General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20269 min read

EastEnders: E20

EastEnders: E20 (often shortened to E20) is a British online soap opera spin-off from the BBC soap EastEnders, set in the same fictional location of Albert Square in the East End of London borough of Walford, and first transmitted on 8 January 2010 as part of the main show's 25th anniversary celebrations¹^•². It was aimed at a younger audience than the flagship program, written largely by writers in their late teens and early twenties, and distributed primarily online through the EastEnders website and BBC iPlayer before reaching television on the youth-oriented channel BBC Three³. The title comes from Walford's fictional London postcode district, E20¹.

Key fact	Detail
First transmission	8 January 2010, on the EastEnders website, ahead of EastEnders' 25th anniversary on 19 February 2010⁴^•²
Format	Short online episodes of roughly six to 12 minutes, three per week (Tuesday, Thursday, Friday)²^•⁵
Writers	Series 1 written by 13 London-based writers aged 17 to 22, recruited through a summer school⁴
Audience	2.1 million views within a month of launch; more than 3 million views for series 1 on the EastEnders website and iPlayer²^•⁶
TV broadcasts	Re-edited into half-hour omnibus episodes for BBC3; the TV debut drew just over 300,000 viewers on 23 April 2010⁶
Run	Three series between 2010 and 2011, 37 episodes listed by IMDb³^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Series 1 (2010)

Walford, east London, January 2010. Leon Small (Sam Attwater) turns up on the Square, a fast-talking teenage boxer who has just walked out of his father's house after another row. Zsa Zsa Carter (Emer Kenny) arrives around the same time, a sharp-tongued blonde with heavy eyeliner and nowhere to go. Fatboy (Ricky Norwood), a wiry would-be DJ in a flat cap, and Mercy Olubunmi (Bunmi Mojekwu), a churchgoing Nigerian teenager, complete the four. None of them has a stable home, and none of them wants to go back to the family they left.

So they break into an empty flat at 89b George Street and squat there. The flat becomes their headquarters, and the series runs on the collision between their big plans and their small resources. Leon wants a boxing career and takes training seriously, but his temper and his eye for the ladies keep derailing him, and he drifts into a fling with Stacey Slater from the main soap. Zsa Zsa wants independence and money and treats both with the same recklessness. Fatboy wants to be a DJ, spinning records, inventing personas, and talking himself into trouble. Mercy wants to keep her faith and her future intact, which is hard when her friends' schemes keep dragging her toward the edges of the law.

The squat is precarious. An adult could walk in at any moment and end the whole arrangement, so the four keep their home a secret while borrowing everything, from electricity to food, from the Square around them. Money, romance, and the secrets each of them carries about the family they fled all test the friendship. The series ends with the four still standing, bound together by the shared mess of their lives, and with the characters crossing over into EastEnders itself, where Fatboy and Mercy became regulars on the flagship show.⁸

The highlight of series 1 is Leon's boxing match, staged with startling commitment for a web series. Sam Attwater spent about two hours filming in the ring against a real stuntman he was actually allowed to hit, though not at full force, so that the fight would look real rather than choreographed.¹⁴ The sequence lands late in the series and pays off everything Leon has been chasing: the discipline he resents, the father he is fighting by proxy, and the image of himself as a winner. The physical cost shows on screen, and it remains the set piece people remember from E20's first run. Attwater described the whole series as "edgier with a freehand, urban feel" than the parent soap, and the fight is that aesthetic at full volume.¹⁴

Series 2 and 3 (2010 to 2011)

The success of the first run brought two more. Series 2, transmitted from September 2010, kept Fatboy as the connective figure and introduced a new cohort of young Walford arrivals, including Stevie, Asher, Naz, and Sol, with fresh writers from the same talent scheme writing their stories of housing trouble, ambition, and romance.¹⁵ Series 3 followed in 2011 with another rotation of characters, among them Faith, Ava, Donnie, and Richard, continuing the format of short, fast episodes that overlapped with storylines on the main show. Across all three series the pattern held: new teenagers arrive, the Square absorbs or spits them out, and the best of them graduate into EastEnders proper.

Characters

Leon Small (Sam Attwater) is the boxer with the bruised knuckles and the wounded pride, all swagger on the surface and anger underneath, desperate to be taken seriously as a fighter and as a man.

Zsa Zsa Carter (Emer Kenny) is the mouth of the group, quick with an insult and slow to admit she needs anyone, running from a family situation she refuses to explain.

Fatboy (Ricky Norwood) is the comic heart, a DJ-obsessed schemer with a nickname he treats like a brand, whose loyalty to his friends is the one thing he never plays for laughs.

Mercy Olubunmi (Bunmi Mojekwu) is the conscience, a devout Nigerian teenager whose faith and caution put her at odds with the squat's constant small crimes, and whose steadiness keeps the other three from burning out.

Origin and commissioning

The spin-off was commissioned by BBC Vision Multiplatform and announced in October 2009, to go live in January 2010 in the run-up to EastEnders' anniversary on 19 February 2010⁴. The idea came from executive producers Diederick Santer, who wanted a show in which regular EastEnders characters would appear in the background, and John Yorke, who wanted to improve the portrayal of teenagers in EastEnders and to bring younger writers into the program¹.

The BBC's stated aims were to develop new talent, including writers, actors, composers and remixers, to target a younger audience, and to drive more people onto the internet¹. Simon Nelson, then controller of portfolio and multiplatform at BBC Vision, described the project as an opportunity to match new young talent from the television industry with creative new media talent under the EastEnders brand⁴. The multiplatform commission came from executive Rosie Allimonos⁴.

Format and storytelling

Each series follows a small group of new teenage characters who arrive in Albert Square, each searching for an escape from their regular lives⁴. Series 1 centers on four teenagers: Zsa Zsa Carter (played by Emer Kenny), Leon Small (Sam Attwater), Fatboy (Ricky Norwood) and Mercy Olubunmi (Bunmi Mojekwu)¹. Series 2 introduces a new quartet, including brothers Asher Levi (Heshima Thompson) and Sol (Tosin Cole), Naz Mehmet (Emaa Hussen) and Stevie Dickinson (Amanda Fairbank-Hynes)¹. Series 3 follows a trio of new residents, Ava Bourne, Donnie Lester and Faith Olubunmi, learning to survive in Walford⁵.

The storylines were designed to stand alone, so that viewers unfamiliar with EastEnders could follow the drama, while regular fans were offered crossover treats connecting the spin-off to the main series⁴. The web shows also differ stylistically from the television program: the theme tune was remixed, with backing music, faster editing and more humor⁸. The writers produced extra online material, including video blogs and behind-the-scenes footage⁴.

Talent development

Writing for the series was deliberately opened to young people. Series one's scripts came from a group of 13 young London writers, ages 17 to 22, who developed and penned the online drama at a summer school they took part in.⁴ Among them, Emer Kenny was picked first as a writer and was then cast as the trouble-making Zsa Zsa, niece of the EastEnders character Shirley Carter⁸.

The spin-off fed directly into the main show: several of its young characters crossed over into EastEnders itself, and the spin-off is one part of a wider pattern in which EastEnders serves as a training ground for new talent in the UK television industry³. Ricky Norwood, who played Fatboy, went on to appear in the main series⁷.

Reception and platform history

E20 was one of the most high-profile British web TV series of its period. Within a month of its launch on 8 January 2010 it had drawn 2.1 million views across the EastEnders website and iPlayer, at which point it had reached the eleventh installment of its scheduled 13-part run². By late February, the twelve short episodes had attracted 2.8 million hits on the website and iPlayer, with behind-the-scenes clips and interviews pushing the total to 3.3 million views⁸. The first series ultimately drew more than 3 million views, and a second series was commissioned for web transmission in September 2010⁶.

The spin-off also reached television. The first series was re-edited into three 30-minute episodes for BBC3, and the TV debut on Friday 23 April 2010 attracted just over 300,000 viewers and a 1.4 percent audience share between 8.30pm and 9pm⁶. Series 3, which began on 20 September 2011, premiered episodes on the EastEnders website every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with a BBC Three omnibus on Friday evenings at 8.30pm⁹^•¹⁰. The series won a Webby Award⁹.

Scholarship on EastEnders places E20 within the BBC's wider digital development strategy, as the spin-off was screened on BBC Online via the EastEnders website and subsequently on the youth-oriented BBC3 channel and the digital-only iPlayer platform³.

The same name: the E20 set-renewal project

The name E20 also belongs to an unrelated BBC infrastructure program: the project to replace and enlarge the external EastEnders filming set, including a new Albert Square, and related core infrastructure at BBC Elstree Centre¹¹. The original set was built in 1984, planned for two years of use, and lasted 34 years while falling out of repair¹². Plans first developed in 2013 budgeted £59.7 million for completion in August 2018; after a 2015 scope change, the project was expected to finish in October 2020 at the same cost¹¹. By 2019, the projected cost had risen to £87 million, £27 million over budget, with completion set for May 2023, nearly five years later than originally planned, and the National Audit Office and the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee concluded the BBC would not deliver value for money on the program as originally envisaged¹³^•¹².

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Early English-language web series (1997–mid 2010s)

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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