A Workshop for Children and Denis Healey: BBC1 Junction, 10th March 1995

Описание: Here's a couple of Eastenders-related junctions from the Briggs/Marshall Conglomerate. Call it a tribute to Leslie Grantham. They also both have football in it, so you can call it a World Cup special if you like. Whatever. Both are also from 1995, if you want to contrive a special occasion out of that.

Here we're going into Eastenders - or rather Classic Eastenders, because 1995 was its tenth anniversary, and to celebrate, they repeated memorable episodes from the show's past: the identity of Michelle's baby's daddy, Den and Angie's divorce papers and some of the famous two-handers, which really changed British soap opera by showing that, occasionally, you could make them like proper television drama of quality, with acting and camerawork and everything.

Anyway, the lead-in was Tomorrow's World, early in the reformatting era where the studio-bound hijinks of Stableford and Hann were replaced with filmed reports linked by a solitary Carol Vorderman on a stool. Vorderman can be heard here directing you to their Ceefax page over the new agey planet-and-baby end titles, with music not by Neil Hannon (it hadn't come out yet).

Cut to a brief slide for The Photo Show, a magazine show about photography I expect. Pushing Gardener's World out of its traditional Friday at 8 slot (it's on afterwards) and by all accounts doing the same thing, only swapping zoom lenses for dahlias. Such a programme feels more suited to the '|'\\'() era than the dynamic, edgy Britpop BBC2 of the mid-90s, but we're not quite there yet. Alan Yentob only left for BBC1 a year earlier. Besides, to this day Friday at eight is the Gardener's World slot on BBC2, even though we now have BBC4 for all the weighty, esoteric or minority interest stuff the '|'\\'() era used to specialise in. This week: Denis Healey's favourite photo (you see what I mean about the '|'\\'()-ishness) and, though Andy Cartledge doesn't mention it, Lovely Liza Goddard Who's Lovely gets help photographing her dogs.

Football! THERE IS NO ESCAPE. It's March, so it's the business end of the FA Cup, at the start of the era when the BBC and ITV basically took it in turns to broadcast it. It's the BBC's turn in 1995 (ITV took it back in 1997) and it's the 6th round! Everton just beat Norwich 5-0 to set up a meeting with "Premiership high-fliers Newcastle United, widely tipped as one of this season's favourites". They were indeed both those things, but ironically it was Everton who won the cup that year, confusing everyone by beating Man Utd 1-0 via a messy goal by one of the least remembered footballers of the 90s, Paul "The Devil" Rideout.

Anyway that's live and dangerous on Sunday. Now, it's The Unforgettable Eastenders (as it was billed), and specifically one of its two-character proper-acting specials. No previous soap in this country had ever trusted its actors enough to hold a half-hour duologue, but EastEnders did it a bunch of times until it became a staple, starting with a genuinely electrifying episode between Leslie Grantham and Anita Dobson's Den and Angie, which starts with Den explaining that he wants a divorce and ends with Angie gloating down the lens, having changed his mind by pretending to have cancer.

Astonishngly that one - directed by the late Antonia Bird, incidentally - wasn't repeated, instead going for the more iconic cliffhanger where Den, having uncovered the lie, serves her with divorce papers for Christmas. Right now, we're going into perhaps the most famous and beloved of its trademark two-handers, the one between Dot and Ethel. Rather than tying in with any ongoing storyline, this one represented some downtime and was instead just about being old, remembering the past, and giving two comic relief characters some serious material for a change.