Pat Butcher - Creation and Development

Creation and Development

The character of Pat was conceived by the creators of EastEnders, Tony Holland and Julia Smith, in 1984. Although not one of the serial's original protagonists, Pat is referred to in the character outline of Pete Beale, who appeared on-screen in EastEnders' first episode, as written by Smith and Holland in their book, EastEnders: The Inside Story: " married very young to Pat — it turned out to be a total disaster. They were too young, rushing into a difficult life for all the wrong reasons, and truthfully, was a vicious shrew... divorced and married Kathy when he was 24...His two sons by his first marriage are nineteen and twenty and he hardly sees them..."

Pat was first seen on-screen in June 1986, over a year after the show debuted. The character's introduction was the result of a deliberate policy "to add an extra edge of toughness to the show." Prior to this point, Holland and Smith had begun to feel that EastEnders was starting to get "a bit soft". During a meeting with scriptwriters, the programme makers decided to try to recapture some of the soap's "original grittiness that seemed to be getting lost in its own success". Thus the character of Pat was introduced to "add a new hardness to the atmosphere."

Pat, played by actress Pam St. Clement, was initially introduced on a three-episode trial basis. She was given an extensive backstory, heavily intertwined with various focal characters within the serial, including all of the Beale and Fowler family who mostly disliked her, particularly her ex-husband Pete Beale (Peter Dean), her son Simon Wicks (Nick Berry), and Pete's mother Lou Beale (Anna Wing). In addition, she was an old friend of Angie Watts (Anita Dobson), a former lover of Angie's husband Den (Leslie Grantham) and, as a supposed former resident of Walford, she was known to many of the other regular characters such as Dot Cotton (June Brown) and Ethel Skinner (Gretchen Franklin).

The character's initial three-episode stint marked the beginning of what has been described as one of the soap's most complicated storylines, the paternity of Simon Wicks. Pat immediately "threw a spanner in the works" by telling Pete that he was not Simon's biological father, as she had previously claimed. After causing havoc Pat then disappeared; however, she was reintroduced later in the year, returning as a regular character, barmaid of The Queen Victoria public house. St. Clement had reservations about returning to the soap. In 1995 she told The Independent, "I couldn't envisage how this character, who creates absolute havoc everywhere she goes and is not at home with herself or with anybody else in the Square, could possibly fit in". However she was persuaded to continue by producer Julia Smith, who said: "'We've only seen one layer of the onion skin—the defensiveness—now we'll start to peel away more and get to the vulnerability that lies behind it'."