Television
Several EastEnders spin-off episodes have been produced, which look at the history of some of the characters using flashbacks. They are often a lead up for a character's return to the show or follow characters who have departed from the show in an overseas setting. These spin-offs are usually set outside the usual location of Albert Square. The first of these was Civvy Street, which aired in December 1988. It was set in Albert Square during World War II and featured younger versions of some of the soap's characters. Other episodes include Dot's Story, Perfectly Frank, Ricky & Bianca, Pat and Mo and The Return of Nick Cotton.
Documentaries have also been produced, particularly for the 10th, 15th and 20th anniversaries of the show looking back at the history of the show's inception, its characters and storylines. A behind-the-scenes documentary, EastEnders Revealed, aired regularly on BBC Choice and continued on BBC Three after the closure of BBC Choice. The first episode was in October 1999 and the show continued regularly until October 2005, with a few episodes still being made after this. A series of documentary shows, similar to EastEnders Revealed aired from 2006. EastEnders Xtra was an interactive series available between February and May 2005 via BBCi.
There have also been two EastEnders Christmas specials, and two charity specials: Dimensions in Time was a crossover with the science fiction series Doctor Who, and Pudding Lane relocated the characters to Pudding Lane in 1666. Both charity specials were made for Children in Need and neither are considered canon.
Read more about this topic: East Enders Spin-offs
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.”
—Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)