EastEnders actor Jacqueline Jossa has responded to the bizarre knickers moment from the 40th anniversary live episode.

In the episode, Natalie Cassidy’s Sonia Fowler gave birth in the wreckage of the Queen Vic, aided by Patsy Palmer’s Bianca Jackson and Jossa’s Lauren Branning.

In one moment, Bianca took off Sonia’s knickers and threw them at Lauren behind her. Before she put them aside, it looked like Lauren took a sniff of them.

A TikTok video questioning why Lauren supposedly smelt her cousin’s underwear has been doing numbers, currently standing at 20,000 Likes and 14,000 Shares. It was in the comments of the video where Jossa explained what actually went down.

“Just to clarify, I didn’t sniff them. I was checking what they were and lifting them in shot. No sniffing,” she wrote.

In another comment, she said that when the actor had done the scene before, the knickers “usually hit me in the face” so she wanted to make sure they were visible to viewers.

Since this didn’t happen in rehearsal, this might count as a live episode mistake. Over the weekend, Martin Fowler actor James Bye admitted to making his own slip-up in the broadcast, and that Stacey Slater actor Lacey Turner managed to save him.

Sadly, he didn’t say exactly what the gaffe was, but teased that Turner probably will spill the beans about it at some point.