When EastEnders launched on BBC One in 1985, Britain’s most popular soap operas were being imported from America. Dynasty and Dallas both peddled televised fantasies of extreme wealth, atrocious behaviour and shoulder pads you could land a helicopter on. Then, on a gloomy February evening, came EastEnders, a soap set in working-class London which began with three men – a cabbie, a publican and an out-of-work gardener – breaking down the door of a dank bedsit where a man lay dead in an armchair. This homegrown series was billed as a cockney Coronation Street but the vibe was positively Dickensian.
Now Dallas and Dynasty are a distant memory (failed reboots notwithstanding), but EastEnders, which this week celebrates its 40th anniversary, lives on. It may no longer pull the audiences of its heyday – 30.1 million tuned in to watch Dirty Den serve his wife divorce papers on Christmas Day 1986 – but it remains an institution, as reliable in the TV schedules as the News at Six.
