A Chat With New Executive Producer Louise Berridge
By Larry Jaffee
You’ve been on the job a little more than two months. Has it turned out the way you envisioned?
Not at all. It's been great, but on my very first day we went into a major crisis with an actor being ill, which meant we had to rewrite 53 scripts, including the one we were shooting that day.
That's part of the buzz of EastEnders. They're real people [who work here]. They get sick. They have real problems. They have real lives. You just have to react to it constantly. It's not like you make a carefully laid five-year plan for the show and that's what you follow. The cast behaved superbly. They all pulled together. You know, the show must go on. The cameras never stopped filming. Everybody had to work overtime—the writers, the script editors. Actors had to cancel their holidays. They had to pull in people who weren't scheduled and change their stories on the spot. It worked out fantastically, but it did make for a very exciting start. And the audience never noticed the difference. I'm really proud of that. You were back there in 1994 and 1995. How have things changed?
It had just gone to three episodes a week. I started as script editor and became story editor. The first big story that I did was 'Sharongate.' Now we have four episodes a week. It's almost just too much for one script editor to cope with comfortably. It's too much for one writer to write all four episodes. It's pushed everything just beyond the breaking point, so we've had to add far more personnel than we've ever had to before. When we were doing three episodes we could do it, only shooting five days aweek with only one team shooting. That made life really easy in terms of scheduling.
But four episodes means that sometimes we need to use Saturdays, and people must work six-day weeks, which makes them very tired. It also means that four days a week we have two teams shooting simultaneously, and that means we're all fighting over the same sets, the same actors.
So we have to be really clever how we construct the scripts, so we don't have characters talking to each other who are in different stories. It can be done, but it's much harder.
It seems like when a new executive producer comes in, a large family follows: the Taverniers, the Jacksons, the di Marcos, the Slaters. What's in store?
We're checking each character to see if this one is getting a bit tired. Are we short of people? We're looking at every character to see where we need new energy coming in. Over the next two years I think a lot of new people will come in. It's not focused on one specific family. There are a lot of areas where we can have some fresh blood. What was it like to be back after being away for so long?
I'm looking at Natalie Cassidy, who plays Sonia. I knew her when she was a child. I watched her grow up.
Do you ever dream about EastEnders characters?
Frequently. It happened in '94-'95, and it took some months before I stopped doing it. But I'd been back here a week and it started again. Oh boy, there goes the rest of my life.
This interview will be continued in the next Walford Gazette.
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