EastEnders Around The World
By Pam Margoshes
(Editor’s note: The following article is reprinted with permission from Woman magazine in the U.K., and features Walford Gazette subscriber/sometimes contributor Karen Blicker, as well as this newspaper’s publisher and editor-in-chief.)
From Zimbabwe to Finland, from the United States to New Zealand, British soaps rule the hearts (and telly schedules!) of fans all over the world. International Brit soaps fans just can’t get enough of the working class woes of EastEnders.
Several besotted international fans tell why they just can’t pry themselves away from their tellies when their favorite Brit soaps come on...
Karen Blicker, a 50-something American woman who runs a business out of her house with her husband, has been a mad keen EastEnders fan ever since she first started watching it five years ago on her local New York City area public TV station. (American public TV is kind of like the upmarket channel of the BBC, but a bit different. It’s part-government, part-membership funded.) Blicker motors around Hicksville, New York (where the rock singer Billy Joel went to school, she points out proudly) in a car with license plates that read:
LVBRTCMS. Translation: Love British Comedies.
Karen watches all the Brit comedies but her heart belongs to the soaps, to the strong, gritty women of EastEnders. Pat, Kath, and Pauline. When Arthur Fowler died, she was up all night, she just couldn’t sleep. "It was like my family member died," she says, with a deep sigh. People honk at her on the expressways. They give her the thumbs up sign when they see her license plate. She’s Brit telly crazed" but has no idea why it so rules her life. "I must have been a Brit in a former life," she says, with a smile.
"EastEnders is more like real life," she explains. "I especially like it that they don’t use cookie-cutter characters. Carol Jackson is cranky" but also defends her children like a lioness. Michelle was very natural but not glamorous. Roy is dependable and honest but no Mel Gibson. Nigel is overweight and Robbie has bad skin. Just like in real life!
"American soaps are so homogenized and sanitized in comparison," she says. "You’d never find Nigel on The Bold and the Beautiful."
One of her favorite male character is David Wicks. "He’s cunning and kind and complicated all at the same time," she says. "One minute he’s nice to his mom, the next he’s doing some awful thing to someone."
Karen especially likes the working class emphasis of the show and the complexity of the characters. The United States is big EastEnders territory. It’s shown in about 20 cities in the U.S. There are fan clubs in many major cities including Minneapolis (which has some 500 members). Denver, Erie, PA and the Manhattan area also have very keen fan clubs. The original fan club started in San Francisco.
Episodes shows in the U.S. are at least two years behind the U.K. There are fan web sites and even a newspaper, a quarterly devoted to the show.
The Walford Gazette, a big hit among EastEnders castmembers, was started in 1993 as a "labour of love" by journalist Larry Jaffee, 40. He’s an extraordinarily devoted EE fan, who tried for several years to be allowed onto the BBC set of Walford Square only to be refused repeatedly then finally got the official okay to tour.
The Walford Gazette was successful from the very start and now has a circulation of 4,000.
Jaffee also likes the gritty reality of the show and the working-class emphasis. "Here in the U.S." he says, "the only series that deals with lower-middle-class life is Roseanne, and that’s a comedy, although both Karen and Larry find that EastEnders, although most often serious, contains much humour.
He most identifies with the Fowler men - Mark and Arthur. "My father is a cabbie," says Jaffee, who likes the decency of the characters. "Mark has been through so much," he says, "he carries such burdens but with such dignity. And he’s such a good friend to others."
Sabine Vonbank (rght), a 23-year-old from Schruns, Austria, watches all the Brit soaps - Brookside, Emmerdale, and Hollyoaks - but is most fond of EastEnders. She’s a mad Tiff fan, identifying most with the travails of Tiff. She got hooked on the soaps when she worked as an au pair in London in 1996 and began watching all the Brit soaps. "I must be crazy," she says, "because the very first day in was in London I checked the telly paper for the Brit soaps even before I did any sightseeing!" She also watches Brookside and Emmerdale (on tapes from the U.K., or when she can get them on satellite), but loves EE the most.
"I’m Brit soaps mad!" she declares proudly. "They’re so much better than our own soaps in Austria," she exults "because we don’t even have our own soaps here! We get lots of German soaps on Austrian TV. I watch them but they are not nearly as good as the Brit ones."
The German ones, she says, are more simple, the Brit ones more like real life and more problem-filled. "You would never see someone with HIV or with an alcohol problem on any of our local shows," she says.
"Joe (Wicks)" is the sexiest character on any Brit soap, she thinks.
She most "loves to hate Grant and Peggy" for pestering Tiff. The show is several months behind the U.K. and is dubbed into German, which Sabine finds annoying.
At first, she admits, it was hard for her to understand Cockney slang (when she watched in the U.K.), but after two months she got it. Brookside is harder to understand, she says, "because of the northern slang!"
Brit soaps aren’t as popular in Austria as in the U.S. or Canada (there are no formal, organized fan clubs or web sites) because, as Sabine explains, "The Austrians watch the German soaps and don’t even know the Brit soaps exist."
Plotline wise: Sabine would most love to see Grant and Joe’s mum get married.
"My friends all think I’m absolutely crazy," she adds, "but I have just one word for Brit soap - FABULOUS!!!. It’s like a big family for me."
Nicky Bedu (left) is a 22-year-old freelance researcher at a TV station in Johannesburg. He’s been a Brit soaps lover ever since he lived in London and first laid eyes on the "wanna-be entrepreneurs," the "Jack the lad" Mitchell brothers. He now subsists on tapes from family in the U.K. because the show has been shown in South Africa" but isn’t right now. He likes most of the soaps - but prefers EastEnders for its realism. "The Mitchell brothers are a good representation of London. There are many people like them in London," he chuckles.
"I especially like the way a wide range of cultures are presented on Brit soaps, not just the upper class and not just white people," he adds.
There are a number of South African soaps but they are according to Nicky, mainly geared to kids or rather like the U.S. ones. Generations is an exception, a highly rated, well-done, South African-produced soap. But Nicky still prefers EastEnders!!
Inger Hansson, a 30-year-old living in Stockholm works at the local underground company in Stockholm. She’s qualified to drive trains but right now works in the "train stable."
She grew up on Emmerdale Farm on local TV, but now her favourite soap is EastEnders. She loves Grant. Swedish soaps, she says, are "not so realistic. They’re more like the American ones," she says. She loves Brit soaps because, she says, "I love the British way of living."
