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Eastenders: Characters
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EastEnders has always featured a culturally diverse cast which has included black, Asian, Turkish and Polish characters. "The expansion of minority representation signals a move away from the traditional soap opera format, providing more opportunities for audience identification with the characters and hence a wider appeal".[24][25] Despite this, the programme has been criticised by the Commission for Racial Equality, who argued in 2002 that EastEnders was not giving a realistic representation of the East End's "ethnic make-up". They suggested that the average proportion of visible minority faces on EastEnders was substantially lower than the actual ethnic minority population in East London boroughs, and it therefore reflected the East End in the 1960s, not the East End of the 2000s. Furthermore it was suggested that an element of "tokenism" and stereotyping surrounded many of these minority characters.[26] The programme has since attempted to address these issues. A sari shop was opened and various characters of differing ethnicities were introduced throughout 2006 and 2007, including the Fox family, the Masoods, and various background artists.[27] This was part of producer Diederick Santer's plan to "diversify", to make EastEnders "feel more 21st century". EastEnders have had varying success with ethnic minority characters. Possibly the least successful were the Indian Ferreira family, who were not well received by critics or viewers and were dismissed as unrealistic by the Asian community in the UK.[28]
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EastEnders is further separated from its U.S. counterparts in that it doesn't try to pass off credulity-straining nonsense as creative daring. There are no evil twins, cloned humans on growth hormones, or secret experimental clinics in Switzerland that have perfected cryonic freezing and reanimation of human tissue. And if the stories unfold somewhat predictably, the series succeeds in spite of format limitations, in part because it effectively interpolates new characters and talented actors into a strong veteran cast -- principal among them being Wendy Richard as Fowler family matriarch Pauline, and June Brown as the longsuffering Dot Cotton.
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EastEnders was created by script writer Tony Holland and producer Julia Smith. They created twenty-four original characters for the show; Arthur, Pauline, Mark and Michelle Fowler, Lou, Pete, Kathy and Ian Beale, Den, Angie and Sharon Watts, Ali and Sue Osman, Kelvin and Tony Carpenter, Saeed and Naima Jeffery, Lofty Holloway, Mary Smith, Ethel Skinner, Nick Cotton, Dr. Harold Legg, Andy O'Brien and Debbie Wilkins.
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In 1998, EastEnders Revealed was launched on BBC Choice (now BBC Three). The show takes a look behind the scenes of the EastEnders and investigates particular places, characters or families within EastEnders. EastEnders Revealed is the only BBC Choice programme to last the entire life of the channel and is still running on BBC Three. An episode of EastEnders Revealed that was commissioned for BBC Three attracted 611,000 viewers.
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Like a number of other groups, they felt that the social world of EastEnders, and particularly that of its younger characters, was rather limited. Although these criticisms were shared by other groups, what distinguishes the comments of this group is that their judgments of the programme's lack of authenticity were informed by two specific, and related, ideological concerns - firstly by their notions of masculinity, and secondly by a rather different East End mythology from that provided by EastEnders. (pp. 189-90)
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EastEnders has a high cast turnover and characters are regularly changed in order to facilitate storylines or refresh the format. Following the departure of many established characters between 2004-2006, several families and long-term characters were introduced in 2006, which included the Fox and Wicks families and an extension of the already established Branning family. It is fair to say that a break in viewing during the time leading up to 2006 would leave the contemporary viewer without any sense of familiarity with the cast.
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