EastEnders' boss says soap 'belongs to the audience' ahead of 40th anniversary

As close to a punk as the upper echelons of television got in 1985, or indeed ever, Michael Grade was appointed controller of BBC1 after the corporation had already decided that the channel needed a soap. It had one in development, in fact – set in a caravan park in the north east of England. “My heart sank,” recalls Grade, now Lord Grade of Yarmouth CBE. His heart was buoyed when, meeting the also newly appointed head of drama series Jonathan Powell, he was told that the caravan park idea had been scrapped.

“Jonathan told me he’d been driving out of London through the East End and saw these old squares,” Grade now explains. “He thought about Coronation Street’s sense of place and how a square in the East End with its mixed bunch of residents would be a natural place to set a soap.

"He had Julia Smith and Tony Holland setting it up with scripts being written as we spoke. I said, ‘What’s it called?’ He said, ‘EastEnders,’ looking for a reaction. I said, ‘That sounds a lot more essential than a geriatric caravan park. I don’t want to see the scripts, I trust you, send me the first episode when you’ve made it.’”

One weekend, weeks later, a parcel arrived at Grade’s home. “With great trepidation, I put it in the tape machine and watched the first episode of EastEnders. I immediately rang Jonathan and said, ‘This is just wonderful!’”

“I was a West London teenager and it spoke to me,” Diederick Santer recalls of those early episodes. He’d go on to be EastEnders’ executive producer (2006–10). “I came from an upper middle-class family but my parents were lefties and sent me to the worst possible comprehensive they could find, so it was a world I knew because those were my friends and their families.”

What was so interesting about EastEnders – and new at the time – Santer says, was the multi-generational storytelling. “There was Den and Angie, Pauline and Arthur, Lou and Ethel – and there was also this really vivid teen cast. My friends and I completely responded to Michelle, Sharon, Kelvin and Ian. They felt like us.”

Out in the London suburbs, EastEnders also resonated. When it launched, Sarah Phelps was still a teenager and recently expelled from school. Now, of course, she’s one of the soap’s most significant former writers, who has gone on to great acclaim as doyenne of Agatha Christie adaptations, among other things.

“I know its heart and soul,” she says. “I know it’s a twinkle in the eye and a heartbreaking smile as it dips its hand into your pocket and takes your wallet out. If you can hold the audience by the hand, you can take them to some really dark, important places. When Arthur lost his marbles, nobody was talking about men’s mental health. That’s the sort of journey that only EastEnders could have taken you on at the time.”

Phelps thinks one of the keys to EastEnders success is that it provides community, though not in the way you may think. “The audience is a community. Yes, we all stream now and appointment-to-view TV is much rarer, but there is still that urge to be together as a community to watch things.”

And she has no truck with snobbery around soap. “If people don’t recognise soap as an art form, that’s their problem. EastEnders is Greek tragedy – but the Furies have acrylic nails. It’s the great medieval She-Wolves Eleanor of Aquitaine and Margaret of Anjou, wading, thigh high, through the blood of their enemies – but they’re wearing Primark. There’s epic in the miniature, just as there’s the universal in the specific.”

Everyone has their own version of EastEnders. That’s one of the brilliant things about it. It’s also one of its Achilles heels. Each of us has a specific idea of what EastEnders should be. In the last 20 years, it’s faced fiercer competition than when Michael Grade launched it. There were four television channels in 1985. Today, there are hundreds, over 400 streaming services, social media and YouTube. EastEnders responded, as all soaps did, in ways that weren’t always successful and didn’t please everyone.

The fashion for upping the ante with explosions and disasters and stunts makes for headlines but only attract audiences temporarily. The increase in episodes means that story inflation kicks in, to fill the hours and hit the heights with more outlandish stories that damage credibility and leaves actors and audiences exhausted. (Interestingly, ITV announced this week that it is cutting back both Coronation Street and Emmerdale by one episode a week.)

But the dichotomy is simple, as Santer explains. “You need to do two contradictory things at once. You need to make it absolutely reflect the audience’s experience and make it feel like normal British life. But you also have to make it exciting, unmissable and full of stuff happening that makes TV listings magazines want to put it on their cover.”

Chris Clenshaw, EastEnders’ current executive producer, describes himself as a custodian of the soap. “It belongs to the audience,” he says. He wasn’t born when the first episode was aired but he’s lived and breathed EastEnders for as long as he remembers. His dad was a market trader in Woolwich and his Greek-Cypriot mum ran the café on the market. Basically, he’s Ian Beale. But cooler.

“From episode one, it’s been about a community looking out for each other and on top of that, there have been those stories that pack a punch like Who Killed Reg Cox? Which is a story we’d play today,” he says. “Balance is the key, between what’s exciting and social realism. You can have a storyline like Lola’s, which was about a young mother facing terminal cancer. And in another part of the forest, you’ve got the high-concept camp of ‘The Six’ a murder mystery with six iconic matriarchs.”

EastEnders has been home to Den and Angie, Ethel and her little Willy, Phil and Grant, Ricky and Bianca, Ronnie and Roxy, Little Mo and Trevor, Stella and Ben, Mick and Linda.

It’s smashed taboos with stories about Mark’s HIV and Kathy’s rape, captivated with Sharongate, Who Shot Phil? Who Killed Archie? and, way back, Who Fathered Michelle’s Baby? It introduced Mary the Punk, Nick Cotton and, immortalised as a pub quiz answer, Reg Cox.

Clenshaw says EastEnders is in his bones. He’s not the only one. It’s in the DNA of the UK.

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EastEnders airs Monday to Thursday at 7:30pm on BBC One and from 6am on BBC iPlayer.

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