Ladies and gentlemen of the church, please be seated. Lo, it is on this day that we commemorate a swaggering twat of a man who goes by the name of Daniel Dyer. Over the years he has regaled us with laddish tales of gangsters, hooligans, gangster-hooligans, cockney loudmouths, and gangster-hooligan-cockney-loudmouths in an acting range only bested by the true greats of our time.

 

Dyer is truly one of Britain's finest method actors. His general method is to show up, be Danny Dyer for a bit on camera, then leave to write something misogynistic in Zoo Magazine. And yet now we must mourn Mr. Dyer for he has suffered a fate worse than death – he has joined the cast of Eastenders.

 

To join the cast of Eastenders is a bit like being a swan – once you've mated with the prime-time soap, that's you for life. Never again will you dream of being an epic Hollywood A-lister, a star of the stage or a national treasure. It's the acting equivalent of a mid-level, dead-end office job; never progressing, never even moving sideways. Simply stagnant.

 

And Eastenders itself is constantly about as depressing as that last sentence. Every year at my mum's house I'm forced to watch the Christmas special with her. It's a staple of the Christmas day seemingly designed to make the viewer lose the will to live as they witness the worst of human misery before them. Cockneys scream and bellow at each other, 'THAT WAS MOY BABAY RICKAY!', 'OI'M LEAVIN' YOU TERRY! MERRY CHRISTMAS!' It's like viewing an episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show broadcast directly from hell. By the time the show is finished the remaining goodwill my mother and I have left is spent fashioning nooses out of our Christmas stockings.

 

And this is the future that we're allowing for Mr. Dyer. It's a shame because there is evidence that he can be a decent actor if he really wants to be. His performance in 1999's Human Traffic was imbued with just enough charm to create a reasonably likeable character. The same goes for his turn as Steve in the underrated Severance, in which Dyer plays, surprise surprise, a laddish but ultimately likeable bell-end. Although he's never exactly been one to depart from his cockerney geezer persona, that's not really his problem.

 

The real issue is that he seems dead set on starring in any old shit that'll have him. This caused him to reach a career nadir earlier this year with the release of Run For Your Wife, a British farce that caused The Independent to run the headline 'Is this movie the biggest turkey ever filmed?' and that managed to take a mere £747 in its opening weekend. To call it a train wreck would be unfair to train wrecks. If train wrecks were sentient beings they would distance themselves as much as possible from any association with Run For Your Wife. The Commission for the Accurate Representation of Train Wrecks would release a statement saying, “Although train wrecks reap destruction and misery wherever we tread, we have never created anything as unremittingly bleak as Danny Dyer's Run For Your Wife.” My point is that Run For Your Wife is bad. Really very bad.

 

Oscar Wilde once said, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Danny Dyer is not looking at the stars, but instead seems to be lying on his stomach and pushing his face desperately into a grating in the gutter, writhing his body towards the rest of the piss and shit careering past him, as though trying to become an integral part of the social excrement it represents.

 

From Danny Dyer's Deadliest Men to his genuinely appalling and hopelessly misogynistic column, Dyer seems to stagger from one horrendous career move to another, groping desperately for success, a flailing wank of a man set to waste his potential simply because of a lack of discerning taste. So, as the darkness falls on a career that once seemed so promising, and Dyer is plunged into the very depths of Eastenders, let us now bow our heads and pray for this lost soul -

 

    Oh Lord, please cut Danny Dyer some slack

    And stop him from making himself look like a dick.

    Amen.

 

There it goes past the pews and up to the furnace, a funeral pyre of pointlessness otherwise known as Danny Dyer's career. Goodbye Mr. Dyer. Goodbye.