The Main Event: EastEnders' 25th Birthday

One minute, I'm congratulating myself on this panoply of pasty-faced whingeing having had no impact on my life over the past 25 years, the next I'm remembering the stuck-in-a-sweetshop thrill of visiting the Elstree set, trying, and failing, to chat up Mandy Salter at T in the Park – and then there are all the Albert Square legends I've interviewed: Wideboy Wicksy, Sinful Cindy, Grunting Grant and Mel Owen/Beale/Healy among the many. How could I forget them? Was I kidding myself that I've always moved in more sophisticated circles?

Maybe they slipped from my mind because soap actors are the biggest stars in the telly firmament in terms of the numbers who watch but, when you meet them, the least starry. They speak little of the craft of acting, deferring to their characters as if they were real people. Tabloids perpetuate sudsy myths and when I worked for one of the small, funny papers in a previous existence, the question "So are you anything like the bitch/slapper/drunk/murderess we see on screen?" was a must-ask.

Posher papers tend to be more interested in EastEnders' actors after they've quit the show and this is definitely when they're most interesting. Relief at having got out is written across faces which previously we knew for having only two settings: "Thatcher's underclass", and "Now fings just got a whole lot worse". They tell you they're "thrilled" by new challenges but, deep down, you know they're terrified.

Suddenly they're adrift. No more stress from the big, grinding Easties machine, but no more help from it either. I interviewed Ross Kemp after his departure and not even the security of a seven-figure contract with ITV could persuade him to stand down the press officer who, in soap manner, sat in on our chat, cautioned him against swearing and answered questions for him – even those relating to his childhood when presumably young Ross the apple-scrumper didn't have access to a publicity department's protection.

I've often told this story against Kemp, a telly thug back then, a Kray Twins manque. But since looking in on E20 again, it's been endearing me to the big, bald softie, all EastEnders actors and especially the current lot, knocking it out four times a week. And I'm really looking forward to seeing them go live.

Friday's first-ever live episode will commemorate the show's 25th anniversary. Eight possible endings have been rehearsed. The big revelation will be the identity of Archie's murderer, but the actor playing him or her won't be told until the night. Now that's acting!

Maybe this seat-of-the-pants stuff shouldn't faze the cast because they've been four-"eps"-a-week for a while. You don't imagine there's much time for rehearsing even their character's wistful contemplation of a cup of tea and a Custard Cream. There can be no interludes for stretching back in the director's chair and asking "What's my motivation?" and certainly no long days away from the set spent "in character", where you're eating/sleeping/filling in your tax return in a "method" way, just like De Niro. On EastEnders you must get told: "Here's your script, there's your mark – do it."

But, as I've said, these actors are mainly modest types, more anxious than most in a notoriously insecure profession, who can be uncomfortable with their fame and often don't know how good they are. Soap acting can be electric acting, gonzo acting, heroic acting. I just hope, after giving them the big build-up, that they don't freeze.

There's obviously something very Reithian about live drama on the goggle-box and in the crackly, black-and-white days, stagey actors were always tripping over cables and carrying on regardless. And EastEnders at its best over this quarter-century has been very Reithian, a show for the masses which doesn't talk down to people or shirk from the issues of the day. I can't promise I'll stay with it for 25 minutes longer than the 25th anniversary, but I do want to find out if Bianca remarries "Rickaaaaaaay!" The final image from the hen night – her paint-chipped big toe sticking out of a bed also containing the sixth-form stripper – was genius.

EastEnders' 25th anniversary episode, BBC1, Friday, 8pm

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, February 14, 2010.