WHAT would a soap look like if it was suffering a mid-life crisis?

Well, it would probably have characters coming back from the dead, like Kathy Beale.

You might expect resident hard-nut Phil Mitchell to be kidnapped by Paul Nicholas, from Just Good Friends, and beaten to a pulp.

Bonnie Langford and Harry Enfield’s Double Take Brother could make fleeting appearances.

And chances are a middle-aged undertaker would suddenly confess to his wife that he’s a lifelong secret cross-dresser named Christine, who had me thinking on last Friday’s big reveal: “Sherrie Hewson has let herself go.”

It would look very much like EastEnders, in other words.

Of all the barmy stuff this show has done in its sorry, 30-year history, and it has done some barmy stuff, Les Coker’s transvestite storyline is a real watershed, the moment you can pinpoint it lost its marbles, hope and all sense of direction (three things it all but abandoned by refusing to stop flogging the Lucy Beale murder 19 months, NINETEEN, later.

Obviously this is driven by the show’s endless never-ending PC agenda that has, over the years, tied itself in knots. But it’s also yet another pointless cul-de-sac, not least because Les was one of its best characters and is now reduced simply to the latest feckless man to be made a laughing stock by Walford’s on-screen army of female supremacists.

The plot might deserve to be taken seriously if EastEnders ever remotely resembled reality.

But it doesn’t, does it? So derision is what it shall receive.

It’s a place where pubs host drunken karaoke in the middle of a weekday and all children are psychopaths.

A place where there’s never more than one active alcoholic at a time, with Lee and Phil currently competing to assume Cora’s crown.

Where everyone shops their child/parent to the police for a crime they didn’t commit.

Nowhere other than Walford are London cabbies mute or weddings arranged overnight without anything like the required legal notice period (see Kush and Shabnam’s, set for next Friday, which the bride-to-be sprung on him on Monday).

As for the latest comings and goings, since the summer we’ve lost Charlie, Max, Cindy, Liam, Lola and Lexi.

Carol, Robbie and Beth have gone to the great Albert Square refugee camp, in Milton Keynes.

And Jean, Ollie, Lauren and Libby have all shown their faces and left again.

The only remaining returnee is Kathy who’s been walking around and doing shifts at Ian’s cafe with almost no-one noticing anything’s out of the ordinary, like the small matter of her being alive again.

She’s set for a showdown this evening with violent husband and fellow zombie Gavin, despite Ben delivering this reassuring news: “He’s agreed to leave us alone. I watched him get on a train. I saw him go.”

What with there being no such thing as a return train journey.

As Shabnam, taking estranged daughter Jade out of school for the day, told Stacey: “Sometimes things just happen. They don’t always have a cause and a reason or a neat little handbook to make it make sense. It doesn’t always make sense.”

Exhibit A: Three decades of EastEnders.

Spudulikes…

Dave Gorman: Modern Life Is Goodish.

Everything about ITV whodunit Unforgotten except the relentless net-curtain twitching.

SAS: Who Dares Wins’ brutal Sickener task weeding out five recruits.

Soccer Saturday legend Jeff Stelling: “Jose Mourinho had a go at the media. He said, ‘I’m prepared to listen to every type of critic, even the stupid ones’. Merse, do you see any improvement?”

Yours truly mishearing The Apprentice’s Brett telling the London Pet Show crowd they’re fond lovers of animals as: “You’re all a fondler of animals.”

And Rylan Clark, announcing the Royal Variety Performance acts, feeling the need to point out: “Ricky Martin. Not from The Apprentice, the singer Ricky Martin.” Because we were all assuming it was the former.

Spuduhates…

ITV’s impatience not to wait for a suitable Jekyll and Hyde slot on Sundays.

Caroline Flack complaining about press intrusion while plugging an autobiography about her private life on This Morning.

Ratings disaster Eternal Glory’s aptly named Lead Balloon round which involved, and I swear, holding a balloon in the air the longest.

Bruno Tonioli forgetting what Strictly’s about by despicably rollicking sweet Carol Kirkwood.

X Factor’s chaotic live Judges’ Houses, especially Simon Cowell surrendering his own judgement by putting Max through “on the audience reaction”. An audience, Olly Murs said, “full of friends and family”.

And The Apprentice’s smug Baroness Brady: “Team Versatile sold a total of £4,051.62.” But you’re cutting £1,500 of that in tax credits, right, Karren?