Hipsters Are Going to Ruin EastEnders

It is no secret that EastEnders has been on its uppers for a very long time. Most soaps have peaks and troughs of tedium, but EastEnders has done particularly badly – if any attention is shone on it, it's usually in the form of caustic criticism directed at almost everything it has to offer. This year though, new producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins has stormed in like an Elstree Caligula and kicked it into shape, ruthlessly getting rid of the detritus irritating the living hell out of viewers for years. For the first time in a long time, EastEnders is beginning to stand up to its superior soap rival Corrie. But, like an overexcited fresher buzzing its tits off, daring itself to somersault off a balcony, the trajectory of greatness has plummeted. Walford is getting Shoreditchified.

I've long theorised that the reason Coronation Street succeeds where EastEnders doesn't is that Coronation Street is the place you come from, and Albert Square is the place you arrive at, confused, out of your depth and a bit too eager to fit in.

London is rammed with people who were too bright and ambitious to stay within the confines of the small towns they knew intimately, up and down and inside out. EastEnders drops its metaphorical bags, brandishing awkward slang, in an outfit that would make an undercover policeman at carnival cringe his arsehole inside out, trying to make sense of chicken shops and the tube network.

Albert Square, which is based on Hackney's Fassett Square, is a morbid diorama of cack-handed inauthenticity. The characters do not talk or behave like anyone you've met, but instead some caricatured Punch and Judy show of imagined and grossly inaccurate cock-er-nees trapped in a bizarre time warp. At times this can be patently insulting – representation of black and brown people in a borough that would have around 45 percent non-white residents IRL being the worst offence. Asian families arrive in a carnival of awkward cultural signifiers, before being slowly decimated and written out because to superimpose decent plots on characters who haven't been honoured with more than one dimension is too difficult a task. The scant black faces don't fare much better, with writers refusing to look black culture in the eye except for the occasional gaudy wink, which usually involves Patrick pissed on Wray and Nephews shaking a geriatric leg to some ska.

In other ways though, the lack of realism is a comfort. As in life, it's better not to question how characters pay rents that would surely be unaffordable, or to think too deeply about how many evenings they spend in the pub. You can wrap the shoddy storylines round you like a stinking, soiled, but worryingly familiar blanket. But now that's all about to go to pot.

Nods to gentrification have been quietly showing themselves for a while in EastEnders. With each handover of the throne of Walford, the Queen Vic pub, the blood drains from faces of Albert Square serfs as they speculate what will become of it. Most recently, they guessed it would be converted into flats, or – even more horrifyingly – become a gay bar. Occasionally a character will stagger home on the first tube, covered in the supposed spoils of East London nightlife, glitter and foam, having lost one of their neon legwarmers along the way. The less said about Peggy Mitchell's grime night the better.

What will be gained from introducing the flotsam and jetsam of gentrified Hackney, who are without fail emptier and more worthless than even the worst soap character, I do not know. To hope for some kind of post-witch house Hollyoaks, something that doesn't arrive already out of date and which could at least provide a cheap laugh, is tragically optimistic. Judging by the current pace of relevance, when the expanded square is revealed in 2018, all the stall holders will find their baker boy hats replaced by trucker caps. These days, real hipsters are indistinguishable from a down-at-heel single mum clinging to her rave glory days, so don't worry about your brave fashion choices being plundered by the BBC wardrobe department just yet. Whether Winston will introduce an electroclash section to his stall is, as yet, unconfirmed. I suspect the most accurate aspect of the new world order will be be well-to-do wankers still trying and failing to bend their tongues around around tewtally authentic inner-city accents.

There is at least one upside: Sharon's new wine bar will be empty, losing money hand over fist as Walford's hip new residents opt instead for the cultural safari of a real "old man pub". It will start with a suspicious band of twats playing darts in the corner of the pub, asking if they take cards. Friends and misguided one-night stands will slowly join them, and soon Walford will be colonised.

It goes without saying that this will be wholly annoying, but don't get your knickers in a twist just yet. This shift is just further evidence for the homogenisation of hip. "Hipster" is – as any hipster worth his salt knows – an outdated word, uttered only by Radio 4 comedians and when a family member looks a particularly pioneering outfit up and down and quizzically asks if you are one.

Maybe this will be as significant as the first gay soap kiss. Maybe some poor boy, watching from his mum's back bedroom in Dewsbury, will crystalise all his confused feelings about Stone Island and early acid house, look at the assorted under-nourished fools on screen and know where he belongs: on the first coach out of the town that raised him.

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