The mawkish affection the Krays inspired, along with fear, has become something of a cliché. Yet their business model — clubs, protection rackets, loan-sharking and the occasional robbery — really did have rules of engagement: avoiding “civilian casualties” chief among them. Like other criminal outfits, meanwhile, the Krays also indulged in performative acts of community engagement, donating to charities and the poor. In 1966, they quietly gave £100 to the Aberfan disaster relief fund, the largest single donation the organization received.

Such philanthropy might explain why, when Reggie Kray died of cancer in October 2000, his send-off was a schmaltzy Cockney pageant, featuring a cast of C-list celebrities and aging villains. Reggie was laid to rest near Ronnie, ending an era of antiquated villainy. It feels apt that one of London’s last old-school heists, the ill-fated Millennium Dome robbery, took place just a month after Reggie passed.

As a London policeman, I witnessed the death throes of old-school London gangsterism. This was the era when the Adams family was finally taken out by MI5. One of the infamous Hunt brothers ended up in court too — after The Sunday Times accused his organization of murder and drug trafficking. Hunt lost his libel fight, and certainly by this point, English organized crime was increasingly centered on narcotics and money-laundering. Yet it soon found itself playing second fiddle to bloodthirsty foreign competition. I’m thinking, here, of the Eastern European gangs unleashed by the Soviet Union’s collapse, to say nothing of the dirty capital, cheap labor and drugs waved in by globalization.

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Surrey cokeheads are lining up chaos

By Dominic Adler

In this, the decline of English gangsterism has parallels with the wider white working-class, and indeed with the British economy more broadly. It’s tempting, too, to cast analogue villains like the Adams as dinosaurs, vaporized by a meteor storm of foreign narcotics. There’s something to this analysis — but detail is where the devil lurks, and chasing devils is what detectives used to do.

Consider, for starters, the role played by the authorities. By the time Reggie Kray died in 2000, the Metropolitan Police was disrupting English organized crime on several fronts. The first involved aggressively attacking corruption via the fabled “Ghost Squad”. The second encompassed an overhaul of informant-handling, restricting covert relationships between criminals and cops to specialist, heavily supervised units. These were shadowed by a third and accidental shift. By encouraging graduates to join the force, CID offices were less often staffed by detectives who’d attended the same schools as the criminals they investigated.

And if all this helped stymie native organized crime, so too did foreign competition. An uncomfortable truth is that working-class English gangsterism was replaced by foreign competitors. Crime is Hobbesian, and it turned out that foreign criminals were simply more vicious. Notice how London’s gangsters, for instance, have yet to develop the minerals to set up shop in Tirana or Mogadishu. Meanwhile, the Albanian mafia makes softly-softly England its playground. At the same time, English laws and police forces remain configured for the relatively genteel crime lords of yore, not the ruthless bandits of war-torn Africa or the Balkans.

At this point, sociologists and criminologists might point to the structural similarities, say, between the Krays and their Albanian successors. Both involve, do they not, notions of class, family, honor? And, as my Adler family legend implies, English mobsters clearly had a capacity for violence; Reggie himself notoriously stabbed a man to death at a Clapton house party. Yet as a former detective, all this is a bit like saying all food consists of protein, fat and carbohydrate. It’s fundamentally true, but hardly insightful. It’s difficult to imagine the Krays selling heroin to schoolkids, or sanctioning hits in crowded family restaurants.

As for the drugs themselves? They’re clearly important: Albanian gangs have carved out an estimated £6 billion niche in Britain’s cocaine market. In the end, though, it’s again more subtle than that, with the type of drugs also explaining the decline of white English gangsterism. Crack, especially, has become an accelerant of “acquisitive” crime, its addictiveness prompting waves of hit-and-run burglaries. For their part, protection rackets and bank robberies have become niche pastimes. A friend serving on the Met’s Flying Squad bemoans the demise of the old-school blagger. “When I joined we looked at proper people, second generation Eastenders, tooled-up with shotguns.” These days? He’s more likely to be chasing moped-riding kids. Another old colleague, serving on the Met’s Project Team, rolls his eyes when I ask about his work. “Same old shit,” he shrugs. “Drugs and guns, mate. Nothing but drugs and guns.”

In other words, then, the dynamics of the modern drug trade leave less space for the kind of organized heists the Krays became famous for. And there’s something else here too. As the English know full well, it’s easy to be cruel when you’re not on home turf. Our working-classes have cheerfully exported violence abroad, from the Black and Tans to Heysel. But back in England, Gen Z’s white, working-class organized criminals have given up on becoming crime lords. Nor is that especially surprising. The hard Victorian slums their grandparents knew are a distant memory, particularly from the vantage point of a three-bedroom semi in Swanley.

If they’re criminals at all, they’re more likely to operate underworld service industries, oiling the wheels of international narcotics cartels. From county lines drug dealing to City money laundering, English criminals are, increasingly, vassals. Either that, or second-tier dealers, big fish in small ponds — what I call the “Etsyfication” of boutique crime. For the sort who binge “Essex Boys” murder stories and stream TV gangster slop, the height of their ambition is shifting parcels of overcut, third-rate gak.

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The old-school horror of Scotland’s gangs

By Dominic Adler

As for the old ways? Extortion and blackmail? It’s moved online, replacing shaven-headed men demanding money with menace. Now, teenage nerds bring multinationals to their knees from their bedrooms. Occasionally, they don’t even demand money, merely indulging in cheery digital nihilism. For their part, British police forces struggle with online fraud and hacking. It’s a transnational and highly specialized field, far beyond the ken of the average copper. Hacking is also being co-opted by parastatal organizations, deployed as a hybrid warfare tactic by China and Russia.

To Ronnie and Reggie and their ilk, all this would have felt like mind-blowing science fiction. But though white, working-class Londoners have largely given up on gangsterism, their social superiors haven’t got the message. Film and television show no hint of mercy for the dead horse of Kray-inspired crime — and, as usual, the floggings are delivered by posh boys. I recently enjoyed Mobland, directed by gangster film supremo Guy Ritchie and starring Tom Hardy, who turned in a barnstorming performance as both Ronnie and Reggie Kray in the 2015 flick Legend.

Hardy and Ritchie both attended private schools. Hardy grew up not in Tower Hamlets, but the gilded Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames. Again, that’s unsurprising: the middle classes have always lionized working-class crime. I suspect it’s partly “noble savage” syndrome, partly an enduring English fondness for Robin Hood defiance. Either way, and whatever their entertainment value, shows like Mobland retool an extinct age of English villainy for the 21st century, even as the Krays’ legacy remains a lodestone, an origin myth, for the kind of person who’s never even seen a hatchet, much less wielded it in anger.

There’s one more irony here too. The fact is, it’s never been easier to make drug money, launder it, then scurry off to the Gulf. Just ask Scotland, where indigenous thuggery has endured in a way it hasn’t down south, and where Dubai has become a sunnier alternative to Glasgow. So if you can almost hear the old Eastenders in their Essex bungalows, lamenting Reggie’s passing and shaking their heads at his brutal successors, such nostalgia misses the point. Were the Krays alive today, they’d happily be filling their boots with coke and dirty money too, then sharing the spoils on TikTok.

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 revitalizing 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 lackluster. 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 recognizably 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 recognizable 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.

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Say Nothing's empty empathy

By Darran Anderson

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 polarized 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 ostracized 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 anemic 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 sanitized 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 corporatized. 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.

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Kneecap are the future of Northern Ireland

By Darran Anderson

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” humorless, 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 recognizable 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.

Elsie Tanner — a long-time resident of a small street in the Manchester suburb of Weatherfield — worked as a seamstress, with occasional stints at other jobs. She was married three times. Her first husband abandoned her and their two young children; her second, an American soldier, was killed by a fellow GI in a squalid dispute over gambling debts; her third marriage ended in divorce. Eventually Elsie moved to Portugal to run a wine bar with an old flame.

Sharon Watts is a long-time resident of a square in the London suburb of Walford. She is the adopted child of publicans Den and Angie Watts, and has worked mostly as a pub/nightclub manager. She has also been married three times — to mechanic Grant Mitchell, her adoptive brother Dennis, and to Grant’s brother Phil, an alcoholic, drug-addicted gangster.

Sharon’s father Den faked his own death but returned 20 years later, only to be murdered by his new wife and secretly buried under his own pub. Sharon’s second husband — her father’s biological son Dennis — was also murdered, by gangsters, shortly afterwards. Sharon gave birth to his son, also named Dennis, but he was recently drowned (aged 13) in a freak boat accident; at the same moment Sharon (aged 51) gave birth to a child by her toyboy lover, Keanu.

Sharon’s biological father Gavin (who also faked his own death, and was married to Sharon’s mother-in-law, who also faked her own death) turned out to be a gangster, who kidnapped Sharon’s third husband Phil, doused her house with petrol, and threw her auntie from a window to her death.

Sharon has been involved in five separate car accidents, three kidnappings, and she’s been seriously assaulted more times than I can accurately ascertain, usually by gangsters. Oh, and she’s also addicted to painkillers, has no spleen, and she was a pop singer.

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By Gareth Roberts

In some ways, the characters are similar. They’re both tough, no-nonsense ladies with dubious reputations and hearts of gold. But Elsie lived at a time when British TV soap operas went out just twice a week, and were part of a rich tapestry of varied prime-time programming.

Sharon came of age just as this changed, with the soaps becoming scheduling juggernauts, the number of episodes per week gradually creeping up and up. Eastenders is now transmitted four, sometimes five nights of the week; Coronation Street — incredibly — now regularly takes up three hours of the ITV weekly schedule. Emmerdale runs every weekday night, with regular double-length episodes.

It’s not hard to see why. In an increasingly crowded media marketplace, there are solid commercial incentives for loading the schedules with reliable ratings winners with strong followings. But the unintended consequence is the removal of something quite valuable from our pop-cultural landscape: a sense of the worth of ordinary people and ordinary lives as subjects for examination and reflection through drama.

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Don't call it poverty porn

By Jenny McCartney

British soap operas were, back in the day, notoriously unglamorous and uneventful in comparison to their wild, high-concept American counterparts. Granada executives were famously nervous at the genesis of Coronation Street in 1960, worried that it was a show where “nothing happened”. In the 1980s, Clive James used to end his TV round-ups of exotically bloody clips from foreign language soaps with quips about how unlikely such scenes would be at Emmerdale Farm, as it then was.

Dramatic events certainly happened in the soaps of old — and it would be a mistake to characterise them as convivial fluff. They always, necessarily, dealt in a heightened version of reality, and were often hard-nosed and full of incident.

It is the nature of those incidents that was different. The bread-and-butter stories of Coronation Street in the Sixties right through to Nineties (when — full disclosure — I worked on it) were illicit affairs, non-violent disputes, financial precariousness, and, most centrally, the examination of long-standing marriages and other family relationships.

People rubbing along in situations not too far removed from our own. Jealousy, rivalry, luckiness and unluckiness in love. Anybody can identify with those. My guess is that very few of us, thankfully, can exclaim: “Oh, that’s exactly what happened to me!” when people suffocate in a car boot, or drown alongside their sister on the eve of their wedding, or get kidnapped and tortured in an abandoned basement, all of which have occurred in our soaps fairly recently.

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Why Miranda is more daring than Fleabag

By Peter Franklin

The transformation of the media landscape transformed our soaps. As more material was demanded to fill more slots, and as competing distractions continued to pile higher and higher, more and more extraordinary and unlikely events and stunts were necessary to draw viewers’ attention.

It’s ironic that as levels of recorded crime in the real world have gone down, the soaps have got increasingly ensanguined. It’s funny to think that statistically speaking you were much more likely to be a victim of violence when Weatherfield was a much more genial place than it is now.

Coronation Street, to its credit, retains much of its humour and charm. The writing has kept up to a very high standard. The problem is that the sheer volume of material, and the overload of accidents, murders and other tragic events, strains credibility. Characters bear huge amounts of personal tragedy and grief. It’s hard to imagine how, for example, David Platt (father stabbed to death, wife stabbed to death, stepfather a serial killer, hid the body of a drug dealer down a manhole, etc) can function in society even in his wonky way.

The purpose of all these big events is to sustain ratings, or at least to stem their inevitable decline. Increasing ratings is out of the question, as entertainment options proliferate and our mass culture becomes more and more a selection of niches.

Committing to watching the big three British soaps is a big ask now. It will take up about 10 hours of your evenings a week. You can still occasionally find the drama of the everyday in other more digestible shows such as Last Tango in Halifax, or even a comedy like This Country, but that’s about it. The rest is mostly sudden explosions and/or stabbings.

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Why the woke can't make jokes

By Gareth Roberts

The attention-grabbing nature of modern media has, I think, blotted out the idea that ordinary life is dramatic. We have lost, or are losing, a realistic sense of of our reflected selves.

This has political implications, too. The shock among elites at the Brexit vote and the Tory landslide might not have been so strong if we saw more ordinary people living ordinary lives in our mainstream culture. It’s hard to imagine a Leave/Tory voting person being portrayed reasonably on TV, and this in an age obsessed with ‘representation’.

One last thing. Elsie Tanner’s son returned to Weatherfield in 2012, when he revealed that Elsie had plummeted to a fiery death when she accidentally drove off a cliff in the Algarve.

Well, of course she did. Nobody in the soaps of today gets a happy, or even an ordinary, ending.