Divorce, Walford Style
By Larry Jaffee
At the end of the second season of EastEnders, the creative team delivered a Christmas Day 1986 episode that captured 30 million U.K. viewers, an astounding figure considering that Britain had only about twice that many inhabitants at the time.
And to put that achievement into further perspective, the BBC these days thinks it’s ahead of the game when the series gets a third of that audience. True, two decades ago EastEnders had prime-time competition from only three other over-the-air channels, not the myriad of home entertainment options available in the 21st century (e.g., 500-channel cable and satellite TV systems, PlayStation and Xbox video games, cell phone entertainment, etc.).
But what caught the attention of so many Brits over 20 years ago?It was Den Watts serving his wife Angie divorce papers.
Den and Angie’s performance in this particular EastEnders episode, as well as in general, lifted the world of soap opera into the sphere of heavy drama, every bit as good as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolff?
EastEnders’ creative team had had two years to establish the characters: Den the womanizer with a mistress on the side; Angie the boozing flirt, still hopeful she could make her straying husband fall in love with her all over again.
And it almost works. When Den first broaches the subject of divorce with Angie in the episode that aired in the U.K. on 16 October 1986, saying that perhaps they should call the marriage a day, the ever-desperate Angie pullsa whopper of a lie out of the ether—she’s dying and has six only months to live. And Den somehow falls for it. Maybe Angie caught him at a particularly vulnerable moment, like when Humphrey Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca gets uncharacteristically all sappy reminiscing about how Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa stood him up at the railway station as the Nazis began to occupy Paris in the early days of World War II.
What Angie didn’t think about when she came up with the dying story was whether Den would believe in her miraculous recovery. In any case, it bought her a romantic trip to Venice.
Alison Graham, soap critic for Radio Times, picked the episode as one of her favourite moments in the show’s first 15 years:
“When you think about it, successful marriages are not generally based on malice and mutual distrust. But, having said that, living in a swamp of recrimination, humiliation and mutual dislike—all played out in public under the microscopic gaze of the inhabitants of Albert Square—never seemed to do Den and Angie Watts much harm.
Goodness, but they were horrible. She claimed to be dying, just to spite him, he had affairs all over the place, eventually impregnating his daughter’s best friend, and they were both just generally unpleasant.
Thus, of course, the relationship between Den and Angie passed into soap mythology, and one of its greatest legends is the Christmas Day divorce papers.
Just when Angie thought it was safe to get the turkey out of the oven, Den handed over the documents and announced their marriage was at an end. In the Watts household, this kind of thing passed for a good time.
Short of wrapping his intentions in crepe paper ad leaving them under the Christmas tree with a label bearing the words ‘I’m leaving you, you bitch’, Den couldn’t have been more unkind. Which is probably what made it all rather wonderful.”
In EastEnders: 20 Years in Albert Square (BBC, 2005), author Rupert Smith selected the Christmas episode as one that “everybody talked about” with a frame-by-frame description of the drama.
Former Inside Soap writer Josephine Monroe gives divorce a chapter of its own in her book The EastEnders Programme Guide (Virgin, 1994). She writes:
“It seems quite ironic that there have been so many extra-marital affairs in EastEnders, but not once has an affair led to divorce, or has one mistress subsequently become a wife.
That’s because divorce in Albert Square comes about not out of spite or retaliation, but quite simply because couples involved had simply married the wrong partner in the first place. There has never been a big custody battle or rows over child support, but that doesn’t mean divorce has ever been easy.”
She prefaces her chapter on adultery by observing, “It’s a wonder that a solicitor hasn’t opened up shop in Bridge Street because the marital slings and arrows of the folk in Albert Square could keep a divorce lawyer in business for life!”
Monroe goes on to detail the divorces of several couples in chronological order: Saeed and Naima Jeffrey (December 1985), Den and Angie (May 1987), Tony and Hannah Carpenter (May 1987), Michelle and Lofty Holloway (April 1988), Pete and Kathy Beale (November 1988), Pat and Brian Wicks (May 1989), Carmel and Matthew Jackson (July 1989). Without going into the specifics of each marriage’s dissolution (unless readers are interested, you let me know), one thing is clear in Walford, and in real life for that matter: as common as divorce is in society, each story is unique in its own way.
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