ASK anyone who watches Britain鈥檚 top soap opera, EastEnders, and they鈥檒l have heard this line many times before. At times of high drama, more than half of all Britons tune into the series. So what exactly is so gripping about it?
To a visiting anthropologist from Mars the answer is obvious. This is a Primal TV. That obsession with finding and keeping a partner, the infidelity, deceit, children with the wrong fathers, the everyday nightmare of trying to earn (or steal) a living, plus anxiety, jealousy, even murder 鈥� the goings-on in Albert Square all tap into the primitive instincts of our species. Indeed, it may go deeper. The antics that keep EastEnders viewers coming back for more are the same ones that animal behaviour experts find among our evolutionary cousins.
Some critics see the show as depraved. 鈥淲e are all tainted by this sick soap,鈥� The Mail on Sunday declared last year. But whether the moralisers like it or not, real life is not only like this, it is sometimes even more sordid. Our own survey of 18 years of EastEnders reveals that the series actually underplays many of our vices, compared with figures from British social surveys.
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Of the main behaviours we studied, murder and rape are the exceptions. There is more of both in 鈥渢he square鈥� than in real life, though the figures for rape are questionable because the crime is known to be seriously under-reported. Averaged over 18 years, a massive 0.22 per cent of the cast are murdered every year compared with 0.0016 per cent of the population of England and Wales. When it comes to rape, it would take only a little less under-reporting in real life for EastEnders to match reality.
But other behaviours that keep viewers gripped appear to be even more common in real life than in EastEnders. This applies in particular to relationships between men, women and their children. And here it is easiest to see our evolutionary past coming back to haunt us. One glance at our bodies and our primate cousins will warn the Martian anthropologist to expect some pretty bad behaviour.
Humans, for example, exhibit a degree of sexual dimorphism: men are 13 per cent taller and have 50 per cent greater muscle mass than women. This is nothing like as impressive as a harem-forming male gorilla, which is 70 per cent larger than a typical female, but such dimorphism is typical for a species in which the males want to ensure their females do not stray.
Then take testicle size: when compared with body size, humans are better endowed than gorillas, though not as large as chimpanzees. And larger testicles mean more sperm. This makes sense because chimps are highly promiscuous, while gorillas are not. Humans fall in between. Producing lots of sperm seems to be important for a species in which females have lots of partners, and the sperm from one male has to compete with that of others.
So men have evolved to keep their women on a leash and to compete sexually with other males when the fancy takes them. And as a strategy for passing on their genes, it makes sense for men to spread their seed widely. Are these tendencies reflected in EastEnders? Oh yes!
Ian Beale recently exposed the one-night stand between his wife, Laura, and Garry Hobbs, who had cheated on his own wife Lynne. Garry鈥檚 feeble excuse was that he was drunk, but his behaviour is actually not that surprising.
The real shock is that the incidence of infidelity is lower in the soap than in real life. In the square, 2 per cent of women a year cheat on their partner and 1.7 per cent of men. Yet, in real life in a single year, 14.6 per cent of British men aged between 16 and 44 and 9 per cent of women in the same age range admit to two-timing, according to Anne Johnson of University College London, one of the lead researchers behind the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles.
Aficionados of EastEnders will find this analysis hard to accept, based on the past year鈥檚 events. But the past 12 months were atypical: to put it bluntly, there has been an awful lot of extracurricular shagging going on. The ratio between the sexes looks more real because more men strayed than women, but the absolute figures are incredibly high: 39 per cent of men with partners and 35 per cent of women were unfaithful at some point. What was the Queen Vic putting in its beer?
In evolutionary terms, Garry鈥檚 desire for multiple partners might be easy to explain, but what about the Laura鈥檚 infidelity? Actually, there are good reasons for females to take several partners. Sleeping around in search of better genes for her offspring, for example. Or forming a larger network of allies. At least among our primate relatives, females seem to mate with several partners to confuse the issue of paternity and encourage 鈥渕ultiple fathers鈥� who can come up with more resources than one alone.
Unfortunately for her, Laura slipped up. Being married to Ian and finding herself pregnant, she told him that they were expecting a baby. But Laura didn鈥檛 know that Ian had had a vasectomy, so he did what any primate would do when faced with the mother of someone else鈥檚 child and disowned her.
Yet such certainty is rare. Earlier, Ian had married his first wife, Cindy, believing her to be pregnant with his child, only to discover later that the boy was Simon Wicks鈥檚. Cases where a father has been deceived and brought up a child, only later to discover that it was not his own, are rare in the square compared with Britain as a whole. Nationally, the generally accepted figure for deceived fathers is 10 per cent of all births. DNA testing could well see the figure surge. Maybe the square鈥檚 handsome doctor, Anthony Trueman, should start offering the tests as a lucrative sideline鈥�
The scriptwriters make no claims to mirror life statistically. And as our research showed, some behaviours are even underplayed. Does that mean we have not evolved as far as we might hope? As any of Phil Mitchell鈥檚 girlfriends could have said: 鈥淕et off me, you鈥檙e nothing but a great ape!鈥�
