I've been a member of the EastEnders writing team for 22 years.
And head of the writers room since 2005.
And during that time, I've overseen somewhere
in the region of 3,000 complete half-hour scripts.
Given the size and scale of a show like EastEnders,
there are plenty of scripts, hundreds of them which are written
but never actually make it to air.
And so, these are the ones that got away,
my top 10 lost EastEnders scripts.
In this episode, Dot falls asleep in the launderette,
and has a horrifying nightmare.
She's sucked through the washing machine,
through this sort of wormhole vortex.
This bit was very much based, when I wrote it, on my own birth.
And she arrives in the Vic, although it's not quite the Vic,
because all the walls are made of flesh.
She plays chess with Wellard,
and then finally Dot is
ceremonially reborn through a giant fibreglass uterus.
The guys who made this for us, actually,
it's the same people who did U2's Pop tour.
Unfortunately, June Brown, who plays Dot,
wasn't comfortable with the nude rebirth scene, so...
it didn't happen.
Um, since the 1990s,
the soap industry had tended to use
computer algorithms to write its scripts -
that's why Hollyoaks sounds like it's been written by a microwave.
And the BBC has recently been trialling
a state-of-the-art narrative module known as the ScriptThink E20.
It's a promising piece of software, but on closer analysis,
we found that the dialogue didn't quite ring true.
Someone writes an H on Ian's back, and a helicopter lands on him.
In 1996, we were losing the ratings battle with Corrie badly.
And so in order to give ourselves a boost in numbers,
we briefly experimented with using subliminal messaging in the show.
We would secretly splice in flash cards,
soft-core pornography,
and we wrote in a Welsh character called Owen,
who spoke in what looked like Welsh on the page
but in reality it was just instructions to keep watching
but flipped in reverse.
The BBC actually still use a lot of these techniques to this day.
COCKNEY ACCENT: Oo's pinched my pooch?
This was episode number 5,000,
and to mark the occasion, we wanted to do something huge.
So the idea was, let's do an episode that's 5,000 minutes long.
And all 100% live.
But, um...that's when the problems began.
We got letters from various acting unions
claiming that working for 83 hours straight
was a - quote unquote -
"extreme violation of the artists' rights."
Then the medical board weighed in, and before long,
we were being hammered from all sides.
Amnesty International were organising vigils,
there were protests outside Television Centre.
We knew the jig was up.
So, instead, Mick had a birthday.
Ian Beale, Wet Nurse.
Ian Beale-zebub.
Ian Beale's Bonkers Bar Mitzvah.
Adam would have loved to do that one, actually.
Huh...
The Who Shot Phil? storyline was enormous.
Babies were being named after it,
new species.
It was a water-cooler moment
and what was in the water cooler? Phil's blood.
Was it Steve? Was it Dan? Was it Mark?
But we knew we'd come up with a culprit that nobody would expect.
This guy.
Back in 1989, Den Watts was shot at the canal,
and our idea was that the same bullet had just been
ricocheting around Albert Square ever since.
Until Phil unfortunately got in its way 13 years later.
Unfortunately, someone leaked it to the press,
so we had to change it to Lisa.
Because THAT makes sense.