An (EastEnders) education: Social interventions, collective proselytising, male fandom and EastEnders

Previous studies of EastEnders (1985-present) have focused on important feminist and queer scholarship or topics including class and ethnicity. Likewise, previous quantitative and qualitative analyses of the programme have been largely skewed towards female spectatorship. The significant male viewing demographic within audience research has been comparatively underrepresented. Taking an autoethnographic approach which seeks to triangulate previous ethnographic studies with the extant body of theoretical literature on EastEnders, this article seeks to fill important gaps in the EastEnders literature. Via autoethnographic discourse, this study focuses on the vital educative function (what we term ‘collective proselytising’) that EastEnders offered to the authors as well as its potential ongoing, longitudinal influence. In doing so, it exemplifies the role that the programme played in conveying education on issues such as class, sexuality ethnicity and, most prominently of all, gender inequality. With an emphasis on EastEnders’ early years (the mid-1980s onwards), this article illuminates the social and educative function of the programme. In a period in which EastEnders offered a soap that was vital and dynamic to young male audiences, and before the programme deliberately targeted a male demographic with ‘tough guy’ archetypes, it also presented a form of masculinity that challenged rebarbative stereotypes. The article likewise works to highlight how individual and collective televisual memory plays a central role in underlining television’s socio-cultural importance.