First viewed : 25 December 1986
When this started in February 1985, I instantly took against the idea of the BBC having a twice weekly soap. The idea of a public service broadcaster spending the licence fee on a product already well supplied by the commercial channels seemed like a capitulation to Thatcherite philistinism. I also suspected that it in part stemmed from Southerners' resentment that the nation's favourite soap was firmly embedded in the industrial north. I made a deliberate point of not watching it and hoped it would soon fall flat on its face.
Initially it looked like my hopes would be realised. Only one person, a Londoner of course, in my hall of residence seemed interested in it. However when I came back to university in the autumn, I realised everything had changed . The father of young Michelle's baby had become a hot topic among my peers and the soap's stars were now all over the tabloids. The following year they all started crashing the charts with terrible records, none more so than Nick Berry's Every Loser Wins, the worst number one of all time.
The first time I caught a snatch was the tail end of the Christmas Day episode in 1986 because I'd come down for Only Fools and Horses. It was the one where "Dirty" Den Watts ( Leslie Grantham ) tells his wife Ange he's divorcing her. Grantham is a particular bugbear for me. One, he's a bloody awful actor with only two expressions- sneering psychopath or bug-eyed maniac. Two he's a fully fledged murderer that I don't particularly want to support through the licence fee. I just don't get how the people that holler for racists and sex offenders to be banished from our screens are content that he still has an acting career.
The more attention the show got, the more resolved I became never to watch a full episode of it. This became more difficult when my sister returned home in 1987 and infected Mum with the virus. The peril increased after I got married and found my wife was a fan. I can proudly say I still haven't watched an episode from start to finish but I have come dangerously close. One Sunday afternoon, I came home drenched and exhausted from an arduous walk and sat on the sofa through most of an omnibus edition where John Junkin played a former boys home warden who'd mistreated Billy Mitchell. I also saw a fair chunk of the one where Martin Kemp's character made his fiery exit. Fortunately, my wife threw it off some time in the mid-noughties and the danger has passed.
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