Michael Hogan on EastEnders’ struggle to stay relevant
In 1987, tabloid headline “EastBenders” greeted the BBC soap opera’s first gay kiss. Thankfully the world has moved on since then, but when news broke this week that Albert Square will soon get its first gay bar in a bid to reflect the reality of London life, there were a few raised eyebrows.
In a seemingly unironic statement, executive producer Kate Oates said: “We’re looking at opening a gay bar on the Square, which will be a super-cool precinct where gay and straight characters can all just hang out… and stories can feel true to multicultural London.”
The raised eyebrows weren’t just due to Oates’s baffling use of the phrase “super-cool precinct”, which sounds like some sort of sub-zero Arndale Centre, but at her anachronistic sentiment proving just how out of step with society our soaps have become. They might purport to be gritty portrayals of contemporary life but are increasingly divorced from reality.
First, dating apps and spiralling property prices mean that London has lost 58 per cent of its gay venues since 2006. Anybody brave enough to open a new one would need deep pockets and a clientele larger than the handful of gay characters who live around Albert Square.
EastEnders creators Tony Holland and Julia Smith based the fictional borough of Walford E20 on Hackney E8 (with Albert Square an approximation of Dalston’s Fassett Square). Over the Cockney soap’s 34-year lifetime, however, it has resembled its inspiration less and less.
Five years ago, the BBC Trust complained that the soap was “too white” – twice as white as the real East End – and thus not a true representation of Britain today. Indeed, white, working-class nuclear families are still the series’ lifeblood, even though in real life they would have moved out to suburban Essex, their houses snapped up by buy-to-let investors, making way for a more ethnically diverse and also gentrified inner city.
But Albert Square has remained curiously immune to gentrification. There are no vegan eateries or warehouse workspaces and the local greasy spoon somehow hasn’t turned into a Pret a Manger. Similarly everyone has a local job, rather than having to endure the daily commuting horror of most Londoners.
In Britain’s big three soaps, pubs are portrayed as the focal point of the community. Emmerdale’s Woolpack is arguably the most authentic, since pubs still play a key role in rural life. By contrast, Coronation Street’s Rovers Return and EastEnders’ Queen Vic seem quaint. Nowadays town and city dwellers increasingly drink in bars, restaurants or at home. with backstreet boozers rarely thriving at lunchtime or on a weeknight.
And are there really any pub landlords left like the Vic’s Mick Carter (played by Danny Dyer), a hardmanwith-a-heart recently released from prison after being framed for shooting a punter? Let alone the Rovers, which with its frosted-glass windows seems so untouched by modernity that it belongs in a museum?
Coronation Street at least recently made some efforts to move into the 21st century by adding a tram station, tattoo parlour and excellently named Indian takeaway Speed Daal (plus branches of Costa Coffee and Co-op, thanks to ITV product placement), but still feels unrepresentative of inner-city Salford, with its Media City development and teeming student population.
Soaps are now a middle-class writer’s vision of working-class life: nostalgic, rose-tinted and out of kilter with contemporary reality. Yet the original mission of Coronation Street (first shown in December 1960) was to show social realism on the small screen – akin to the work being done in late-Fifties British theatre, such as Look Back In Anger and A Taste of Honey (both later adapted for cinema). The programme makers still strive to reflect reality, but less in terms of relatable characters or recognisable settings. That’s been replaced by “issues”.
EastEnders boss Oates defected from Coronation Street, where she was credited with introducing storylines about such hot-button topics as child grooming and male rape. We can expect similar now Oates has moved down south from Weatherfield’s cobbles to Walford market (and EastEnders is already beholden to modish storylines – see the knife crime plot from last summer).
Over Christmas, not one but three Albert Square residents were victims of attempted murder, only to rise miraculously from the dead. It’s an indication of how our soaps now deal in melodrama, rather than the kitchensink variety. As they become plotdriven and issue-dominated, realism starts to suffer.
In fact, you could argue that The Archers, with its Defra-approved storylines and gently sustained plots, is by far the best reflection of how we live now. If you want authenticity, forget Albert Square and head for Ambridge instead.