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. 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 revealed that 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. Julia Smith and Tony Holland, the creators of EastEnders Granada Television gave Smith unrestricted access to the Coronation Street production for a month so that she could get a sense how a continuing drama was produced.
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. The outline that Reid presented was vague: two episodes a week, 52 weeks a year.
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. In March 1983, under two years before EastEnders ' first episode was broadcast, the show was a vague idea in the mind of a handful of BBC executives, who decided that what BBC1 needed was a popular bi-weekly drama series that would attract the kind of mass audiences that ITV was getting with Coronation Street. History Conception and preparations for broadcast 10.2 Allegations of national and racial stereotypes.1.1.1 Initial character creation and casting.1.1 Conception and preparations for broadcast.
It has also won 13 TV Quick and TV Choice Awards for Best Soap, six TRIC Awards for Soap of The Year, four Royal Television Society Awards for Best Continuing Drama and has been inducted into the Rose d'Or Hall of Fame.
Īs of September 2019, EastEnders has won ten BAFTA Awards and the Inside Soap Award for Best Soap for 14 years running (from 1997 to 2012), as well as twelve National Television Awards for Most Popular Serial Drama and 11 awards for Best British Soap at The British Soap Awards. It has also been important in the history of British television drama, tackling many subjects that are considered to be controversial or taboo in British culture, and portraying a social life previously unseen on UK mainstream television.
Today, EastEnders remains a significant programme in terms of the BBC's success and audience share. In 2013, the average audience share for an episode was around 30 per cent. Within eight months of the show's original launch, it had reached the number one spot in BARB's TV ratings and has consistently remained among the top rated series in Britain. In February 2022, the programme confirmed that the Friday broadcast would be retired and that from 7 March 2022, the show would be broadcasting every weekday except Friday, thus making it the first time in the show's history that the programme will air on Wednesday on a permanent basis. Restrictions to filming resulted in the programme returning to transmission, with four 20-minute episodes per week resuming on 7 September 2020. The three-month suspension of production in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, led to broadcasts of the show being reduced to two 30-minute episodes per week, and eventually, the show going on a transmission break.
Initially there were two 30-minute episodes per week, later increasing to three, but from 2001 until March 2022, episodes were broadcast every weekday except Wednesday (outside of special occasions). Set in Albert Square in the East End of London in the fictional borough of Walford, the programme follows the stories of local residents and their families as they go about their daily lives. EastEnders is a British soap opera created by Julia Smith and Tony Holland which has been broadcast on BBC One since 1985.