The King and Queen pose with Eastenders’s cast and crew, 2022

Comments made by Reform’s Sarah Pochin last week have ignited a debate about the depictions of ethnicity in British media, especially advertising. Despite the outrage, Pochin’s remarks are backed up by statistics that suggest the ethnic balance on British TV commercials does not reflect reality.

In other ways, depictions of British life on television seem quaintly outdated. None more so than soap operas, where neighbourhoods often retain the demographics of the eras in which the programmes were first aired. In no case is this more patently absurd than that of BBC One’s Eastenders, which first aired in 1985.

The show’s fictional setting of Walford is supposed to be on the District and Hammersmith & City lines of the London Underground, putting it somewhere around the real life station of Bromley-by-Bow, in Newham. The current character list of the show is around 60 per cent white, many of whom are members of traditional cockney families who have inhabited Albert Square since the programme’s inception. The second-largest ethnic group represented in the show are Afro-Caribbeans who make up between a fifth and a quarter of the characters. There are a handful of Asians, mainly middle class Indians and Pakistanis.

In reality, even by 2011 Bromley-by-Bow was 45 per cent Bangladeshi, with 20 per cent white British. There are very few black people living there, and while some of the white British are leftovers from the old EastEnd population, many of them will likely be young graduate professionals in flat-shares. Many of the other whites are more likely to be from eastern Europe than the East End. If the BBC really wanted to do a soap about the historic inhabitants of that part of London, they would be better off setting it in Essex.

Surprisingly, ITV’s Coronation Street remains relatively accurate in its overwhelmingly white cast list, given that its fictional location of Weatherfield is supposed to stand in for Salford in Greater Manchester, which still has a white population of around 80 per cent.

ITV’s other prominent soap opera, which began life as Emmerdale Farm in 1972, is self-consciously set in an area where life continued at a more traditional pace, far less disturbed by social changes that were going on in the rest of the country. This was part of the charm that attracted viewers to the show, and to some extent explains the divergence between kitchen sink dramas and commercial advertising in the way they approach ethnicity in modern Britain.

Some suggest that advertising is so disproportionate in its depiction of ethnic minorities because all advertisers want to appeal to people of different races, and so each individual advert will try to show people of different races. There is some truth to this, but it doesn’t explain the overwhelming depiction of black people compared to South Asians, or the skew in terms of the gender split in mixed white/black couples compared with reality.

Advertisers are attempting to broaden their appeal, but they are also trying to seem modern, novel and exciting. Due to the strange way that the avant-garde in Britain use Afro Caribbeans as a kind of counter-cultural emblem, this means more of them in places you wouldn’t expect to see them, and it also means white guys with black girlfriends, as well as elderly mixed race couples. Neither of which are particularly common in reality.

Soap operas on the other hand appear to be watched these days by an older cohort from working or lower-middle class backgrounds. This audience values continuity and familiarity, and enjoys the depiction of typical-seeming people facing typical-seeming troubles, well cast and well scripted. This is in contrast to the self-consciously “gritty” depictions of working class life aimed at a better heeled audience, beloved of BBC 2 and Radio 4 in the late 20th century.

To put it bluntly, the sort of people who put their feet up with a cup of tea to watch EastEnders on a weeknight aren’t going to sit there watching a realistic portrayal of a Bangladeshi family working through their issues. There wouldn’t be enough cultural rapport between viewer and character for it to be meaningful – and if you were really to do it accurately, you’d probably need subtitles. In either case, I lean toward the answer that what you see in adverts and on the TV is more to do with perceptions of audience taste than it is to do with politics, even if neither of them do a particularly good job at representing the reality of modern Britain.