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MADDIE WATCH - Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann

The newspapers’ hunt for Madeleine McCann has passed. The missing child now serves as a point of reference for anyone looking to add realism to a work of fiction:

PEOPLE: “I’m having a BLAST in EastEnders - EXCLUSIVE As evil GP Mad May is back to terrorise Walford actress Amanda Drew lifts lid on her return”

Eastenders’ “Mad May” is one of the most sinister psychos to grace Walford. The evil GP vanished last year after trying to steal her love rival’s baby.

A female doctor, like Kate McCann?

In an exclusive chat with The People, Amanda, 38, talks about being single, her friendship with Catherine Tate and why she was relieved when scriptwriters changed her storylines at the time Madeleine McCann went missing.

Firth things first:

Q When you left last year your storylines were rewritten because it was too similar to the Madeleine McCann disappearance.

How did you feel about it?

A As soon as Madeleine went missing I thought “no”. I was very worried and really relieved when they changed it. It was too raw a topic to be dealing with on a soap.

Because the typical soap watcher cannot differentiate between fact and a fiction?

In response to that script change Anorak was invited on the BBC’s Jeremy Vine show. The BBC produces EastEnders but no-one from the show arrived to comment on the decision to alter the script and then tell the world about it.

DAILY TELEGRAPH: “Relocated: chilling, vivid and unnervingly topical - Charles Spencer is unnerved but impressed by Relocated at the Royal Court”

The theatre’s knack of keeping its finger on the pulse of our troubled times is displayed yet again with Relocated, a deeply disconcerting new play by Anthony Neilson. I saw it on Friday night and it’s been nagging away in my head all weekend, like a half-remembered nightmare that taints your waking hours… This unsettling piece taps into a great fear of the age -…

Global warming? Terrorism? Being fat? Appearing on the Jeremy Kyle show?

…the abduction and abuse of children.

Indeed, ’tis every parents worst nightmare. The papers tell us so. But this play, isn’t it a game of Tabloid Bingo!

The play has clearly been inspired by the recently discovered activities of Herr Fritzl in that terrible basement in Austria, in which he fathered children on his own daughter and kept them in captivity.

But you also catch echoes of the Soham murders and Maxine Carr’s complicity with Ian Huntley, and of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

At the finale Shannon Matthews comes out dressed in a duvet cover and singing Climb Every Mountain in Portuguese…

Posted: 16th, June 2008 | In: Broadsheets, Madeleine McCann, Tabloids. Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0