BAFTA Award winning scriptwriter Sarah Phelps, who wrote over 90 episodes of EastEnders, has discussed penning Barbara Windsor’s final episode as Peggy Mitchell.
Phelps joined the BBC soap in 2002, and continued contributing words until her departure in March 2016.
She’s also written A Very British Scandal, No Angels and Holby Blue, and is the latest guest on Lacey Turner’s new podcast We Started Here.
In each episode, Lacey, who has appeared as Stacey Slater since 2004, digs deep into the soap opera pasts of famous television and film icons, both on and off screen.
The series launched last week, with Kat Slater star Jessie Wallace as her first interviewee.
In tomorrow’s edition, Lacey discusses how she came to join the show – originally auditioning to be part of the Miller clan – as well as Jean Slater’s (Gillian Wright) bipolar storyline.
Speaking of her love for the genre, Sarah says: ‘Never mind what you can achieve at nine o’clock at night. Never mind what you can do with a massive budget. Never mind what you can do with the big names that you’ve had to spend a year working out their contract.
‘This is what you do on the ‘People’s Theatre’, which is how I think, how I feel about EastEnders.
‘This is what you can do. This is what you can achieve by trusting your audience, by trusting your cast, by trusting your writer.’
The topic of conversation soon moves to writing Barbara Windsor’s final episode, after 22 years as Peggy.
As viewers will remember, the matriarch revealed that her breast cancer had returned and chemotherapy wasn’t working.
She settled old feuds with her former neighbours, as well as reuniting with sons Phil (Steve McFadden) and Grant (Ross Kemp), before hallucinating her frenemy Pat Evans (Pam St Clement) who had died four years earlier.
After some reassurance from Pat that she wouldn’t leave her side, she took a lethal overdose of pills so that she could end her life with dignity.
‘I always think that if you’ve got one of those great matriarchs, you’ve got to give them an ending, you’ve got to give them an out, a proper out’ Sarah explained.
‘I didn’t want it to be all about masculinity. I wanted it to be about, not just Peggy Mitchell, but I wanted it to be about Barbara Windsor. And I wanted it to be almost a kind of sense that Peggy took herself apart and put herself back together again.
She continued: ‘Some people said to me, “Oh no”. I said, “I want Peggy to be seen without her ‘Peggy-ness’, without the hair, without the makeup, without the clothes” and they went, “Barbara won’t do that.” And I went, “You watch me!”
‘I adored her so much because in that most vulnerable of moments, she trusted us that we would do right by her. She trusted all the actors around her who had known her since day dot.
‘She trusted Pam, she trusted the director, and she really, really leant into that thing where she took it off and she was vulnerable and then she went back in and she put it back on and looked up at Pat and went, “Well” and she went, “Not bad for a bottle blonde”
‘But it was that line that I go for her which is “I will go as I have lived head high straight back like a queen” and I just was really I was really proud of that.
‘I think Barbara was outstanding and I thought Pam was outstanding and it was so moving and it was a proper a proper exit for a true soap Matriarch and a cultural icon.’
Barbara passed away in 2020, after living with Alzheimer’s disease for six years. She had chosen not to make the diagnosis public until after she filmed her final storyline.
The character returned three years ago – albeit with Jaime Winstone playing a younger version of her – and will appear again in coming weeks as part of Phil’s mental health decline.
