Tony Carpenter, played by Oscar James, is a jovial character, who tries to establish a successful business and steady home for his family, but nothing he does is ever good enough for his nagging wife. Tony is one of the original twenty-three characters invented by the creators of EastEnders, Tony Holland and Julia Smith. Tony was originally intended to be named Alan, and his son Kelvin Carpenter was originally named Kevin. They are the first black characters to appear in the soap. Black and Asian characters were two ethnic minorities that had previously been under-represented in British soap before EastEnders aired. Holland and Smith knew that for the soap to succeed there needed to be a varied group of characters, so that several different sections of the audience had someone to identify with. Additionally, if the programme was to be realistic, it had to reflect the cross-section of society that actually existed in the real location. For these reasons, different sexes, ages, classes, religions and races were all included in the original character line-up. Both Holland and Smith had been at the forefront of the move towards 'integrated casting' in television and had encountered an array of ethnic diversities in the process. Even though the ethnic minority groups were deemed the hardest to research, Holland and Smith called upon their contacts to relay information about their origins and lifestyles and were then able to portray Walford's most recent immigrants more realistically.
Read more about this topic: List Of East Enders Characters (1985)
Famous quotes containing the word carpenter:
““But there’s always been rich and poor, and that’s all there is to it. And us two won’t change it, either.”
The carpenter calmly puffs away: “Only the ones that likes it ought to be poor. Let the others have a try at it first. I ain’t got no liking for it. A fellow gets tired of it after a while.””
—Alfred Döblin (1878–1957)