EastEnders Winter of Discontent flashback: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV

EastEnders

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The Boys From Brazil: Rise Of The Bolsonaros

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Long before she was landlady of the Queen Vic, pint-sized Peggy Mitchell knew how to bellow ‘Git Ahht!’ and mean it.

‘Git Ahht!’ she roared at her sister-in-law Glenda with her two little girls, Veronica and Roxanne — Ronnie and Roxy to everyone who follows EastEnders (BBC1).

This was January 1979, in an engrossing flashback episode of the 37-year-old soap that showed us the Mitchells in their Winter of Discontent.

Phil and Grant were looking for work. Their mum was cooking mash, making pots of tea and bringing up their little sister Sam. Dad Eric was a small-time crook, robbing warehouses and selling the loot off the back of his van.

EastEnders has staged glimpses into the past before, such as the episode where Dot relived her wartime evacuee years in Wales.

But this was the first time a whole episode of retrospective has been set up to explain current storylines — most importantly, why DCI Keeble is pursuing a vendetta against Phil and his family.

Peggy commanded the episode, her presence felt even when she was not on screen. The story, which climaxed with her holding a bread knife to her husband’s chest, was a battle for the soul of her two sons

The action teetered on the edge of a Sweeney parody, as the Mitchell boys piled out of the back of a Transit with a sawn-off ‘shooter’ in a leather bag. ‘Put these on,’ Eric ordered, handing out nylon stockings. Young Phil and Grant (Daniel Delaney and Teddy Jay) stared at the legwear, bewildered. ‘On yer ’eads!’ snapped their old man (a menacing George Russo).

The raid was played for laughs — with a night-watchman demanding the used nylons as his pay-off for keeping silent. But EastEnders has always possessed a knack for sliding from comedy into pathos, and it repeated the trick several times in this half hour.

Phil refused to turn the shotgun on another security guard, but could not prevent his dad from committing murder. ‘I’ve got a little girl,’ the man pleaded. In a scene that was as emotional as it was inevitable, we realised that little girl would grow up to be DCI Keeble.

The opening scene saw the Mitchell boys sparring in an alley, and Phil getting clobbered. When the punches mattered, though, Phil knocked his dad down, to prevent him from giving Peggy one more battering.

With all this violence swirling around her, Peggy (Jaime Winstone) never stirred from her claustrophobic house. All her scenes took place in the living room and the kitchen, as she channelled the indomitable spirit of Dame Barbara Windsor.

Peggy commanded the episode, her presence felt even when she was not on screen.

EastEnders has staged glimpses into the past before, such as the episode where Dot relived her wartime evacuee years in Wales. But this was the first time a whole episode of retrospective has been set up to explain current storylines

The story, which climaxed with her holding a bread knife to her husband’s chest, was a battle for the soul of her two sons. Either they stuck with their mother’s instinct for decency and hard work, or their dad’s criminal tendencies were going to drag them down. That’s the story of Phil Mitchell’s whole life, condensed into half an hour.

The life story of Brazil’s populist president is spread across three hour-long documentaries in The Boys From Brazil: Rise Of The Bolsonaros (BBC2).

Jair Bolsonaro and his three sons are manifestly unpleasant characters, intent on exploiting the Amazon whatever the environmental cost. We saw Sao Paolo city in darkness at 3pm, the sky blotted out by smoke from jungle wildfires.

But viewers aren’t trusted to form their own conclusions. The Bolsonaros, said the narrator, are ‘a political insurgency’.

Cheap graphics painted the family as gangsters toting guns and parrots. They were framed by banana leaves. Yes, we get it, this is South America, it must be a banana republic, right?