EastEnders’ glory days are behind it – but it still deserves a Bafta ...Middle East

It’s a scene that even Dot Cotton and her reliable tea leaves couldn’t have predicted. The cast and crew of EastEnders will be taking to the stage in London later this month – fittingly at historic venue The Brewery in the east of the city – to receive the 2025 BAFTA Television Craft Special award.

This gong isn’t handed out every year but solely at the discretion of the judging Committee. It’s being awarded in recognition of 40 years of tireless effort by thousands of individuals – including a few household names, but the majority unknown – to bring the stories of Albert Square and its residents to the screen.

More specifically, it is a tribute to the work of the show and its bosses in developing and nurturing new talent in front and behind of the camera. At a time when soaps struggle to compete with reality TV shows, YouTube stars and former viewers simply having more alternatives of things to do – and when every falling rating is jumped on by braying press with headlines of imminent extinction – this commitment to nurturing our future stars can’t be trumpeted enough.

Soaps have long been perceived the poor relation in the TV firmament. Their storylines – always vacuum-packed with tales of marriage and murder, burglaries and betrayal, and more recently documenting social challenges such as drug addition, domestic violence and even euthanasia – would quickly win awards if presented via contemporary drama. I suppose this oversight is purely because they always seem to be on TV, and familiarity breeds at least complacency.

There was, however, a fresh wave of appreciation for EastEnders in February when the show pulled out all the stops to mark its 40th birthday: the return of Albert Square alumni including Bianca Jackson, Grant Mitchell and, thrillingly unrevealed prior to her appearance, Angie Watts (Anita Dobson). Audience numbers will never reach the 30.15 million of Christmas Day when Angie was served her divorce papers by husband Den – still the most watched British TV programme of all time, excluding sport and news. But EastEnders, along with its northern counterparts, remains important for what it does on and off the screen.

Where else are the stories of human lives told so richly, crossing class, racial or generational divides, and particularly those of complex, strong-willed, witty women? Among the rare and special two-hander episodes, the one shared by June Brown and Gretchen Franklin (Dot and Ethel), and another starring Pam St Clement and Barbara Windsor (Pat and Peggy) matched anything served up by Harold Pinter on the West End stage. More recently, Lacey Turner’s chronicle of bereavement as Stacey Slater would surely have secured a BAFTA had this been Elizabeth R and not EastEnders. For many people watching, these characters remain as familiar, and sometimes more loved, than relations. Bringing them to life is no small task.

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The 40 best EastEnders characters of the past 40 years, ranked

While we wouldn’t be able to identify any of the crew in a lineup, many luminaries of this country’s TV industry also cut their teeth on the demanding production schedules of EastEnders. Sue Tully, once a teenage and pregnant Michelle Fowler, has gone on to direct episodes of Happy Valley. Producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins recently helmed the big-budget Jilly Cooper’s Rivals for Disney. There are thousands of behind the scenes crew who might still go onto create our next big streaming hit.

One such young writer was Sarah Phelps, who has gone on to great things, including the critically acclaimed Sixth Commandment, as well as adapting Agatha Christie for the BBC. She told the Radio Times recently, “EastEnders is Greek tragedy, but the Furies have acrylic nails.”

With such a bon mot, she cut to the heart of the soap’s enduring success: offering characters who feel real and accessible, and memorable stories that capture the viewers’ imagination. To ride these two horses is far more difficult than it appears – to do it for 40 years is worthy of a BAFTA special award at the very least.

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