Clyde Tavernier - Reception

Reception

Writer Rupert Smith has suggested that Clyde's purpose was "almost entirely decorative" and that Clyde had little else to do in EastEnders except take his clothes off, other than to "dally improbably with Michelle and to do the odd bit of kidnapping." In the 1992 book Come on down?: popular media culture in post-war Britain, the authors have referenced Clyde and the rest of the Tavernier family as non-white characters who appeared to have been integrated into part of the predominantly white communal setting of the soap. However, they suggested that this attempt at inclusion "is the single clue to an understanding of why EastEnders is a development of an old form of representation of working-class life. The ethnic minority households are accepted in the working-class community, but the black, white and Asian families remain culturally distinct." They suggested that there was no attempt to portray hybridity between black-white cultures.

Robert Clyde Allen has discussed the Tavernier family in his 1995 book To be continued--: soap operas around the world. He suggested that black characters in EastEnders were incorporated into the working-class culture of the soap as opposed to offering something different from it. He noted that the Taverniers, the focus of black characters in the early 1990s, for a while had the same mixture of generations and attitudes that characterized the Fowlers, one of the soap's core white families who had a dominant position in the series. However he stated that "somewhat typically the family broke up".