News Round-up: Daniella Westbrook, Drudge, Online Video

Daniella Westbrook returns to EASTENDERS
Former EASTENDER Daniella Westbrook is set to return to the BBC One soap as Sam Mitchell this summer.

"I'm really happy to be coming back, it feels just like coming home," the actress said.

Westbrook, 35, first appeared on Albert Square in 1990 but left in 1996. She spent a brief second stint in the show between 1999 and 2000.

HUMOR: Star of GUIDING LIGHT for 72 Years Laments Show’s Passing
102-year-old Samuel Blatchford, who has starred as leading man Ellis Smith in every episode of the show on both radio and televison, blames “the hippies and the draft dodgers” for the show’s demise.

Faced with extinction last year, the show’s plotlines were revamped to attract younger viewers. The producers had Blatchford’s character take up with a college crowd – ”we were a bunch of hot studs on the prowl for hook-ups,” he explained — but after an initial ratings bump, viewership plummetted. Insiders blamed Blatchford. First, he objected to playing every scene shirtless “because of the pacemaker.” Then he abruptly forced writers to scuttle a plotline where his character was to be accused of date-rape by a fellow-student because he feared “they’d make me show my wee-wee.”

French soap shakes up prime time traditions
PLUS BELLE LA VIE does everything France 3's programmers hoped for. Set in a fictional working-class neighbourhood in the ethnically diverse Mediterranean port city of Marseilles, the story revolves around the most French of institutions, the neighbourhood café. It follows characters such as the successful Algerian-born lawyer Malik Nassri, the wealthy Frémont family with its shady business dealings, and the Castellis, a newly married couple.

Although the story line can be as ordinary as sibling rivalry, it also veers toward the fantastic with tales of murders and ghosts. Much of its intrigue is based on subjects such as teenage pregnancy, medical marijuana and homosexuality.

VIDEO: Christian LeBlanc and Winsor Harmon discuss Soap Opera Mania


More on the Matt Drudge controversy
It turns out the Out magazine's item on Matt Drudge, which got the "Drudge Report" publisher so riled up last week, was sourced to a onetime gay stripper's memoir. The ex-stripper has more stories. Craig Seymour knew Drudge when both of them worked as telemarketers at Time-Life and used to crisscross the DC Beltway together into the wee hours.

According to a memoir excerpt Seymour posted to his blog, Drudge's love for Chaka Khan and THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS — both reported by Out, to Drudge's great shame — aren't the fedora-wearing blogger's only embarrassing pop-culture obsessions: He also had a "love/hate relationship" with pop singer Whitney Houston and her hit "One Moment in Time."

Online Video Seen as Biggest Threat to On-Demand Business
The video-on-demand business is one of the entertainment mediums most vulnerable to being replaced by online video over the long haul. That’s the finding of a recent report from research firm One Touch Intelligence, which contends that the DVD and paid VOD businesses face a real threat from the burgeoning online video marketplace.

For the most part, the experience of watching a movie or paid TV show is replicated easily by online portals and services including Hulu, iTunes, Fancast and now Netflix, which streams many of its movies and TV shows online.

“For both ad-supported VOD and transactional [pay-per-movie] VOD, flourishing in a time of rising Internet video availability depends on content and convenience,” said Stewart Schley, author of the report. “Viewers will gravitate toward whichever platform provides more choice in titles and more ease in access.”