What happened to Vinny in EastEnders? Fans joked they'd forgotten he was still in Walford — turns out they missed a lot
What happened to Vinny Panesar in EastEnders? Why Shiv Jalota's character vanished from screens for weeks, what viewers said when he returned, and what's been going on in his life off camera.
There is a particular fate in soapland worse than being killed off, and it's being quietly forgotten whilst still technically alive. That's where EastEnders viewers recently placed Vinny Panesar — last Panesar standing, owner of one of Walford's more tragic CVs — after he and Penny Branning spent weeks entirely off screen.
The return that broke the fandom's memory
When the pair finally resurfaced in a May episode — Vinny sniffing around a car that Lauren absolutely could not sell him, on account of it being stolen — the reaction was less "hooray" and more "hang on, who?" One viewer's verdict, as reported by TV Guide, rather summed it up:
"I'd forgotten they were still in EastEnders!"
Brutal. Accurate. And a bit unfair, because off in the margins Vinny has been having an enormous year.
What everyone missed whilst not watching
For the record, the man the fandom mentally filed under "miscellaneous" has been busy:
- he's the only Panesar left on the Square, after a family exodus that includes his father Nish leaving in a body bag;
- he's in an actual functioning relationship with Penny Branning — a pairing the show teased at the start of the year and then developed largely in the gaps between everyone else's crises;
- the two of them are expecting: the soap gave them their first baby scan back in the spring, making Vinny a Panesar patriarch-in-waiting whether he likes it or not;
- and the Penny storyline is currently the subject of some rather ominous fan theorising about where it's all heading, which is never a comfortable place for a soap couple to sit.
None of this came out of nowhere. Shiv Jalota was teasing a major Vinny era as far back as last autumn's NTAs, telling Digital Spy:
"Ben [Wadey] has given me a beautiful storyline that I can't give away."
He kept the secret. The audience kept forgetting he existed. Somewhere in between, Vinny Panesar got himself a partner, a pregnancy and the family mantle — proof that in Walford, the quiet ones are only ever quiet because the cameras are pointed elsewhere.