EastEnders at 30 - a national pastime

My mum used to watch EastEnders religiously in the early Nineties, when I was a teenager. So I would watch it too. But it was always with a little trepidation, because of the cautionary nature of some of the storylines – when Diane ran away from home and lived on the street I felt scared, this could really happen – to anyone, to me if I made the choices she had.

When I was watching, Enders was already well established - a soap opera of nine years. But it’s arrival in 1985 turned the TV world upside-down. Born in the decade that saw the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher the first female PM and the phenomenon of Live Aid, it was the first soap produced by the BBC in over 20 years (the last one being Compact which was aired between 1962 and 1965 and penned by the same people who would go on to make Crossroads). EastEnders came three years after the arrival of Channel 4 and it’s Liverpool-set Brookside.

Like the granddaddy of soaps Coronation Street, EastEnders was set in one community with a number of families, but unlike the Corrie of the Eighties it offered: “a realistic cross section of the community… for instance they acknowledged the existence of ethnic minorities” (from Allesandro Silj’s East of Dallas: The European Challenge to American Television).

It was cutting-edge stuff – according to Silj, “The Dialogue is always explicit, even when it is about sex (other British soaps tend to be vague to the point of evasiveness about this subject).” Could this be because – “a survey by the women’s committee of the Writers Guild for February 1985 showed that the new soaps, EastEnders and Brookside, were employing more women than men”?

Despite being racy it was like the other soaps in that it had no stars, it was a real community affair with someone everyone could relate to, and “never-ending stories”.

But that anxiousness about the ‘reality’ of the programme my teenage self experienced was born out of what George W Brandt calls (in British Television Drama in the 1980s): “The confrontation with social reality within the soap format” which he says, “started when home produced soaps … were joined by the newcomers Brookside and EastEnders”. But perhaps the pulse-racing aspect (and the duuf duufs) were a lesson learned from American soaps – we’re hungry for story and will eat it up, Women and Soap Opera author Christine Geraghty says: “EastEnders took on the Brookside commitment to realism through the dramatization of social issues and combined it was a US style paciness”.

It’s a formula that worked for EastEnders: “By the end of its first year it reached … over 23 million in other words 45% of homes in the UK”, it continues to be the most-watched BBC programme to this day. And so it seems the soap's popularity is one of the things that's kept support for the BBC strong. Richard Kilborn speculates in his book Television Soap, “The high ratings obtained by EastEnders have, in the opinion of many observers, proved a valuable asset in the corporation’s continuing quest to obtain adequate levels of funding through the government supervised licence fee system.” So while Mary Whitehouse reached for the phone and the tabloids went into overdrive digging up stories about the stars, we watched in droves and fell in love with the show.

And as a result of what’s called ‘TV pick up’ the National Grid had to start monitoring the programme because as the credits rolled and the nation got up to make a cuppa in tandem, demand for electricity soared. So much so that apparently, on occasion while my ma was knocking on Mrs Harris’ door to borrow some milk, the chaps at National Grid were knocking on the door of our French neighbours to borrow some spare electricity to make up the shortfall! No doubt they’ll have their French counterparts on speed dial this week as the nation tunes in to find out who killed Lucy Beale. 30 years on and we’re still watching and then discussing Enders over a brew, it’s a national pastime, and long may it continue.

Hannah Khalil is Digital Content Producer, About the BBC website and blog

• Find out more about EastEnders at 30 programmes
• Watch the trail – A Killer Exposed
• Read 30 for 30 – Things you never knew about EastEnders
• Watch EastEnders 30 years of cliffhangers
• Watch the first ever episode on iPlayer