History of East Enders - Conception and Preparations For Broadcast

Conception and Preparations For Broadcast

In March 1983, just under two years before EastEnders hit the screen, the show was just a vague idea in the mind of a handful of BBC executives, who decided that what BBC One needed was a popular bi-weekly drama series that would attract the kind of mass audiences ITV was getting with Coronation Street.

The first people to whom David Reid, then head of series and serials, turned were Julia Smith and Tony Holland, a well established producer/script editor team who had first worked together on Z-Cars. The outline that Reid presented was vague: two episodes a week, 52 weeks a year. After the concept was put to them on 14 March 1983, Smith and Holland then went about putting their ideas down on paper; they decided it would be set in the East End of London.

There was anxiety at first that the viewing public would not accept a new soap set in the south of England, though research commissioned by lead figures in the BBC had revealed southerners would accept a northern soap, northerners would accept a southern soap and those from the Midlands, as Julia Smith herself pointed out, did not mind where it was set as long as it was somewhere else. This was the beginning of a close and continuing association between EastEnders and audience research, which, though commonplace today, was something of a revolution in practice.

The show's creators were both Londoners, but when they researched Victorian squares, they found massive changes in areas they thought they knew well. However, delving further into the East End of London, they found exactly what they had been searching for: a real East End spirit — an inward looking quality, a distrust of strangers and authority figures, a sense of territory and community that the creators summed up as "Hurt one of us and you hurt us all". These themes that were found for the setting can still be found in a present day episode of EastEnders.

When developing EastEnders, both Smith and Holland looked at influential models like Coronation Street, but they found that it offered a rather outdated and nostalgic view of working-class life. Only after EastEnders began, and featured the characters of Tony and Kelvin Carpenter, did Coronation Street start to feature black people, for example.

They came to the conclusion that Coronation Street had grown old with its audience, and that EastEnders would have to attract a younger, more socially extensive audience, ensuring that it had the longevity to retain it for many years thereafter.

They also looked at Brookside but found there was a lack of central meeting points for the characters, making it difficult for the writers to intertwine different storylines.

So EastEnders was set in Albert Square. The first stage of the exterior set was built in 1984, and had to be made to look as if it had been standing for years. This was done by a number of means, including chipping at the buildings with pickaxes. The EastEnders lot was designed by Keith Harris, who was a senior designer within the production team together with Supervising art directors Peter Findley and Gina Parr. Then in 1986, he added an extension to the set, building the fourth side of Albert Square, and in 1987, Turpin Road was added, which included buildings such as The Dagmar. In 1993, George Street was added, and soon after Walford East tube station was built. The set was constructed by the BBC in house construction department under construction manager Mike Hagan. The initial build took 6 months to complete.

The target launch date was originally January 1985. Smith and Holland had just eleven months in which to write, cast and shoot the whole thing. However, in February 1984, they did not even have a title or a place to film. Both Smith and Holland were unhappy about the January 1985 launch date, favouring November or even September 1984 when seasonal audiences would be higher, but the BBC stayed firm, and Smith and Holland had to concede that, with the massive task of getting the Elstree Studios operational, January was the most realistic date. However, this was later to be changed to February.

The project had a number of working titles — Square Dance, Round the Square, Round the Houses, London Pride, East 8. It was the latter that stuck (E8 is the postcode for Hackney) in the early months of creative process. However, the show was renamed after many casting agents mistakenly thought the show was to be called Estate, and the fictional postcode E20 was created for Walford, instead of using E8. Julia Smith came up with the name Eastenders after she and Holland had spent months telephoning theatrical agents and asking "Do you have any real East Enders on your books?". However, Smith thought "Eastenders" "looked ugly written down" and was "hard to say", so decided to capitalise the second 'e'.