An EastEnders gay bar? I am worried

EastEnders is planning to install a gay bar on Albert Square, and I’m worried. Am I worried because executive producer Kate Oates has described the gay bar as “a super-cool precinct where gay and straight characters can all just hang out”, which seems to operate on the false assumption that EastEnders is actually a lower-rung 1990s sitcom about peppy New Yorkers? Yes.

Am I worried because the revenue potential for an EastEnders gay bar is extraordinarily low, given that there only tends to be one same-sex couple on the show every six or seven years, and their love is always full of torment and anguish, which doesn’t automatically lend itself to happy-hour fun times? Yes.

But mainly I’m worried because the EastEnders gay bar is a deliberate attempt to reflect what life is actually like in modern-day London. In one sense this is admirable, because real-life London is much more vibrant and diverse than the London of EastEnders. But on the other hand, this is instant death.

Because EastEnders is a fairy tale, isn’t it? It’s the story of the solitary part of London that’s still primarily populated by poor white people. It’s the story of people who don’t want to move away even though a) selling their homes would easily fund a comfortable early retirement in literally any other part of the country, and b) all their neighbours are drunks and murderers and they’ve all watched most of their family die a maximum of 10 feet from where they sleep.

EastEnders is an illusion that resides in an alternate reality, and I’m worried that this attempt to reconcile it to the real world will destroy it. Because where does it stop? First there’s a gay bar, but then what? Will the street market get binned off in favour of a vegan farmers’ market? Will all the railway arches suddenly start to house artisan gin distilleries? Will most of the square get demolished so that an objectively evil property developer can construct a luxury high-rise full of £20m apartments doomed to for ever sit empty because nobody can afford them.

It’s a slippery slope. I’m worried that, if this happens, the Queen Vic will be leased to an anonymous pubco conglomerate that robs the pub of its character and slashes its profit margins to an unsustainable level, then transforms it to a nebulous co-working space designed to allow yammering privately-educated laptops named Tristram to sit in vintage armchairs and bray about the reclaimed trombone startups they’re all launching now that their trust funds have matured.

And then Albert Square will be full of twentysomethings who don’t have proper jobs and spend their days tweeting furiously about online spending diaries that are deliberately published just to provoke that reaction, and then Ian Beale will buy a microscooter, and then all will be lost.

My point is this: you wouldn’t watch a version of EastEnders that accurately reflects modern-day London, because modern-day London is basically intolerable. It’d be a matter of seconds before you picked up your television and smashed it against your toilet.

So leave EastEnders alone. It’s a faux-Dickensian fairy story that only exists thanks to an exhausting collective suspension of disbelief, and anything that chips away at that – a gay bar, more than one black family living there at a time, serviceable public transportation links, Pret, Netflix, an efficient police force capable of arresting any of the three dozen murderers who remain on the loose in Albert Square, running water, basic human happiness – will ultimately bring about its end. You have been warned.