Angus Kidman – anguskidman.show

When Den Watts tried to tell his wife Angie he wanted a divorce on Thursday 16 October 1986, EastEnders established a new tradition: the “two-hander”, an episode featuring just two characters. That’s become a recognised EastEnders format in the decades since.

With only 23 two-handers to date, the format accounts for just 0.3% of all episodes – but they do tend to be the ones you remember. The strategy was risky, as series creator and producer Julia Smith recalled in EastEnders: The Inside Story in 1987:

Den and Angie’s traumatic two-hander was a risky experiment. A thirty-minute episode with only two people in it had never been attempted in a soap before. Even with a tantalising story, and brilliant writing and acting, would the episode hold up? Press and public were in agreement that it did.

Wikipedia lists all the two-hander episodes, so I won’t repeat all those details here. But that list raises some questions: just how often does EastEnders do this? Is there any kind of pattern? Can we predict when the next one will happen? Let’s have a look.

The table below shows the original date of broadcast for every EastEnders two-hander, and how many days since the previous two-hander. (In the case of the very first one, I’ve counted the days since the show itself began.)

#	Characters	Date	Days
1	Den and Angie	Thursday 16 October 1986	604
2	Dot and Ethel	Thursday 2 July 1987	259
3	Sharon and Michelle	Tuesday 4 April 1989	642
4	Grant and Phil	Tuesday 15 November 1994	2051
5	Pat and Peggy	Tuesday 27 October 1998	1442
6	Roy and Frank	Thursday 29 October 1998	2
7	Matthew and Steve	Thursday 3 February 2000	462
8	Ricky and Phil	Thursday 20 April 2000	77
9	Kat and Zoe	Tuesday 2 October 2001	530
10	Sonia and Dot	Thursday 9 May 2002	219
11	Phil and Sharon	Thursday 5 September 2002	119
12	Little Mo and Trevor	Thursday 31 October 2002	56
13	Lisa and Phil	Thursday 27 March 2003	147
14	Den and Sharon	Tuesday 30 September 2003	187
15	Den and Dennis	Thursday 1 April 2004	184
16	Kat and Alfie	Tuesday 25 May 2004	54
17	Den and Dot	Thursday 26 August 2004	93
18	Martin and Sonia	Friday 5 January 2007	862
19	Max and Stacey	Friday 26 March 2010	1176
20	Sharon and Michelle	Thursday 12 January 2017	2484
21	Phil and Jay	Monday 21 August 2017	221
22	Linda and Stuart	Thursday 13 December 2018	479
23	Jay and Lola	Thursday 18 May 2023	1617

There’s no obvious pattern here. Clearly some producers like two-handers more than others. There’s a relative glut between 1998 and 2004. That period accounts for half the list.

Unsurprisingly, as EastEnders progressed from 2 episodes a week to 3 (in 1994) and then 4 (in 2001), changing production demands meant the format was used less often.

The only pairing to have happened more than once is Sharon and Michelle, but there’s an asterisk there as Michelle changed actresses in the meantime.

This year’s two-hander between Jay and Lola was the first in almost five years. Will we wait that long again until the next one? Quite possibly. The longest gap between two-handers is just under 7 years.

The average length of time between two-hander episodes is 608 days. If that broad pattern sticks, we won’t see another one until 2025 at the earliest.