Watching EastEnders in the U.K., Five Times A Week
By Mackenzie Lambert Wood
One of the best things about living in the U.K., for me at least, is being able to watch EastEnders four nights during the week(as well as Sunday Omnibus recap) and knowing that they are current episodes.
When EastEnders was first shown on PBS in the U.S., I was living in Dallas, and the local station didn’t carry it. Fortunately, it was being shown in the Washington, D.C. area where my father lived at the time, and he agreed to tape the show for me, sending them out a few at a time. I was hooked on the show immediately, and especially liked the fact that I never knew what was going to happen next, no plot line leaks and no magazines with blazing headlines that you couldn’t miss.
The show did eventually come to PBS in Dallas, but I continued getting the tapes from my dad, as these were further along in the plots. In 1989, I travelled to the U.K. for the first time and talked my way into a private tour of the BBC Elstree studio, including the EastEnders sets. This just added to my love of the show, seeing how the sets looked up close and meeting some of the cast members.
In the 1990s, I left Dallas and travelled around the U.S. for several years, losing touch with the show a bit. I tried to keep up with it on the Internet and through letters from British friends but was really pleased to find that when I settled in Los Angeles, BBC America was carrying the show. I was also still getting newspaper clippings and soap magazines from friends in the U.K., so I was also clued in on upcoming plot lines, which was sometimes not a good thing. I missed the days of getting the tapes in the mail from my dad, where I could watch several hours at a time, not knowing what was going to happen next or who was going to end up getting the duff- duff.
When I met my husband, Ed, he was already a fan of both Emmerdale and Coronation Street but had never really watched EastEnders. During the time that we were long- distance dating, EastEnders was taken off the schedule on BBCA, so Ed offered to tape the show for me. He bought me an international VCR that would play tapes from Europe, and started sending me tapes of the show, along with other British programmes. Since I had friends in the U.K. who watched the show, I could ask them about characters I wasnít familiar with until I was caught up to storylines. This worked also when I finally moved to England and was watching the showís first- run episodes. I am back to being able to watch the show faithfully. This has also made a fan out of my husband, as he will sit with me while the show is on and has gotten interested in most of the plot lines. Not only do I get the pleasure of seeing EastEnders five times a week, but I also get to share it with my husband. The only thing that I could ask for now is for the national papers and magazines here to stop giving away story lines and spoiling the surprise many viewers used to feel. I do my best to avert my eyes from the newsstands, but sometimes it can’t be avoided. I do miss the days when I was so shocked by a plot twist that I would shout ‘What?!’ at the television screen, but I think I can learn to live with that.
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