So I still think about Ali and Sue Osman losing their baby son, Hassan, to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in 1985, when Shabnam and Kush lost their son to stillbirth in 2015, or when Whitney and Zack lost their baby in 2023 when she was just five months pregnant.
I didn’t fully understand it, but it felt like everyone depicted in the show was just like other families – with the same struggles and dysfunctional dynamics that many of them deal with day in, day out.
I was 11 years old when I watched ‘Dirty’ Den Watts (Leslie Grantham), Arthur Fowler (Bill Treacher) and Ali Osman (Nejdet Salih) break down the door of Reg Cox’s flat and find him barely alive in his chair.
Today – at 51 years old – I get to my desk in my home office by 8:30am and put EastEnders on in the background while I get set up for the day with a cup of coffee.
Of course, we’ve also seen some of the most dramatic and entertaining telly in soaps history – from Den Watts blindsiding Angie and serving her with divorce papers, to the whodunnits like the infamous ‘Who Shot Phil?’ or ‘Who Killed Lucy Beale?’ storylines.
