The best-looking gal in Walford and arguably Weatherfield, Emmerdale and beyond, Lauren is virtually the only the person in Albert Square who is single.
Even her dowdy younger sister Abi has a tasty boyfriend in Jay and after a drought lasting several years, her aunt Carol has two - David and Masood. So It’s basically Lauren, Tamwar, and Dot.
Even on New Year's Eve as the bells chimed for midnight in the Queen Vic, she was the only one in the whole with no-one to kiss.
Actress Jacqueline Jossa could be forgiven for developing something of a complex.
Ever since Lauren broke up with Joey several months ago, not a single male character has asked her out, or eyed her up in the street. The likes of Peter, Dexter, notorious ladies man David Wicks and the man who we all still think of as Danny Dyer seem blissfully unaware of her presence.
Apart that is from Jake Stone. Ah Jake – the middle-aged, married, alcoholic. What a catch.
Lauren ‘became close’ to Jake at her counselling sessions, where they bonded over a mutual love for getting bombed out of their brains on vodka. Sweet !
The indignity of sneaking around having back street snogs with Jake was bad enough but this week,
Lauren’s life/love life went from bad to worse.
First, Jake’s 10 year-old daughter Bella virtually caught her in her parents’ bed with her dad (with Bella’s dad that is. Even Lauren is not that messed up, even if her previous boyfriend Joey was her cousin.) Then Lauren’s dad Max went round to Jake’s to smash his face in when Carol (wrongly) told Max that Lauren was up the duff.
This started a ruck that resulted in Jake’s wife Sadie finding out that Lauren was sleeping with her husband. Lauren thus became responsible for Jake’s wife and kid moving out, thus losing her job and friends Poppy and Lola their jobs in the process when she resolved to close the salon and move back to her mum’s (to Sadie’s mum’s, not Lauren’s. That would have just been weird.)
Jake then fell off the wagon – which admittedly didn’t take much – sinking a bottle of whisky and throwing it at her, with the glass smashing in her face (albeit only slightly).
+10
So few of the male population of Walford ever
give Lauren Branning a second glance, let alone ask her out, that
actress Jacqueline Jossa could be forgiven for getting confused or
getting a complex
Finally having been caught in bed by her lover’s daughter, broken up his marriage, cost his wife her business and driven an alcoholic to drink, Lauren capped off a fairly dismal week, when she failed to persuade Jake they were finished.
‘We can go where we want, do what we want,’ he argued, meaning presumably, go the Vic and drink.
Declaring that he had nothing left to live for and threatening her with suicide, Jake then marched her into his car, effectively taking Lauren hostage.
Let’s face it we’ve all had weeks like it.
Admittedly she was the most obliging hostage ever seen, getting into the back seat without putting up a fight or a single scream.
The only high point of Lauren’s week came when Jake ploughed his car into Tommy’s pushchair and it turned out that it wasn’t carrying Tommy but was full of meat.
‘What do I know about meat?!’ Kat had cried – a question that was best left unanswered. The answer, it transpired, was not much when we learned that the meat was ‘dodgy’, or rather ‘doggy’. Yes, Kat was selling dog.
Even after all this – after his daughter, his wife, his alcoholism, his abduction, and his near miss with Our Tommy – Lauren was still so desperate, all she would think about was Jake and making sure he was alright (he wasn’t).
As her dad Max put it pertinently: ‘Wossa matter wiv you? Have you gone mad or wot ?!’
It was, like the whole storyline, hard to fathom. Jake was, after all, the latest of EastEnders’ identikit Northerners, in the tradition of Jase and Tony the Paedophile: mumbling, unshaven, untrustworthy, undesirable, generally unemployed and, ultimately, criminal.
