“In the scheme of headaches facing the BBC, an overspend on the EastEnders set is towards the bottom of the list,” says Chris Curtis, editor of industry bible Broadcast. “That doesn’t excuse it, and it is a lot of money, but with Sky paying circa £5 million for every Premier League game, it’s an overspend of four Burnley v Wolves games.
“An awful lot of people watch EastEnders, and in general UK soaps’ return on investment is remarkable in an era of soaring drama-budget inflation. The set will be used over and over again for years. As long as the BBC is committed to keeping it on air for the long term, it is still relatively cheap.”
Indeed, if you amortise that £87m across the 38-year lifespan of the previous set. that’s £2.2m per year. There are four episodes per week – with a possible fifth on the way – which means that, if you spread the cost of the set across roughly 200 episodes per year, it adds just £11,000 to the budget of an episode.
As an unfair comparison, the cost of hiring Matthew McFadyen to play Tom Wambsgans in Succession, on the other hand, was around £300,000 per episode – with a record-breaking (for Succession) 310,000 people watching the show’s season-three debut episode in 2021. Obviously, Succession isn’t funded by the licence fee, but it was lavished with reviewer praise by every broadsheet newspaper, including this one. Going by print circulation alone, that means five reviews per viewer.
“The problem soaps have is that MPs and journalists look down on them, but the audience still loves them,” explains Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. “Around 80 per cent of soap viewing is live, while for most drama that’s below 50 per cent. Soap storylines boost mainstream broadcasters’ PSB [public-service broadcasting] credentials. They can run a domestic-violence plot line – that’s usually the only broadsheet press they get – and put it in a naturalistic setting. If the BBC is about reaching as many people as possible to inform, educate and entertain, then EastEnders is a very cheap way to do that.”
