More than a soap: the true poetry of Eastenders

Poet Ross Sutherland has adapted an old episode of EastEnders into a new 30-minute poem for BBC television. Here he explains why he looked to Albert Square for inspiration

Any subject is worthy of poetry if you stare at it long enough. There are no unsuitable subjects, it’s just a question of invested time and attention. It’s a shaky belief system I’ll admit, but it’s too late for me to turn back now: I’ve written a collection of poems on motorway service stations, another on the video-game Street Fighter 2. I once took an episode of the Today Programme and painstakingly re-arranged John Humphrys word by word until it eventually became a long sad poem about senility.

I was convinced I could apply the same process to EastEnders. My plan was simple: one, select an episode; two, watch it about hundred times; three, wait for inspiration. Perhaps the sheer repetition would force me into a kind of Stockholm syndrome? The episode might transform before my eyes, turning into the greatest work ever committed to screen. What began as a small scene about Pauline Fowler giving Ruth a jigsaw might eventually feel like something ripped straight from The Cantos. Either that or I would go mad.

I decided on the episode from October 7th 1997. That was the same night my best friend crashed his car into a sign, with me in the passenger seat. Miraculously no one was injured, though the car itself was obliterated. I have a strong memory of watching the opening of EastEnders with my family before getting in the car that night, and have associated the theme tune with the crash ever since. Despite the fact that I only watched the first few scenes, that October 7th episode felt linked to me somehow. Both our stories had  unfolded simultaneously. We crashed mere minutes before the doof-doof.

Despite never being a die-hard EastEnders fan, re-watching the episode was unexpectedly emotional. We’re not supposed to be able to travel back along the timeline of a soap opera. Soaps are fundamentally designed to disappear after use. How many other artworks are protected from our overwhelming hunger for nostalgia? Paintings are endlessly reproduced; almost every film, book and album can be recalled with a couple of mouse-clicks. All culture is kept perpetually present-tense, thinning with each repetition, like photocopies of photocopies. An old episode of a soap however, simply through its unavailability, offers an untapped vein to the past. Soaps are allowed to dissolve away into the back of our memory, which makes any retrieval all the more potent.

Having crept back into 1997’s Albert Square, long-buried memories of my teenage years began to return to me. I remembered just how selfish I’d been on the night of the crash: I’d left my friend alone to deal with the consequences while I wandered home along the side of the road. Our friendship never recovered from that betrayal. No wonder I repressed the whole story. Yet all it took was seeing Paul Nicholls’s haircut (whilst the caff radio played Eternal’s Angel of Mine) for my teenage misdemeanours to come flooding back. Suddenly, everything became a metaphor for the death of our friendship: Nigel’s crumbling video-shop business, Carole’s forced exile from the square. I felt as if I’d abandoned a part of myself back in 1997. As the car came apart that night, so had we, and (just like Pauline’s jigsaw) no one would ever bother to put the pieces back together.

I contacted episode writer Rob Gittins, if only to get a handle on which parts of the story were intended and which parts were just in my head. Rob, as it turns out, is the author of over 250 episodes. While the rest of us see Walford through a tiny half-hour window, the writers have to grapple with the bigger picture, facing the difficulties of working on a story 32 years long. Rob spoke about how soaps are designed to go on forever. If forced to end, they tend to go haywire (Little House on the Prairie ended with the town exploding; Crossroads ended with the whole 26 year story revealed as a daydream of a checkout assistant called Angela).

A successful soap, however, will track alongside our entire life, cradle to grave, then beyond. It’s this quality – its unfathomable vastness – that I think makes a soap opera a classic subject for poetry. Think of the generations of poets who wrote odes to mountains, seeing them as symbols of man’s humility against the cold endlessness of time. Shelley said the “gloom” of Mont Blanc contained “The works and ways of man / their death and birth […] Power dwells apart in its tranquillity.”

Where I live in Peterborough, there are no mountains for a poet to traipse through moodily. But the grim endlessness of EastEnders can serve the same purpose I think. Here before us, here after us, barely refurnishing the sets.

Opening up the vault of EastEnders brought me face-to-face with my past. It reminded me of just how unpleasant I’d been as a teen. All the same, I could take some solace in remembering that this was just one story; one episode out of five and a half thousand. There’s a reason why long-running characters seem to function in a state of perpetual amnesia: you have to forget to keep going. Someone will always be in crisis, but thankfully by design, nothing can ever last.

Missing Episode will be broadcast on BBC Two on Saturday October 7 at 10.30pm. More information about Ross Sutherland's work can be found at rosssutherland.co.uk

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