EastEnders has run on BBC One since February 1985. It is set in Albert Square in the fictional East London borough of Walford, and it is one of the two soaps — with ITV’s Coronation Street — that anchor British television.
Not a daytime soap
The most important difference from the American form: British soaps go out in prime time, in the early evening, four times a week, and are watched by a general audience rather than a daytime one. Big episodes have drawn over 30 million viewers — the 1986 Christmas episode in which Den Watts served his wife divorce papers remains among the most-watched programmes in British history.
The tone
EastEnders was conceived as gritty social realism, and it has never let up. Where Coronation Street leans on Northern warmth and comedy, EastEnders is relentlessly bleak, and this is a running national joke — a show in which almost every character has experienced bereavement, betrayal, addiction, imprisonment or all four.
Its Christmas Day episodes are traditionally the most miserable television broadcast anywhere in the world on that date, and a substantial proportion of the country watches them after lunch.
It has also handled genuinely groundbreaking material: the first HIV-positive character in a British soap, the first gay kiss on a pre-watershed programme in 1989, and long-running storylines on domestic abuse, mental illness and male suicide developed with charities. The 2019 storyline on male suicide is credited with a measurable rise in calls to helplines.
The doof-doofs
Every episode ends the same way: a dramatic revelation, a held close-up, and then the theme tune crashing in on a pair of drum hits. The British universally call these the “doof-doofs”, and the phrase is understood by everyone regardless of whether they watch.
The Queen Vic
The pub at the centre of the square, and the setting for most of the show’s major confrontations. British soaps are all built around a pub, because it is the only plausible reason for an entire community to be in one room having an argument.
Its landlords have included the show’s most famous characters: Den and Angie Watts, Peggy Mitchell — whose “GET OUTTA MY PUB!” is among the most quoted lines in British television — and the Mitchell brothers.
E20
The postcode was invented for the show, chosen because it did not exist and could not be confused with a real place. Then in 2011 the Royal Mail assigned E20 to the new Olympic Park development in Stratford, making the fictional postcode real. The programme now shares its postcode with a genuine part of east London.
Where it stands
Ratings have fallen a long way from the peaks of the 1980s and 1990s, as they have for all linear television. It still draws several million viewers per episode and remains one of the BBC’s most-watched programmes, with a substantial second life on iPlayer.