EastEnders: Live

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the BBC's flagship soap EastEnders aired a special live episode last Friday. I tuned in, mainly because it's a novelty watching a drama air live (as many used to in "the olden days") and a fun technical/logistical nightmare for the cast/crew to contend with. Anyway, I thought they did a good job and it was fairly ambitious at times, not to mention brave in tackling an important climactic storyline in this manner. The embedded video above highlights all the errors, some of which I spotted and laughed at myself (actor Scott Maslen badly fluffing his lines, the cameraman spotting Jake Wood making himself retch, Charlie Clements' fingers moving when he was "dead"), but most of the mistakes weren't too bad.

But I have to say, the concept of filming something live may be enticing (a huge 16.6 million watched this episode) but it detracts too much from the episode itself. Maybe I'm in the minority here, because I just wasn't invested in the plot, but I spent the half-hour feeling very anxious about the actors and hoping nothing too embarassing would happen. So, it wasn't exactly enjoyable, more uncomfortable, and that "live feel" basically means there's a weird slackness to everything.