98 years old and STILL horrified by soap…

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I have never, I must confess, watched an entire episode of EastEnders, or indeed of any other soap opera but I have viewed them with scepticism since reading a paper in the December 20-27, 1997 issue of the British Medical Journal.

Entitled “Death rates of characters in soap operas on British television: is a government health warning required?” it was written by a team from the Department of Public Health and Epidemiology at King’s College Hospital, London and was based on an analysis of mortality rates in four British soap operas from 1985, when EastEnders first appeared, until the middle of 1997.

The researchers attempted, with a fair degree of success, to find the ages and dates of death of characters, as well as the ages at which they joined the list of characters in each soap, and their findings were startling, particularly in the case of EastEnders.

“Over a short interval of time, such as the duration of an episode,” they reported, “a character in EastEnders was nearly twice as likely to die as a similar character in Coronation Street.”

They also found that “people moving to Coronation Street between the ages of 30 and 44 went on to lead charmed lives, while their peers living in Albert Square dropped like flies.”

In fact, while 100 per cent of that age group joining Coronation Street were still alive after five years, the figure for EastEnders was 79 per cent.

A character in EastEnders was nearly twice as likely to die as a similar character in Coronation Street

King’s College Hospital report

As for the 45-and-over age-group, 86 per cent of Coronation Street characters survived five years compared with only 73 per cent on EastEnders.

Worst of all, when they compared the death rates of soap opera characters with certain professions traditionally seen as dangerous (adjusted for age at death and sex using logistic regression, of course), they found that EastEnders characters were the highest risk group, followed by Formula One drivers, Coronation Street characters, oil rig divers and bomb disposal experts, in that order.

Sadly, they had been unable to find sufficient data on the ages of characters in Brookside and Emmerdale, but since the number of deaths in those was even higher than in Coronation Street and EastEnders, they expressed a fear that “Brookside Close and Emmerdale could well be the most dangerous streets in the UK.”

More than 17 years have passed since that paper appeared but its lessons appear to have have been largely ignored.

Not only has the government issued no health warning, but the characters have not followed the advice of the researchers “to wear good protective clothing”.

Finally, my attention has been drawn to a survey on sales of characterlinked EastEnders merchandise on eBay.

Of the top ten most popular characters, only two are dead, which seems to me to show an appalling lack of humanity by investors.

They are clearly buying living characters’ merchandise in the hope that it will rise in value when the character dies. 

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