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Shirley’s angle grinder attack, Aunt Babe’s trifles, and ‘gangster’ Richard Blackwood…It was a violent week of menace and misery in EastEnders, by Jim Shelley

Published: 16:26 EST, 24 April 2015 | Updated: 17:40 EST, 24 April 2015

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EastEnders concluded with Tina defecting to Team Shirley, Danny Dyer ‘annihilating’ his brother with some sandwiches, and an unpleasant ruck between an old lady with Alzheimer’s and her carer. Welcome to Walford!

The week’s real highlights though lay elsewhere.

Ronnie Mitchell sat slumped in her wheelchair like Stephen Hawking with a topknot, while Max Branning turned on the vicar conducting his father’s funeral, uttering the classic soap opera line ‘just take your dog collar and do one!’.

Back at the Queen Vic after Stan's funeral, Danny Dyer watches Shirley brandishing an angle grinder while Linda sees the state of her barnet reflected in the beer pump

Shirley was scary enough armed with just an eyeliner pencil. Now she had an angle grinder - and she knew how to use it. It was a good look for her though

Even this could not compete with the sight of Shirley Carter storming into the Queen Vic brandishing an angle grinder and carving up the licensees’ plate that was above the front door on the bar. Wearing an industrial face shield to protect her delicate features from the sparks she looked as if she was starring in the Terrahawk version of Friday The 13th or the Walford Chainsaw Massacre. Scary. Shirley is terrifying enough with just an eyeliner pencil without arming her with heavy machinery.

Frankly, Friday’s episode was never going to match these giddy, gory, just bizarre heights. There was plenty to give viewers nightmares though as the horror theme continued.

Richard Blackwood has made a promising start as Walford's latest gangster, Vincent. So it would be frankly unfair to mention previous low points in his career such as Brass Eye, Celebrity Detox Camp, and his hit single '1, 2, 3, 4, Get With The Wicked'

Ronnie and Not So Lil’ Kim were both effectively being stalked by Richard Blackwood – a disturbingly surreal storyline for those of us who remember his Top Ten hit ‘1, 2, 3, 4, Get With The Wicked’ or saw him having colonic irrigation with Kim Wilde and Tamara Beckwith on Celebrity Detox Camp.

Then there was his contribution to the legendary Brass Eye when Blackwood earnestly warned parents that ‘online paedophiles could make your computer keyboards release toxic vapours that make you suggestible.’ The giveaway was if ‘your children smell like hammers.’

Having said all this, his performance as ‘Vincent’ was promising, already menacing Ronnie and Kim within days of his arrival.

‘We know that Vincent is some kind of gangsta. We know that he’s some kind of psycho killer,’ Kim told Denise. ‘He’s cute. He’s tall…’

He’s Richard Blackwood…

Ronnie on the other hand knew about Vincent’s criminal activities, having gone to him to borrow a gun. What she didn’t know was that he had married Kim on a cruise ship and that man had got her up the duff.

No wonder Roxy was already calling him ‘Mr Walford.’

Roxy goes understandably pale as she confesses to her sister Ronnie that she slept with Ronnie's husband Charlie while she was in a coma. While Ronnie was in a coma that is, not Roxy. Although in EastEnders, anything is possible

Contrary to expectation, Roxy defied the tradition of waiting until Christmas Day to tell Ronnie she had shagged her sister’s husband. In fact she could hardly wait for Ronnie to recover from her coma before revealing: ‘it’s Charlie. I slept with him’ – a bedside manner far inferior to the one she had shown Charlie.

‘You were in here and I was falling apart !’ Roxy cried, her idea of an explanation. ‘And the one person I always turned to wasn’t there. Me and Charlie were spending a lot of time together. We were talking about YOU, worrying about YOU !’

Basically, she was saying, it was Ronnie’s fault. By being in a coma, she was asking for it - although not as much as Roxy was.

‘Are you ever going to be able to forgive me?’ Roxy wailed.

‘I already have,’ Ron assured her, before requesting with sinister calm: ‘Don’t tell Charlie that I know.’

Ronnie smiles by way of reassuring Roxy that she bears no grudges about Roxy sleeping with Ronnie's husband Charlie, although Ronnie smiling is even more sinister than her scowling

Yikes ! Run for it Charlie !

The real menace though came from a more surprising source.

Viewers surely had high hopes that Stan Carter’s funeral signaled the end of his wife Sylvie and her sister ‘Aunt Babe.’ After all, they don’t even live on the square. Nonetheless we were subjected to unpleasant scenes set in Sylvie’s care home that included Aunt Babe slapping the decidedly fragile Alzheimer’s sufferer - a wallop that saw Sylvie retaliate by biting her. You half expected Babe to produce one of her legendary trifles and shoved it in Sylvie’s mush.

‘You always were a vicious, selfish, cow,’ snarled Babe – not someone you would ideally want as your carer.

They were both so vile it was hard to care about either of them, let alone the events hidden in their twisted history.

Sylvie threatened to expose the ‘evil’ things that Aunt Babe and the alarming-sounding ‘Queenie Trott’ had ‘got up in that caravan in Ramsgate.’

‘You were in on it as much as me,’ hissed Babe. What she was doing, you really didn’t want to know. She wasn’t making trifle that’s for sure – for once.

She had made one for Stan’s funeral. Well not the funeral - the wake.

‘When it’s my turn to go I want everyone to wear bright colours,’ mused Aunt Babe - you know because she’s so cheerful. You never know, hopefully it will be soon.

You couldn’t say Stan’s wake was an ‘appy affair. Shirley acted as if she was five, telling Danny Dyer ‘he was my dad, not yours !’ and banged on about whether her other son Dean The Rapist could attend the funeral.

‘It’s very simple,’ Danny Dyer told her. ‘If he turns up, I will annihilate him.’

That’ll be a ‘no’ then. When he saw his bruvver at the bar later, he assaulted him - with a plate of sardines.

Danny Dyer does that thing when he closes his eyes slightly as if he's all sleepy and talks more and more quietly to make himself more adorable

'AlfEnders'! Dog howls along to EastEnders theme

Linda had confronted Dean after the charges against him were dropped.

He could still not acknowledge that he had raped her but was clearly carrying the burden of what he had done with him every day, not on his conscience or the bruises he received in prison, but the grotesque ginger beard he had grown in there – the type of reminder of prison, like a horrible, hairy, electronic tag.

The farce of Stan’s engagement to Cora stretched beyond the grave. She expressed her grief, staggering around smoking two cigarettes at a time with her hair piled erratically on her head like Rod Stewart.

Her only way of cheering herself up was by slagging off Dot and ‘the way she clicks her bony little fingers and everyone comes running.’

She even made a special trip to see Dot in prison – mostly so she could attack her, complaining: ‘why can’t they see you for what you are? A selfish, stubborn, hypocrite, playing the frail old biddy card.’

Count Dot-ula belatedly changed her mind about leaving prison to attend her husband Jim's funeral

No wonder Dot didn’t want any visitors. Inevitably Count Dot-ula belatedly attended her beloved husband Jim’s funeral. His coffin was carried in a traditional East End hearse pulled by magnificent black horses. He’d have like that. Well he probably would’ve preferred white.

This was a point made by his son Max, in the address he was pressed into giving by Dot.

‘That’s how we should remember him – a lucky geezer,’ Max started, not bothering to do his tie up. ‘But I can’t remember him like that. Because my dad was a bully and a drunk and an ‘orrible dad. That’s why three of his kids didn’t turn up today.’

Plus they had been written out of the series.

‘He was just nasty - cruel, manipulative,’ continued Max, like a stand-up comedian ignoring hecklers, shouting down disapproving complaints from Jim’s friends and family and (mostly) from the vicar, who hadn’t forgiven Max for telling him to ‘do one.’

‘He was a hateful racist… Didn’t talk to Carol for years and years cos she married a black geezer. Never shed a tear when his black grandson died. When I was 13, he locked me in a coffin. He laughed about it. Well today it’s my turn. I’m glad he’s dead.’

Jim Branning's funeral ended with Sonia standing up and singing the opening words to 'My Way' but resisted the chance to get her trumpet out - as it were...

As eulogies go, it wasn’t that positive. Afterwards Cora warned him ‘don’t end up alone’ which was bang out of order and well wide of the mark. He won’t. He’s got his fags, his whisky, and his brown suit... Plus no woman alive can resist Sex-Mad Max and his ginger wiles.

Your heart went out to Dot, but she conceded Max had painted an accurate picture of his childhood. Jim had changed though, she claimed. His closest drinking pal was Patrick Trueman. In later years he had grown into a big softie and an old romantic fool.

‘He took me up the London Eye,’ she recalled which hopefully was not Cockney rhyming slang.

The service came to a close with Sonia standing up and singing ‘My Way.’ One by one, Charlie and the others joined in.

It was a moving moment, although it’s a ‘No’ from me Sonia.

It was also something of a missed opportunity - the last chance for Sonia to get her trumpet out.

As it were...

Danny Dyer has made quite the impression on EastEnders