s boy. Nobody wants to see Grant the righteous moral bouncer. They want the Grant Mitchell we fell in love with 25 years ago; the berserk, no-necked psychopath who spends his life acting like an angry dog trapped in a giant jar of bees. This is Grant Mitchell’s chance to redeem himself as EastEnders’ foremost lunatic villain. If his very first scene back doesn’t include him busting straight through a brick wall, kicking Dean Gaffney in the jaw and then setting Wellard on fire, I, for one, will feel incredibly let down.
