Industry | 2010.02.24
A quarter century in Albert Square offers a telling omnibus of UK politics
EastEnders\' 25 years map sweeping changes in the state of TV, and of Britain. In its 26th year, it could be used to attack the BBC
Many communications between BBC executives are intended to have only a short-term effect: arse-covering, career-enhancing. But an idea typed up in Television Centre on 1 February 1984 turned out to have astonishing long-term consequences: The bi-weekly is an ongoing serial about the life of a community in the East End of London … our group of characters is fiercely territorial – incestuous, almost – and reflects how life is TODAY in a disadvantaged part of the inner city …
That bi-weekly is now a quad-weekly, and the numerous social dilemmas it has reflected have indeed reached incest by the time of the 25th anniversary , to be celebrated on Friday. And, because very few TV shows reach their silver jubilee, EastEnders usefully invites comparisons between the state of TV and of Britain, then and now.
When the show premiered – just over a year after that memo, in which it was known by the working title East 8 – it entered schedules in which all the networks were competing to screen classy period dramas: Bleak House on BBC1, The Jewel in the Crown on ITV1 and The Far Pavilions on Channel 4. In contrast, Friday night\'s celebratory edition – to be screened live – will, revealingly, run against Dancing on Ice and A Place in the Sun , representatives of a reality genre which didn\'t even exist when Albert Square was first seen.
It\'s a measure of how much TV has changed that the BBC carried out research into whether there was room for another twice-weekly series and whether audiences would accept a soap set in the south of England: Coronation Street had established the idea that it was a northern form, and all the other long runners – Emmerdale, Brookside, Hollyoaks – have been set in Yorkshire or Lancashire. Twenty-five years on, ITV has moved most of its operations to London, and the BBC has been encouraged to move some operations north because of fears that the capital was becoming too dominant in broadcasting.
And it\'s not just in that sense that the soap has been politically symbolic. The life of the series has so far been split, almost in a parody of BBC balance, between 12-and-a-bit years of Tory and Labour administrations. But, politically, its most important relationship has been with Conservative broadcasting policy. In the mid-80s, the drama was an attempt to address a recurrent Thatcherite criticism of the BBC – that, despite being funded by a licence fee levied universally on pain of legal penalty, its programmes rarely achieved general popularity. By providing the BBC with its first series able to compete with and defeat Coronation Street in the ratings, it can be argued that this cockney chronicle saved the licence fee from the arguments of free marketeers.
A shift in rightwing thinking on media policy, though, means the continuing appeal of EastEnders is a potential liability for the BBC. Ed Vaizey and others in Cameron\'s cultural team have recently seemed to suggest that the best justification of the licence fee is to provide services that commercial organisations do not. In this context, EastEnders becomes a possible example of subsidised TV competing "too well" against ITV. So it\'s possible that, having helped to save the BBC under one Conservative government, the show could be called in aid by another as an excuse for constraining or breaking up BBC1.
The likeliest precaution against that knock on the door will be to expand the public service remit which the series clearly had at the beginning: expect more storylines linked to confidential helplines for affected viewers. But such a strategy is difficult because soap opera is inherently an anti-realistic form. Ratings have traditionally been most reactive to cliffhangers – who\'s the father?, who\'s the killer? – and so the genre always curves towards melodrama, a trend intensified by the audience-greedy expansion to three and then four episodes in recent years.
Accordingly, although EastEnders was billed from the beginning as an exercise in social realism – largely because a documentary and educational rationale was needed to get it past BBC governors and politicians – the serial has always been vulnerable to the charge of depicting a fantasy Britain.
Especially at times of the biggest fights with Corrie on the other side, events in Albert Square have often perpetuated middle-class assumptions about cockney society. These cliches are not always hostile – there\'s a nice sentimental line in martyred matriarchs like Dot, but the main men – Dirty Den, the Mitchells – will usually turn out to be spiritual cousins of the Kray brothers.
Most notoriously, the show has never convincingly represented the single most important real-life trend in London during its quarter-century of broadcasting: multiracialism. Even though the original characters included a Greek Cypriot and two Bengalis – and families from other immigrant backgrounds have consistently been introduced – none has become a front-page figure, and this lack results from a flaw in populist drama exacerbated by recent TV policy.
The characters who make most impact in soaps tend to be those who suffer bad luck – bereavement, unemployment, illness – or who behave badly: philandering, fraud, murder. But, from a quite understandable desire to avoid providing a good night in for members of the BNP, broadcasters have largely favoured positive depictions of non-white characters. Tolerance and harmony, though, make boring storylines and so the soap has remained dominated by the saddies and baddies in the core white clans.
The show was also responsible for a regrettable development in the wider culture. Early front-page publicity for the series – encouraged by a strategic leak from the BBC of the criminal past of Leslie Grantham , who played Dirty Den – began two media tactics which are now standard: soap opera characters being written about as if they were real people and vice versa.
But having outlived most shows that were around when it launched, and sadly also its inventive creators, Julia Smith and Tony Holland, EastEnders, at 25, remains an extraordinary achievement. It pioneered the use of a domestic serial as a vehicle for serious issues and has featured some impressively sharp writing (especially by Tony Jordan) and acting, led by June Brown\'s Dot Cotton: scriptwriter and performer uniting in a monologue edition which was one of the show\'s many experiments with a form that had traditionally depended on unvarying repetition.
Back on 19 February 1985, the first ever line of dialogue was "It stinks in \'ere," spoken by Leslie Grantham. Subsequently, the series has occasionally taken on a bad smell – twice in serious trouble of cancellation in the last decade – and may be sniffing the atmosphere apprehensively again.
Good news for EastEnders is that, in a multichannel, multiplatform age, recognisable brands will be prized. But credit-crunched budgets are ominous for this notoriously expensive form of programming and the political climate is against BBC populism. Boris Johnson took a drink in the Queen Vic to build his profile as mayor of London; his colleagues in the national Conservative party may yet have Peggy Mitchell worrying that the pub has seen its best times.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]at-25-bbc-conservatives-policy
