In A CONTINUING DRAMA we learned how semi alcoholic and washed-up TV writer Joe Farrell stole the idea for the soap PENGE WEST from his friend Pat Riley. Pat died in a drinking contest with Joe, and Joe passed PENGE WEST off as his own work to Angela Phelan at Lowland TV as he was desperate for money. Angela commissioned the series for Channel 5, and the soap became a huge success.

At the same time, Joe was divorced by his wife Barbara for having had an affair with Becky Butler, a much younger actress who has come to despise Joe, and who has since been cast in PENGE WEST, much to Joe’s dismay.

Made homeless by his divorce, Joe took up residence in Pat’s flat, and has been haunted by Pat’s somewhat cheerful ghost ever since. (Joe believes the ghost to be a manifestation of his own guilt at stealing from his friend.) Joe has worked on every single episode of PENGE WEST and has come to hate the soap. Driven mad by it, Joe decided to blow up the set – and the cast – with the help of insane Irish actor DERMOT COLLINS during the live episode.

Viewers loved the spectacle, and far from destroying the soap it helped establish it all the more, and Netflix picked up the show and is now streaming it internationally.

Joe is contractually obliged to write every episode, and the money he gets goes mainly to his ex-wife Barbara and her lawyers, with another ten percent always going to his eccentric agent Maggie, leaving Joe broke, overworked and on the edge of sanity.

In the actual soap PENGE WEST, we saw how socially anxious Lynne Rose was visited by pretend estate agent Dylan Esex, who was trying to trick Lynne and her partner Jeff out of their house so that Dylan’s wife Daisy could take it over.

Daisy was originally Daisy Morden, part of the Morden crime family who originally owned the house.  Lynne was once married to Terry Morden, who abused her when she was pregnant with her daughter Maya. Lynne ended up killing Terry and burying him in the garden, but Jeff, Lynne’s partner, thought he had killed Terry.  Jeff had somehow embezzled £2.4 million from Lloyds of London. Daisy learned all of this and had Jeff transfer the money to her just before she attempted to blow up the family in the Bleak House pub, but all Daisy managed was to blow herself up. 

Dylan had a change of heart and tried to help Jeff and Lynne. Jeff lost all the money and now works in a call centre.  Maya, Lynne’s daughter who is now eighteen, went off to Durham University, but only after spiking the drink of her A Level teacher Mr MacAllister who she had a crush on.  As a result of her spiking his drink, Mr MacAllister fell under a train at Penge West Station and died. His brother Tim MacAllister has since got a job at Penge West High School, and is investigating his brother’s death with the help of local bakers Bob Baker and Carol Bunn, who run a true-crime Penge Mysteries podcast. Maya returned from Durham at Christmas, and announced that the main achievement of her first term at university was to get pregnant.

Dylan Essex is now a peripatetic music teacher, but has since fallen under the spell of Scarlett Morden, his dead wife’s twin sister who he knew nothing about. Scarlett is even more psychopathic than Daisy was (and Daisy was fully psychopathic). 

Meanwhile, plastic piping manufacturer and ludicrous lothario Leo Malvern, who had been having an affair with Luisa Lorne, the trophy wife of his client the plumbing boss Martin Lorne, got caught in the explosion and has ended up in a coma – the second he has been in since the series started. The first one came when he was in a car crash, driving his secretary Molly Halloran who he thought was trying to blackmail him because she knew of his affair with Louisa.

Molly has since started dating Bradley Curtis, the clueless young barman at the Bleak House pub, but Molly is having doubts about Bradley as he says he doesn’t want to marry her, because the last girl he proposed to, Gemma Di Luzio, rejected him because he did want to marry her. Leo Malvern’s wife Miriam, a terrible snob who lives at the leafier end of Penge and who imagines herself as some sort of social fixer like a character from an Austen novel, is disdainful of the NHS because it is for poor people and she thinks comas are far too common, and so is desperate for her husband to regain consciousness to raise their standing again.

Land Registry field agent Sally Trent had uncovered some strange truths about who actually owned what in Penge West, and is about to return with even more strange truths.

Joe Cartwright, penny-pinching landlord of the Bleak House pub, has had the pub rebuilt. His perpetually-stoned barman Bradley keeps mucking up there, and Bleak House head barmaid Janice Greer is trying to hold it all together.

Tony and Guy, the husband-and-husband duo who run Tony and Guy’s café, are having problems with the milk in their frother, Italian restaurant owner Massimo DiLuzio can’t stop putting on a thick Italian restaurant even though he was born and raised in SE20, his daughter Gemma is trying to hold down her job in an advertising agency while avoiding her old boyfriend Bradley, and Reg Eccles is still officially the most boring man in Penge.

And Nathan Statham, the pretentious artistic director of amdram company the Penge West Players, is waiting in the wings to audition for his terrible musical…