EE: 25th birthday

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[eefanincan]

Why do so many people who hate EE, bother to even read an article about it, let alone comment ??????

It might not be the most intellectually stimulating program on the planet but I still enjoy it

[SpursFan1902]

I agree eefan...why bother? And how is it if you have never watched it, you know for sure and certain that you hate it? People are dumb...

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I liked this reply - haha

"

Never watch it, load of old cobblers!

I think Peggy murdered Archie.
Bradley's just not the type, and it's too obvious for it to be Phil. But, you never know with Ronnie..?
I still miss Grant. Wouldn't it be good if he turned up on Friday and was revealed as the murderer? - but then disappeared off to Portugal or Brazil again?

Anyway, as I said. I never watch this low brow nonsense. ... But, wouldn't it be great if Sayeed got together with Christian and with the blessing of his mum, had a civil partnership?

Load of rubbish. .... never watched it, is this what we (sometimes) pay our licence fee for?"

[Skylace]

That's a good one face. I do find it funny that people bitch and moan. I don't like certain shows. Like "Sex in the City" don't like it one bit. So guess what? I don't watch it nor do I go to the movies. And I also don't complain about it because I DON'T CARE!
What gets to me is the comment "stick to corrie, at least you get the odd laugh." I'm sorry, you do get laughs on EE. It's not all sunshine and roses but it's a soap for ffs.

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25 years of EastEnders women
A live episode revealing who killed Archie Mitchell will show how key the soap’s leading ladies are to its success

Immersing yourself in 25 years of EastEnders cliffhangers on YouTube is best enjoyed with a glass of wine. You surf from Den Watts serving wife Angie with divorce papers on Christmas Day 1986 to Tiffany Mitchell dying on New Year’s Eve — seasonal greetings usually come with spiked eggnog in Albert Square — after being knocked over by Frank Butcher, while trying to stop her abusive husband Grant from stealing their daughter Courtney.

My favourite “doof-doof”, as the BBC insists we define them (because of the climactic EastEnders drum beats at the end of every episode), features Peggy Mitchell interrupting Den Watts’s second funeral (yes, he returned from the dead) to knock his wife, and killer, Chrissy Watts into his grave. Chrissy had framed Peggy’s daughter Sam for the crime. “Murderer,” Peggy bellows in that croaky goblin rasp of hers. “Tell Den you’re sorry.”

You see what happens when you try to explain anything that happens in EastEnders? Sentences spool; complicated plots refuse to be marshalled. But at the centre of this show, set in a square with possibly the highest murder and adultery rates in the country, are its women: Dot Cotton, Pat Butcher, Peggy Mitchell, Pauline Fowler, Angie Watts, Sharon Watts, Jane Beale, Zainab Masood, Janine Butcher, Ronnie Mitchell — if not feminists, then vivid caricatures of extreme female endurance.

These are women who suffer, and just when you think life has them beat, it beats them some more. They will survive. Or die dramatically and, if they are really lucky, get “Julia’s Theme”, a tinkly motif reserved for special births, deaths and marriages named after Julia Smith, one of the show’s creators. If EastEnders is known for anything, then it is its bleakness in contrast to the warmth of its great rival, Coronation Street, although its executive producer, Diederick Santer, denies that it is miserable, and claims it “celebrates the human spirit — characters who go through a lot but who ultimately survive. It’s a never-ending story, and that’s why people watch it.”

EastEnders began, in 1985, as it meant to go on: the body of pensioner Reg Cox was discovered by Den Watts, who uttered the show’s first line: “Cor, stinks a bit in here.” The litany of misery and controversy (rape, abortion, domestic violence, paedophilia) has been relentless: a typical day for an Albert Square resident will begin with a hangover, progress to a mid-morning blackmail attempt, and end with them being dumped by an incandescent loved one just before lights out, as they sit in a cell having been arrested for murder. This seems to be a winning feel-bad combination: it was announced over the weekend that EastEnders has become Britain’s most-watched drama, beating Corrie for the first time in three years.

The strong woman, the matriarch, the survivor, the gin-soaked trollop with a heart of gold: all are familiar female soap archetypes and the most recurrent aspect of EastEnders — an amalgam of suffering and strength heralding back to the likes of Mildred Pierce. British soap has long been ruled by women. Annie Walker presided over the bar of the Rovers Return in Coronation Street like a dowager, Elsie Tanner was for many years the volatile fulcrum of Weatherfield, with a ridiculously turbulent private life, cloud of red hair and battery of cigarettes.

The endless hand-wringing over their children and bounds of mother love are particularly evident in the suffering women of soap. Dot Cotton in EastEnders was blessed with the racist, drug-dealing “Nasty” Nick Cotton for a son: he once tried to poison her, then fleece her of her savings. For years, she has wept over her Bible about her failures as a mother.

Pauline Fowler once rightly pointed out that Peggy’s Mitchell’s children were “two thugs and a slapper”. Pauline’s own son, Mark, was HIV positive, her daughter Michelle was a teen mum and her other son, Martin, hated her after she tried to interfere in his marriage to Sonia Jackson, a former lesbian. Pauline died in the middle of the Square, in a snowstorm, beside a bench dedicated to her beloved Arthur. EastEnders is hailed for its gritty realism but, when necessary, it embraces the melodramatic with camp gusto.

Nina Wadia plays Zainab Masood, who is currently desperately trying to keep her son Syed in the closet to avoid bringing shame on her family. “Everyday drama, which is what soaps are, is about women,” she says. “If men need to sort something out, they go to the pub, talk it out. That would be very boring to watch. Women hold grudges, there’s more drama around them. When my little daughter comes home from school, she’ll tell me who she has fallen out with that day. When my son comes in, he’ll say, ‘Momma, snack’. That’s the difference. When you meet husbands and wives on the street, he’ll always say, ‘I only watch it because she has it on.’ And you know men do watch it!”

Men, though, are not incidental to women’s ascendancy in soaps: their misdeeds or goodness are an essential foil for the women with whom they are paired. On the occasion of EastEnders’ birthday on February 19, for the first time in its history, it will play out a live episode in which the identity of Archie Mitchell’s murderer will be revealed, just after Ricky and Bianca remarry (or will they?).

At the heart of Archie’s storyline was his attempts to control Peggy (Barbara Windsor, for a while, started wearing pie-crust collars and flattening her hair down) and his lie to his daughter Ronnie that her daughter Danielle had died — she hadn’t but when Danielle came to Albert Square she didn’t reveal herself, and Archie helped to keep mother and daughter apart until the latter was tragically killed. As with any major storyline in a soap, this was a clotted mix of scheming, recriminations and tragedy. One of Santer’s most controversial moves was to kill Danielle. “But we had to. Ronnie’s story would have ended had we let them be happily reunited,” he says. “My girlfriend punched me on the arm when it happened, and I knew that punch was really from millions of other people.”

Coronation Street will mark its own (50th)anniversary later this year with a storyline focusing on two major female characters. Gail McIntyre will be enmeshed into the messy aftermath after her latest husband Joe’s botched plan to fake his own death — and the Street’s Queen of Mean, Tracy Barlow, will return.

Secrecy around EastEnders’ live episode is paramount. Santer reveals that even the actor playing the murderer won’t know it is him or her until the night of the episode. Eight possible endings are being rehearsed from this week and, says Santer, “Only on the night will we whisper to the real perpetrator, ‘It’s you’ and, bam, they will play the revelation live on air.”

Finally, we will discover who brought the bust of Queen Victoria down on Archie’s head. “The killer may be revealed to the audience rather than the Square,” says Santer. This would make sense as the crew has been filming episodes to be transmitted after the live one. “It has been very hard,” says Charlie Brooks, who plays the villainous Janine. “In the episodes to be shown afterwards, you’re being told to look or speak a certain way, but not why.”

Santer smiles ruefully. “It’s been a challenge for the cast. They are as desperate to know who did it as the viewers.” The actors got the scripts for the episode (minus the murderer’s true identity) on Friday: Wadia tells me she, “like a few of the actors, was disappointed yet relieved to find that we didn’t have speaking roles. You want to be in it, but not to mess it up.”

Santer shows me the exterior set. The first surprise is how tiny Albert Square is. Stepping on to it, you feel a bit of a giant. The Victorian houses of EastEnders are the right number of storeys — the inspiration was Fassett Square in Hackney — but too small, so everything appears slightly Toytown-ish. Did Phil Mitchell really tumble down those steps when he was shot? He would have just grazed himself. The park in the middle of the Square where Pauline Fowler dropped dead, where Arthur’s bench stands, where Owen has been buried by the murderous Lucas? Titchy!

Only the Queen Vic feels like it could be a proper pub, with its red livery and swinging sign. The hairdressers has been renamed Roxy’s, implying that the Square’s recent multi-millionairess may be about to expand her empire.

There may be curtains and blinds in the windows of the other houses, but they are just shells — actors balance from gantries if they’re required to shout from a casement. The market is also cramped and incredibly small; only the Tube station, Walford East, is built to a believable scale. And we are not in the East End at all, but Elstree in Hertfordshire. Behind the set are lovely suburban houses, although a tower block looms on one side of the Square for a bit of Hackney-esque verisimilitude.

“Guess what?” says Santer. “One of our 25th birthday surprises is that soon we’ll have real trains running over that bridge!” Ah, the EastEnders trains, we hear their wheezes and parps punctuate every dramatic revelation. “They’ll be CGI, of course, the bridge starts and stops here, but the trains look really good.” And surely, in time, one will fall on Beale’s cafe and hopefully squash Phil Mitchell.

The demands of filming four episodes a week take their toll. Santer, who has been a brilliant executive producer, bringing wit and warmth to the Square, is looking forward “reclaiming my life” when he passes the baton to Bryan Kirkwood after the live episode. Brooks says that she left the show for a while when she felt that “the character had gone through so much — drugs, prostitution, agoraphobia.”

Janine is now one of its standout characters, a fizzing mixture of vivacious and vicious, a loser clawing for every chance she can get; nasty yet fun. “You know that you’d have a good night out with her,” laughs Brooks. “I think it’s important that while she’s bitchy, that’s not the only thing she does or it would become too boring.”

When Janine was particularly vile, years ago, Brooks was cornered by gangs. Now, after she has slept with Ian Beale and blackmailed him, or told Ronnie Mitchell that she doesn’t have such a great track record with children (two have died), people stop her in the supermarket and say “How could you?”

Nitin Ganatra, who plays Masood, Zainab’s postman husband, was taking his two young children to nursery when two older children shouted, “Oi, where’s our post, Masood?” Ganatra gets this a lot, as well as people patting him on the back saying, “I don’t know how you put up with her.” On lunch breaks with Wadia, people ask them if they are married for real.

“Walford women, like Zainab, get knocked down, get up, learn from that mistake, but then maybe make it all over again. That’s what being a woman in soap is all about,” says Wadia. “You have to keep a character moving, while staying true to who they are. There’s a traumatic birth for Zainab coming up. She is a Muslim, so obviously she can’t drink and so I would love her to be drunk in a few episodes. I want the writers to ask why she is the lynchpin of this family. Why do they all want to please her when she is so awful? I would love to be kidnapped. The kidnapper would probably end up paying to have her returned. I want to see Zainab accept her son as gay and accept Christian as his partner. I long for the scene where Christian calls Zainab ‘Mum’ ... but, of course, they’ll put us through hell before we get there.”

Of course they will. This is EastEnders.

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This is video of Guardian columnist Tanya Gould visiting the set of Eastenders. I've put it in a spoil box as it autoplays...

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[eefanincan]

She is seriously annoying

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Sean Slater?!

[eefanincan]

I didn't see that coming either face, but, we don't know for sure that he's dead.

The one article said there were three clues, one on Christmas Day, and two more recently. I'm just trying to figure out if those were male or female hands in the gloves the other night when they were planting the diamond ring.

[pirtybirdy]

I thought maybe it was Becca, seems like she's almost obsessed about Stacey, and would do anything for her bezzy mate.

[Colston]

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Having watched the live special I was quite impressed - there were only a few moments that seemed stretched or rushed. Though Jack Branning spluttering his lines at the start was quite funny.

[Colston]

When is it okay to discuss?