How the BBC betrayed EastEnders Albert Square has lost its working-class voice

Around a decade ago, walking through the Bogside, I noticed something unusual in front of Free Derry Corner. Before a small crew, preparing to do a piece to camera, was Ross Kemp, presumably filming something like “Britain’s Deadliest Terrorists”. Locals had gathered at their front doors to rubberneck. As he began, an elderly lady on a mobility scooter ploughed through her family at maximum speed towards him. The whole time she was calling, as if to a long-lost sibling or child: “Grant! Grant!”

Audiences invest passionately in soap operas. While film stars are Olympian gods or aristocrats, soap characters are family. So much so, the woman careering towards Kemp was greeting his onscreen alter ego in the hugely successful EastEnders. Yet as the London-set soap celebrates its 40th anniversary, the primacy of such drama is no more. Its decline is the result not only of shifts in our media appetites but also tectonic changes in society, and the dread hand of politics shaping who we are and how we see ourselves.

Soap operas are — or, rather, were — one of the great working-class cultural forms: a result of untapped creative experience, authenticity and imagination finally allowed to flourish unobstructed. They came into being alongside rock music, Mod culture, the Angry Young Men and kitchen-sink realism. The cultural roots of these soaps run deep — radio plays, whodunnits, yellow-back novels, and penny dreadfuls. There were echoes of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Victorian serial cliffhangers were the doof doof endings of their day.

But what separates soap from other proletarian culture is that it was always deemed unworthy of serious critical attention. This was not just myopic snobbery but also misogyny, given that the core audience for soaps has always been women — the name coming from demographic-targeting adverts that ran alongside early radio plays by the “Queen of the Soaps”, Irna Phillips.

Essentially, soaps weren’t taken seriously because working-class life wasn’t. Snobbery meant that accents, fashion, and even honesty were regarded as weaknesses rather than strengths. Accusations of philistinism usually amounted to projection or petty moralism. After all, it’s worth remembering which class stood in the pit directly in front of Shakespeare’s plays. And it’s also worth remembering the burst of energy and ideas theatre received when the likes of Joan Littlewood and Stella Linden helped bring the working-class voices of Shelagh Delaney, Brendan Behan and John Osborne to the stage. Their honesty may have been provocatively uncouth for the time, but it was revitalising and re-established theatre’s relevance in the modern age.

When George Orwell wrote “If there is hope, it lies in the proles”, he wasn’t pointing to the innate virtue of the working classes, but instead their lack of insulation from reality and its consequences — meaning they couldn’t afford to be as delusional as the chattering classes. Rather than the passive-aggressive choreographies of the elite, there’s a different form of nobility and a liberating disreputable vérité in lines such as “Get out of my pub… you cheap peroxide old bag!”

Thanks to its head start in 1960, Coronation Street had long mastered wit, camp, and glamour (more effective in feminist terms than any academic tract). EastEnders, playing catch-up, needed a USP. It went for edge, set up as an authentic slice of East End life, rooted in the simultaneously grounded and turbulent Beale/Fowler family. Without the commercial imperative, and with the ghost of Lord Reith whispering, EastEnders could sell reality.

Knowing authenticity can rarely be staged or imposed, the programme’s creators Julia Smith and Tony Holland had trawled the East End to find characters and stories. Gretchen Franklin played Ethel Skinner — the pug-wielding, gin-drinking, flirtatious widow whose family had been wiped out by a V-1 rocket. Peter Dean, who played market trader Pete Beale, had himself been a market trader. Meanwhile, Bill Treacher, who played Arthur Fowler, had worked at sea saving money to put himself through acting school.

Considering the punishing production demands, it’s forgivable if some episodes are lacklustre. Yet the finest episodes are worthy of comparison with high-end theatre. Tropes abound — necessarily as soap is partly routine, domesticity and comfort — but they also add to the camp appeal, especially the regularity of “Thought I was dead, did’ya?” resurrection. Characters walk off brain injuries; others end up as statistics in a murder rate more akin to a low-level civil war.

Soap may be life turned up to 11, realism rendered as melodrama, but it has to be recognisably lifelike. If that’s lost, so is its credibility. It should be close enough to relate to, but all that’s restrained must be cathartically unleashed — revenge, affairs, schadenfreude, feuds and, above all, secrets. There’s recognisable dysfunction in Pete Beale’s statement, “Family? We’re not family, Gran. We’re a bunch of misfits that’s sharing DNA.” And there are few among us holy enough never to have thought: “I have had it with you, you cheap little slapper!” Not least about ourselves.

There are few things less acceptable than reality, and nothing more vital. Social conscience was always a factor in soaps, and EastEnders managed this subtly but profoundly. Screened at the time of the AIDS crisis and Section 28, the first gay kiss on a British soap exposed those engaged in moral panic as cruel, fragile, hysterical puritans. Mary Whitehouse, a persistent mosquito at the time, specifically called out “its atmosphere of physical violence, its homosexuals, its blackmailing pimp and its prostitute, its lies and deceits and its bad language”.

But when watched cross-generationally in the past, issues such as AIDS could be approached empathetically. This ameliorating approach put soaps at odds with tabloid culture, which thrived on polarised extremes. Both now struggle because there’s no longer the monoculture that once existed, where large swathes of the population watched the same thing.

Back in 1996, when Peggy Mitchell publicly ostracised Mark Fowler for being HIV-positive, the sympathy it aroused for real-life sufferers of the illness was pivotal in changing attitudes. Such an approach feels unthinkable now, ironically given the constraints of political correctness. Yet it’s also a problem with the eclipse of fiction by nonfiction and the all-round fucked-upness of the world. Any reproduction of, say, gangs which falls short of actual drill videos will appear absurd, cringeworthy and alienating to even remotely streetwise viewers.

At the heart of the problem, though, is the BBC itself. Talking to producers who’ve worked there, the same complaint arises: “the BBC wash”. Fresh, dynamic ideas from hungry writers come in, pass through the bureaucratic machinery, and emerge an anaemic mockery of what could have been. Class is central to this problem. Any truthful depiction of the contemporary East End is difficult, if not impossible, because it would evade or conflict with the paternalistic pseudo-liberalism that permeates the institution. It very effectively robs places and people of their voices, and is closer to Mary Whitehouse’s sanitised view of the world than they’d ever admit.

The East End and EastEnders have long been multicultural, being connected to the docks and waves of migrants, yet the scale of change there — through gentrification, development and population change — has been transformative since the show’s heyday. Throughout London, markets have closed or been corporatised. Pubs and clubs have been shuttered. But watching EastEnders, you’d think nothing much had altered, because it’s now a depiction of how the BBC nostalgically imagines the East End to be.

Transformation should be a gift for storytellers to explore, yet today they are either terrified of change or terrified of admitting that it’s happening, depending on where they place themselves on the political spectrum. Meanwhile, outside their echo chambers, reality flows on like the river. Deprivation and the cost of living, shadow economies, capsizing services, drugs, people-trafficking and sexual abuse are underrepresented or unconvincing. Any depictions of homelessness and addiction are bathetic to the point of becoming online comic memes. Crime is depicted as if the Krays are still walking the streets. It’s no longer a mirror but a mirage.

Two factors are at work here which illustrate wider problems. The first is that the valve that was opened between the Fifties and the late-Nineties, allowing the brilliance of working-class culture to have a fair shot, has been firmly welded shut. The result has been a moribund mainstream culture across the arts, dominated by the 7% of the population who went to private school and the less than 1% who went to Oxbridge. In television, only 8% of the workforce are working class.

The second is that in its place, culture, even depictions of working-class life, has become tepid, cliched bourgeois fantasy. The actor Stephen Graham recently pointed out the “condescending” humourless, greyscale scenes which pass for depictions of working-class life. It goes beyond the hoarding of opportunities into a callous misrepresentation of reality, burying or distorting the issues that impact lives. In this sense, perhaps, the BBC does reflect contemporary Britain, which feels increasingly like China Miéville’s 2009 novel The City & the City, in which the citizens of two overlapping metropolises live without acknowledging the other’s existence. If they notice, they’re punished. Once science fiction, now the book is practically documentary.

There is a solution. Return to the roots to understand why the soaps exist in the first place, and renew it. In the case of EastEnders, go, as the first producers did, and find out what the East End is now. Allow those from the area to write and act their own stories. Set aside ideology, and opt for unflinching honesty. The Queen Vic might be transformed, filled with hipsters or boarded up. Half the Cockneys might’ve moved to Essex, fortunate enough to be early on the London property Ponzi scheme. Truths can be inconvenient, but that’s why they’re truths, especially when facing issues such as poverty, crime, violence, intra-community tensions and state neglect. The everyday resistance and transcendence of all of these is evident on street-level.

The pride and realities of the East End have been continually asserted, from the Battle of Cable Street to the campaign after the murder of Altab Ali. Yet, every day, the deficit grows between the way London presents to the world and to itself, and the way London actually is for those of us who live here.

For now, though, the show, like the political class, seems no longer concerned with or worthy of recognisable social realism. This is a betrayal of storytelling itself. Drama needs friction and adversity, doubt and conflict rather than false hectoring certainty, to have catharsis or resolution. Without this, EastEnders exists as a pantomime whose detachment from reality is increasingly difficult to stomach. It will only continue to drift further and further away from the actual East End, and the lives lived there.