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This week EastEnders turns 40, and it’s celebrating in true soap fashion with an hour-long special, old characters returning and a “whodunnit” conclusion.
But otherwise, the show’s producers are tearing up the rulebook. Normally fans can watch new episodes at 6am on BBC iPlayer before they’re aired that evening – a modern tactic used to diversify viewership – but not this week.
One reason is that viewers will decide the result of a love triangle plotline via the BBC website.
Voting closes at 7.10pm on Thursday, before actors perform the result in a live episode 20 minutes later.
The show usually films months in advance, so for future episodes the cast and crew have been duplicating scenes to cover both possibilities.
This isn’t the first experiment by EastEnders. Parts of last Thursday’s episode took place in 1985, so were preceded by a BBC ident not used in decades.
