he’s back!!

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Myras_Kitchen 4 Comments

YES!!!

No, not Brendan.  Made you look, though.  But in honour of The Big BB, let’s raise a dead-eyed double fist pump to the return of … Gilly.  Yay.  Hmm.  Aw heck, we KNEW the Racqui bliss was too good to last.

We’d better warn you, this won’t be objective.  We’re not the BBC.  If we were the BBC, you’d be paying us a whopping great licence fee, and we would be using it right now to develop a series of Late Night Hollyoaks Specials involving Brendan, Ste, Warren, Mitzeee, Cheryl, Pete, Silas, Doug, Amy, Lee, possibly Seth, Esther, Ruby, and a prison breakout.  We’re writing the Stendan reunion scene as we speak.  It’s gonna be a doozy.

But we digress.  Back to Gilly.   Does anyone really want Gilly back in the village?  He reminds us of someone who turned up for an Inspiral Carpets gig in 1989, stayed on for Oasis, and never left.  Until this year, it’s not as if he’d actually done anything wrong.  It’s just we can’t for the life of us remember anything he’s done that was any good.  We think he fell down some stairs once in an online spin-off and lost his front teeth, in a dire warning about the dangers of binge drinking.  His false tooth came out when he was snogging Cheryl later.  Dark times for the Oaks.

He doesn’t make our velour-clad heart flutter, in all honesty.  The only woman we ever liked Gilly with was Hannah.  When she turned a fresh-faced 18 and her secretly gay boyfriend was wandering round after Craig Dean like a lovestruck puppy, Gilly gave her a lovely necklace and made her feel like the princess she needed to be.  Yet when she was old enough and voluptuous enough to make a pass at him, he pushed her off.  “I think of you as a sister!” he said to her.  Oh come now Gilly, that never put Rhys off Beth.

Last time Gilly came back, from “travelling in Thailand” (that old excuse), he was engaged to scrunchy-faced kickboxer Jem Costello.  He gets engaged a lot, does Gilly.  He got engaged to Beth, before he realised she was shagging her brother/his best mate.  He got engaged to Cheryl, though he only went out with her to make Steph jealous.  Both of them dumped him, and Jem was no different.  There’s a pattern emerging here.  When Gilly and Steph finally got it together, she immediately upped the ante by going down with terminal cancer.  I mean, I know she married him and everything.  Soul mates, apparently (what about Max?!  *sobs*).  But she still walked into those flames rather than spend another day with him.  That’s all we’re saying.  But Steph’s self-sacrificial death wreaked havoc on Gilly’s life.  He went down the angry drunken route.  He got so bad he had to be on the receiving end of stomach-churning platitudes from Tom, and no one needs that.  We had the “moving on too fast with Lynsey” scenes, including toe-curling hot-tub-related flirting.  We had hurling lasagne at the wall when she walked out on him.  And then we had Jacqui.  Distraught.  Hurt.  Drunk.  And vulnerable.  And Gilly made a Very Big Mistake.  She was in no state to give consent.  He was too drunk to remember.  He failed to engage his less than enormous brain and, in the words of our esteemed editor Mrs WLH, came over “a bit rapey”.

He got off the rape charges, and rightly so.  The Oaks may exist in a parallel universe in which the CPS would prosecute a case for which there was basically NO EVIDENCE, but the specially chosen “fan jury” couldn’t convict him, mainly on the basis that there was NO EVIDENCE.  A small yay for British Justice.  We still wept for Jacqui though.  And boy, did Gilly look smug in that dock.  And then he legged it, unlamented, to let things blow over.

Now, he’s back, walking into The Dog in one of those highly inflammable trackie tops rarely seen since Brookside got canned, and we can’t say things look too good for Our Gilbert on his return.   His long-standing bessie mate Rhys is now firmly in Team Jacqui.  In fact this week, Jacqui and Rhys finally jumped their last post-traumatic hurdle and got on with some consummating, enjoying the slightly-delayed wedding night they deserved.  It may only have lasted about three and a half minutes, but like Rhys said, it’d been seven months and eleven days (not that they were counting).   But their happiness was over too soon in more ways than one.  One minute Jacqui was telling her man he was “perfect, in a really strange way” (awwwww), ripping off his shirt, and dragging him under the leopard-print duvet; the next she was engaging in neurotic tidying and hand cream application to a Pixies soundtrack, a sure sign of looming disaster, while Rhys was turning into an attack dog.  “It’s gonna finish us, this,” Jacqui wept, to the invisible counsellor.  Oh Jacqui, you’re breaking our heart.  You might even think Gilly had mainly been brought back to create a great big Manc obstacle on the road to tru luv, but we couldn’t possibly comment.  Set Terry on him, Jacq, that’ll see him off.

Then there’s Tom.  Officially, Gilly is still kinda the wee fella’s guardian, courtesy of dead Steph.  And we know what happens to them.  Look at Mandy.  Just last week she went out to buy him a school uniform and ended up disappearing in the night, leaving Tony heartbroken.  Unlucky, as Ruby might say.  The boy is a positive Bermuda Triangle for his carers.

Cheryl seemed happy to see him, but you know what she’s like.  Once she decides she likes someone, they can do no wrong.  C: “Did you beat me over the head with a chairleg, Brendan, and nick the club’s takings?  Mal says you did.”  B: “Don’t be ridiculous.”  C: “That’s OK, then.”  Inevitably, she took Gilly back to her ample bosom, currently grieving, as are all of our bosoms, for Brendan’s unjust incarceration.  But we still wouldn’t clutch Gilly to ours.  Saving ourselves, us.

So, as Gilly takes to sloping around the village in a not-at-all-rapey way, it looks like we’re heading for the next great Hollyoaks Civil War.  By the Roach divided.  In fact, possibly the only good thing about Gilly coming back is that we’re praying it’ll lead to the smackdown of all smackdowns, the one the whole village has been waiting for.  No, not Brendan v Silas.

MYRA V FRANKIE

The Myranator and Frankie “Giant Haystacks” Osbornehave been itching to have a go at each other for years,

since Myra used to do the cleaning for The Dog and engaged in a bit of joshy flirtation with silver fox Jack.  Myra (Team Jacqui) thinks Frankie is up herself.  Frankie (Team Gilly) thinks Myra is beneath her.   The fact that Myra’s son turned Frankie’s gay and is happily bumming him right now in Dublin is mere paraffin to the flames of their Class War.  Now, they have the perfect excuse to kick off.  We’re hopeful it could all get very messy indeed.  And no prizes for guessing which corner Myra’s Kitchen is in.  Ding ding!