All I know is that my daughter is in a cell, with criminals and low lifes, and its eating away at meBetween you and me and the gatepost, she's quite keen on you, but you know her, she won't let tonIt's coming out of your wagesAnd why should I?DenAnd when you done that, you can empty the bins and clean out the sinkThat's four pounds fifty you've made me!I don't owe you anythingI'll top itI mean it is an invitation alrightWell I'm not giving up without a fightIts not up for negotiation, you're firedI've spoken to GrantJohnny AllenNo, the law's on the side of the person who has got the most moneyListen I'm doing my best alrightLook just forget about itIt makes my blood boilMartinNo more screw ups alrightNo, what difference does it make?People round here are getting really annoyed with yaSamSo now you're incomptent as well as a liarBeen busy yourself by the looks of it, but then he always was a sucker for blondesWell spit it outYou invited him in for coffeeYou owe me, you said so yourselfYou won't win, not against JohnnyYou had a nice lovely meal and then whatYou alright mateDrumsI'd like to see that film thoughI feel like a film starI know you don't wanna hear it, but I love youI'll be smiling even moreI made a mistake on a cake, and you half kill me!I'm sorry to bother you, can I have a word pleaseNoone cares what you thinkOh yeah, no worries, piece of cake nanSame old Peggy ain't it, everyone elses' faultShe's got servants, she won't open the doorThis man who you're great mates with, is a thief, and extorter, and I wouldn't be surprised if he was a murdererWho else are you gonna cheese off eh?Ah here she comes, the wicked witch of WalfordWhat the hell have you been doing, Johnny's lividWhat do you reckon I should do then, drop her a line, or just pop round with a decent pack of biscuitsIn February 1983, two years before EastEnders hit the screen, the show was nothing more than a vague idea in the mind of a handful of BBC executives, who decided that what BBC One needed was a popular bi-weekly drama series that would attract the kind of mass audiences ITV was getting with Coronation Street.
The first people to whom David Reid, then head of series and serials, turned were Julia Smith and Tony Holland, a well established producer/script editor team who had first worked together on Z-Cars. The outline that Reid presented was vague: two episodes a week, 52 weeks a year. Smith and Holland went away scratching their heads. Why did the BBC want to fill the already-full schedules with a new soap? Little did they know just how popular it would become.
There was anxiety at first that the viewing public would not accept a new soap set in the south of England.
Smith and Holland were both Londoners � Holland was from a big East End family, but when they researched Victoria Square they found massive changes in areas they thought they knew well. However, delving further into the East End, they found exactly what they had been searching for. A real East End spirit � an inward looking quality, a distrust of strangers and authority figures, a sense of territory and community that Holland and Smith summed up as 'Hurt one of us and you hurt us all'.
The target launch date was January 1985 when BBC One was planning a major revamp in its schedules. Julia Smith and Tony Holland had just 11 months in which to write, cast and shoot the whole thing. However, in February 1984 they didn't even have a title or a place to film. The project had a number of working titles � Square Dance, Round the Square, Round the Houses, London Pride, East 8. It was the latter that stuck (E8 is the postcode for Hackney) in the early months of creative process.