How soap saved the BBC

In the 1980s, the BBC devised a new weapon in its ratings battle against ITV: EastEnders. DAVID HENDY explores how a mix of masterful publicity and melodramatic plots propelled the drama to popular success

- DAVID HENDY

One of the most unlikely episodes in British television history unfolded on an isolated Devon hillside one evening in September 1986. It was then that around 60 inmates at Dartmoor prison, who had been spending “free association” watching the BBC’s hit drama serial EastEnders, started rioting. Chairs and tables were broken up, and lightbulbs smashed. Afterwards, officials launched an urgent investigation. Had the poor quality of food just served for supper triggered the outburst? Not, it seemed, in this case. It had been TV – or rather, its temporary absence – that had apparently caused the fracas.

On the night in question, EastEnders had featured one of the main characters, the teenage mother Michelle Fowler, jilt her sweetheart, Lofty, at the altar and declare her love instead for the father of her baby: the landlord of the Queen Vic pub, “Dirty Den” Watts. In soap-opera terms, it was a classic moment of high drama, and around 20 million Britons – roughly half the adult population of the entire country – had tuned in. At the crucial moment, all reception in Dartmoor Prison had been lost – the latest in a growing list of reception failures at the institution. By the time the picture returned to normal, all the inmates could see was Lofty crying alone in his bedsit.

In less than two years after its February 1985 launch, EastEnders had become compulsive viewing. Indeed, it had been designed by the BBC with this goal in mind – conceived as a finely honed weapon in an ongoing TV ratings war that the corporation desperately needed to win.