Former EastEnders boss Chris Clenshaw has revealed his alternative idea for the BBC One soap’s 40th anniversary episode, and explained why we got the dramatic fire in the Queen Vic instead.

 

 

Clenshaw, who departed a few months after the tentpole episodes aired in February to make way for Ben Wadey, appeared on the Albert Square After Dark podcast. He spilled the beans on the anniversary, The Six, and emotional storylines such as Lola Pearce’s death and Phil Mitchell’s mental health issues.

“EastEnders is best when it’s a blockbuster storyline cut against something incredibly rooted in realism, something people can relate to, or an issue-led storyline,” he explained.

“But I think when it comes to anniversaries, you want spectacle, I think you want to be surprised. I want more a Six type of storyline than you do a Lola type of storyline.

“That’s what we were looking for, and we talked about the Tube coming off the tracks and things like that.”

Both Clenshaw and the hosts agreed that it would make for quite the spectacular event, so why didn’t it happen?

He explained: “It would be brilliant, we couldn’t make it work for various reasons. But I loved The Vic. The Vic is the heart of the show and I know that it was kind of announced, or people got wind of it, people were like ‘we’ve seen Vic fires before’.

“I knew that this would be different, it wasn’t a ‘fire’, it was an explosion and [what was important was] what it was going to lead to, which is Martin’s death.

“But that became the spectacle, and it also became the heart, and a way of getting everyone there. You want there to be a community event at the heart, we had Billy and Honey’s wedding.”

He also stated that they had “more meetings than we ever did” for any other storyline during his tenure, which started in 2017 as a story producer/script editor and then saw him become executive producer in 2022.

Wadey’s tenure has mostly focused on the return of Zoe Slater and all the issues surrounding her, with the identity of her stalker finally being revealed in today’s episode.