The BBC soap celebrates 25 years next week with its first live episode
Almost exactly 25 years ago, three men burst on to our television screens by knocking down the door of Reg Cox's bedsit. They were Den Watts, Arthur Fowler and Ali Osman and they were making history in the very first episode of EastEnders. Cox, sadly, was dead, the first of many in the Walford drama that has so far claimed the lives of 78 of its characters.
What is very much alive and kicking, however, is the popularity of the soap and its importance to the BBC. EastEnders represents the first time that prim "Auntie Beeb" produced a successful television soap to rival Coronation Street, Emmerdale Farm and the emerging Brookside. In doing so, Julia Smith and Tony Holland – the first producer and screenwriter – created a show that became a national institution, and, arguably, the saviour of the corporation and its licence fee-funded model. Not only is EastEnders the BBC's most consistent programme in terms of ratings, but it is the programme that reaches young and ethnic minority viewers that the national broadcaster otherwise struggles to woo.
Smith and Holland were already a successful partnership, having worked on Z Cars and the popular nursing drama Angels, when they were approached by BBC executives spooked by the success of Channel 4's Brookside in the early 1980s. They needed a soap opera that would connect with "middle Britain" and the project was eventually agreed by Michael Grade. The BBC had been scarred by several failures to create a popular soap, including the ill-fated ferry drama Triangle, which lasted three series.
Holland, from the East End of London, devised the show, drawing heavily on childhood experience. He died in 2007 aged 67, but John Yorke, the BBC's head of drama production, says: "I think EastEnders stems from a child's eye view, a world in which there were strong families, and a sense of community and adversity shaped by the second world war." Bomb damage was a feature of early Albert Square sets, as was an emphasis on struggling through adversity – while humour, used in northern soaps, was downplayed.
Strong women
The third critical element in the EastEnders formula was an emphasis on matriarchy, as epitomised by Wendy Richard's Pauline Fowler or Barbara Windsor's Peggy Mitchell, which attracted the female-dominated early evening audience. Yorke puts that down to Holland's "gay sensibility, which showed a love for strong woman", and in so doing helped created television that meant "BBC licence fee payers are actually getting what they want from the BBC". The first episode was watched by 17 million and an all-time record 30.5 million viewers tuned in on Christmas Day 1986 to watch the womanising Den Watts serve divorce papers on his alcoholic wife, Angie.
Such gritty peaktime soaps are an almost uniquely British phenomenon. US drama is far more aspirational, and other parts of the world more influenced by romantic telenovellas, rather than the daily diet of death, destruction and divorce that is a British soap. Mal Young, who was working on Brookside when EastEnders launched, and then ran the Walford soap between 1997 and 2004, says that EastEnders succeeded because it followed in an established British tradition. "It starts with the kitchen sink dramas, the Osborne plays that led to Coronation Street, Brookside and finally EastEnders. We are fascinated by the underbelly of society."
A long period of success followed. Johnathan Young, who worked as a show runner on the first episode and later became one of its directors, says what characterised it from the early stages was the "high volumes of feedback from the audience" – a show that captured the country's imagination before the days of reality TV shows and social networking sites.
Indeed, EastEnders has only been under serious threat once in its history. The emergence of the reality shows – Big Brother, Pop Idol and The X Factor – brought the soap to a crisis in the middle of the noughties. In September 2005, ratings slumped to 6.6 million and behind the scenes the production was in chaos, with scripts only written 48 hours before screening. EastEnders has recovered, helped initially by the return of the Mitchell brothers, but still has to fight against reality shows, and Young, now the head of drama at TalkbackThames, the producer of The Bill, worries that it is still the reality programmes with their "real-life soap opera storyline" that dominate the public imagination.
Today, the soap is going through a revival, helped by the build-up to the second wedding of the popular characters Ricky and Bianca as well as the Archie Mitchell whodunnit. The rogue, played by Larry Lamb, was killed on 25 December using the bust of Queen Vic, in Albert Square's pub – and the identity of his killer will be revealed in the first live episode on 19 February, the date of the 25th anniversary.
These storylines helped give EastEnders an average audience of 10.8 million in January, putting it ahead of Coronation Street, at 10.4 million, for the first time in more than three years. With the programme now on four times a week, costing a relatively modest £150,000 an episode, its success is critical to the performance of BBC1. The former BBC1 controller Lorraine Heggessey once said: "When EastEnders is going well, BBC1 is going well." The only time of the week the BBC believes it can launch a show is after an EastEnders episode, or possibly after Holby City.
Yet it is what underlies the ratings figures that is almost more important to the BBC hierarchy. BBC figures claim that 43% of black people and other ethnic minority groups watch EastEnders regularly – helped by the introduction of the Masood family in 2007. BBC executives recognise the programme reaches a part of the country – young, multi-ethnic – in a way that no other BBC output does.
Important issues
Mark Thompson, the BBC director general, argues that EastEnders embodies the values of the modern public service BBC, describing it as "a central part of national life" that is "fantastic entertainment" and has "at the same time raised awareness and tackled many important issues – from HIV and Aids, mental health, domestic violence, drug misuse and many others".
With the rise of much cheaper reality TV programmes, several TV executives fear that launches such as EastEnders belong to the past. The last big successful launch was in 1995 with Channel 4's Hollyoaks. Long-running shows benefit from the fact that people have grown up with them and retain a loyalty no longer available in the world of multichannel TV.
Peter Bazalgette, the former chief creative officer at Big Brother's producer, Endemol, observes: "Not only does EastEnders help justify the compulsory licence fee system, because of its popularity with mass audiences, but it looks like it might not be possible in today's climate to create a new soap if EastEnders ever needed to be replaced. That makes it all the more valuable to the BBC."
Or as Yorke puts it: "Can you imagine where the BBC would be today if it had not launched EastEnders?"