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Berridge's personal interview (2010)

Spoiler:

Louise Berridge was Executive Producer of EastEnders for two and half years from 2002 until she quit in September 2004. In this exclusive interview with Walford Web, Ellie recently caught up with Louise to discuss life after EastEnders, her first novel and to reflect on her time with the show.

It’s been over six years since we last heard from you, what have you been up to since?

Real life mainly – though it took me a year to stop dreaming about EastEnders! I did stay in television a while, working in nice, quiet drama development, but in 2006 I decided to leave it entirely to concentrate on my own writing. It was a huge gamble, turning my back on job security for the sake of something I didn’t know I’d ever make a penny at, and I’ve been very, very lucky that it’s paid off. My first novel, ‘Honour and the Sword’, comes out with Penguin in April, and I’ve just completed the second in the series.

It’s an interesting move from reading scripts everyday to writing your own novel, how did it come about?

It’s not as different as it sounds – it’s all still storytelling. I think television drama’s one of the best backgrounds for writing a commercial novel, particularly a show like EastEnders. You learn the importance of pace and narrative drive, and how to leave a cliffhanger to make the reader turn a page. I also have multiple narrators in my novel, which means I can still use the techniques of the cutting room, skipping between different POVs to move the story onward.

It’s still a tricky transition. I missed the size and scope of EastEnders, which is probably why I ended up writing an epic – and a series at that. In a soap you’re constantly looking at the characters for unexpected potential – like Minty, for example, who was originally a very minor sidekicks of Phil’s before we saw Cliff’s potential and started to develop him properly.

You can’t do that in a novel without it spiralling completely out of control. My first draft had about forty significant characters and was over 600,000 words long, which is utterly unpublishable. It’s now less than a third of that, and considerably better for it.

Selling it, of course, was going to be harder. Having worked in television doesn’t give you any shortcuts in publishing, and I had to submit through the slushpile like everyone else. My best chance was to make the book as good as it could possibly be, so when I’d edited it to death myself I sent it to a literary consultancy for an outside critique. To my amazement they liked it so much they offered to pass it on to an agent. The agent liked it, took me on – and promptly got me a publishing deal. I still can’t quite believe it.

Was it always your plan to write your own novel one day?

No, I never thought I could. I’ve always written stories, but when you’re working alongside writers as talented as Tony Jordan, Simon Ashdown and Sarah Phelps it’s hard to take your own scribbling seriously. I didn’t even set out to write a novel this time – I just had a story to get out of my system and no-one else to tell it for me.

What’s your first novel about?/What can we expect from it?

It’s a historical novel set in 17th century France during the time of the Three Musketeers, but it’s not about gentlemanly duelling, it’s about the brutal reality of the Thirty Years War. My hero is a young nobleman trained in the tradition of honour and the sword, but when his family is killed in the Spanish invasion of Picardy he has to live among ordinary peasants in order to survive. The question is whether the nobleman will learn humanity and whether the peasants will pick up the sword. Together, will they do the unthinkable and fight back?

It’s very much an action adventure, of course, but ultimately it’s about those characters and their relationships, a number of which continue into the following books.

Do you still watch EastEnders? What do you think of it? What did you think of the live episode/25th anniversary?

I don’t have much time for television these days, but yes, I do watch it when I can, and think it’s currently very strong. I love the Masoods in particular, but also enjoy Ronnie and Roxy and have a definite weakness for Jack Branning.

The live episode was simply brilliant. It was an incredibly brave thing to do, and a superb achievement by the crew as well as the cast. Live television is much harder than live theatre, because the camera’s that much closer – and because 17 million people will see you get it wrong. It was also the perfect way to celebrate the anniversary, combining old and new elements, like putting the historic Ricky and Bianca pairing at the centre while making classic EastEnders twists and revelations with newer characters. I was so glad Stacey was the killer. I’d actually guessed Ronnie, but Stacey was a far more satisfying solution.

You were Executive Producer for 2 and half years which was a long time, looking back at it now over six years later, how do you view this period of the show? Any personal highlights?

Mine was a pretty torrid time on the show for all kinds of reasons. Staff hadn’t yet been significantly increased from the days of three episodes, and neither had cast or writers, so I remember it chiefly as a time of everyone being totally exhausted and just clawing their way through the crises to get the show on screen at all. The original story-stockpile from more leisurely times had already run out, so we were trying to crank up a cold engine from the start. It was also the time of the record number of cast crises – major illnesses, unexpected pregnancies, accidents, tabloid scandals, the lot. I had to write so many apologetic letters to cast and crew about radical rewrites it became a joke that I never sent them anything that didn’t begin with the word ‘Sorry’.

What saddens me is how much of this showed on screen. We had stories that stopped and started again to deal with an actor’s unexpected absence – like the Little Mo/Billy abortion strand. We had stories that suddenly had to swerve in a completely different direction from the one planned – like the Zoe/Anthony story suddenly turning into Kat/Anthony instead. The worst, however, was the Ferreiras. They had a terrific story in which one of them murdered their control-freak father and they all stuck together to hide the death – but then Dalip Tahil was removed without notice because of problems with his work permit. Without the central character, the others were stranded on screen for weeks playing an interminable story about a transplant.

It’s hard to forget those things looking back now, but of course there were personal highlights. Introducing Shane Richie as Alfie Moon has to be one of them, and I’m thrilled to see he and Jessie are both returning to the show. It was a refreshing change to be able to score big ratings successes with stories that weren’t miserable, and the Kat/Alfie wedding is pretty unique as a Christmas episode with a happy ending. I’m definitely proud of bringing in Nigel Harmon as Dennis Rickman and putting him together with Sharon, who’s one of my favourite characters of all time. I also thoroughly enjoyed developing Janine from a sad case into a SuperBitch. It was a pity Charlie Brooks had to leave when she did, but those are still the things an EP will always be proudest of – the ones that sow seeds for those who come after you. Bringing in Jane and Chrissie was part of that too, but the one I’m probably proudest of was introducing Lacey Turner as Stacey. She didn’t work out for an audition for the Millers, but in a rare moment of inspiration I suggested to Tony Jordan she could make another Slater...

Did you have any reservations over resurrecting arguably the series biggest character in Dirty Den?

A great many. Mal Young’s original idea was to bring him back in a one-off EastEnders ‘Bubble’, but I felt it wouldn’t be right to have something that significant outside the main show because it impacted on so many of our regular characters. I was also terrified of a ‘Bobby in the shower’ moment, so before we went ahead we trawled through the archives and watched all the old episodes to make sure we wouldn’t be going against anything that had actually been shown, or that couldn’t have been faked. In fact there was evidence the other way. A great deal was made in the show of Den’s ring turning up – but if you watch the episode of the shooting you’ll see he isn’t even wearing it at the time of his supposed death. So how did it get in the canal?

I was still nervous about it, and it was a huge relief it worked so well at the time, drawing us 16 million viewers. It also did what I wanted, which was to help bring Sharon right back where she belonged, at the very heart of the show.

Now, however, I do have some regrets about it. The subsequent scandal damaged not only the actor, but also the character – and permanently. There is a world of difference between being ‘lean, mean and dangerous’ and being a ‘dirty old man’, and if I hadn’t brought Den back the legend would still be untarnished. I can’t not regret that.

What is your perception of the negative press that surrounded the show at that time?

For the most part I think it was perfectly reasonable. There were things wrong with the show, and it’s the media’s job to say so. It was also fair to blame me personally for a lot of it, because whatever crises we were dealing with I think I should have been able to cope with them better. I certainly should have insisted on more staff and somehow found more writers to keep us afloat. Yes, the personal attacks were hurtful, but I could understand the passion the subject evoked. EastEnders belongs to its viewers, not its producers, and when you care about a show you don’t want to see someone not looking after it properly.

Some of the criticisms were unfair, of course, but that happens when blame centres on a single individual. I’m getting very used to being accused of axing characters who weren’t even there, or who left of their own accord, or who were introduced specifically for a short time frame. I’ve even been accused of axing a character who hasn’t gone – there was one fascinating piece about my evil plan to axe Pat only being prevented by my bosses putting their foot down!

But even that was to some extent our own fault. The Press Office at that time used automatically to attribute every pronouncement on the show to me – whether I’d said it or not. This created an assumption that the Executive Producer was responsible for every decision made on EastEnders, which was obviously not so. When I left it was agreed to use a formula like ‘EastEnders bosses’ in the future, to prevent that kind of personalization happening again.

Were there any storylining decisions that you are particularly proud of? Are there any that you felt could have been stronger in hindsight?

The one I’m personally proudest of was Jamie’s death because that was specifically my own. I loved the Jamie/Sonia dynamic, and felt the giving of Ethel’s ring gave them a kind of special status as a couple, rooted right back in the history of the show. When I couldn’t persuade Jack Ryder to stay, I had to find a way of ‘paying off’ that history properly and give them the story the moving ending it deserved. We got 16 million viewers for the episode of the accident, and even more for the death on Christmas Day.

There are many I feel could have been stronger if we hadn’t lost actors in the middle of them, but I also made mistakes of my own. The Ferreiras may have been scuppered by the removal of Dalip, but I think the damage was already done because I brought them in too early. There was enormous outside pressure to introduce this family, but I could and should have resisted it. We didn’t have proper story arcs for them, they weren’t properly thought through and developed, we simply weren’t ready – and it was the poor actors who suffered.

I also regret going with having Little Mo raped a second time. I accepted it because the story wasn’t meant to be so much about the rape as the abortion question, but if we were going to do it at all I should have ensured we did it whole-heartedly and played it right through. Someone who’s been raped twice is going through something very specific in terms of their own self-worth, and we didn’t really deal with that.

You started your reign as Executive Producer by axing several long standing cast members. Are there any characters that you regret including in that cull?

The two long-standing characters I cut in my first year were Mark Fowler and Roy Evans.

I was very sad to lose Mark, if only because Todd Carty is possibly the nicest actor I know, but the writers had come to the end of the road with him. There’d been an attempt to give Mark a darker side in the story with Nick Cotton the previous year, but it never sat very easily with other aspects of his character. We also had to deal responsibly with the HIV issue, as there was some concern people were beginning to think HIV wasn’t dangerous any more because of the health and longevity of Mark Fowler.

Roy, in retrospect, I do regret. He was in a similar position to Mark in that his personality didn’t generate story material, but in his case he was also beginning to stifle Pat. John Yorke and I share a great passion for the old, wild dangerous Pat who wore the white mac and looked as if she chewed up broken bottles for breakfast, but the Pat we had now had become too safe and comfortable. She’d had her affair story with Frank – and since he was and is the love of her life, if she didn’t leave for Frank she wasn’t going to do it for anyone else. To galvanise Pat we had to lose Roy.

But I wish now we’d found some other way. Roy had a stability about him that we needed, and losing both him and Mark within a year left us a kind of moral hole in the centre of the show. Those older ‘good’ characters have a role that extends far beyond the immediate gratification of story – as Lou Beale did in the past.

Robbie Jackson was also written out in my first year, but that wasn’t my decision. If it had been up to me I’d like to have kept him – not just for his own sake but also for Sonia’s, as the sole surviving Jackson. EastEnders works best as a ‘clan’ show, and isolated characters are in danger of fading to the fringes when they’re not involved in a specifically big story.

Do you still keep in touch with any of the cast and crew?

With some of the writers and office staff certainly, but very little with the cast now, as we all have such hectic schedules. Sadly, the actor I used to meet up with most often was Wendy, who was always a staunch and loyal friend.

I still have contact with the show, as my husband sometimes works there as a freelance sound supervisor, which is lovely.

There’s a new EP taking over at EastEnders, what advice would you offer him?

The show works so differently now I doubt I could offer much that’s relevant. The set-up is much better structured and staffed, and John Yorke is there for support when it’s needed.

The best advice I could give him would be to talk to Diederick. I love what he’s done with the show and hope to see it continuing.

Do you have any ambitions to return to working in Television?

No, never. I miss the social contact and did enjoy the programme-making, but there’s something very satisfying about working on your own material and being able to see it through to the end. It’s also wonderful to have the time to really tell a story properly, without being affected by outside events.

When and where will your new book be on sale?

The hardback comes out on April 15th and should be available in all good bookstores as well as online.

Thanks for taking the time to chat with us, Louise!

HONOUR AND THE SWORD by A L Berridge is published on 15th April by Michael Joseph, £12.99 hardback