Celebrating its 30th anniversary just last week, EastEnders went live in all of its episodes to celebrate and broke a number of records, seeing the highest viewing figures in over four years.

Credit: BBC

Credit: BBC

The BBC One soap went on to become the only programme this year to achieve 10 million viewers, and was watched by over 20 million people (35% of the British population) across the entire week.

Gripping the nation for ten months, the storyline surrounding Lucy Beale's killer came to a head and an average of 10.78 million tuned in on Thursday, February 19 at 7.30pm to discover just who ended her life.

Peaking at 11.9 million, the episode has become the most watched programme of the year so far, and things continued to soar for the soap with the flashback episode and fully-live edition on Friday achieving 10 million viewers each.

Based on overnights, the three highest rated episodes of television so far in 2015 are all EastEnders.

Social media records were also smashed as it became the most tweeted about UK drama in history, with over 1 million tweets sent out from the audience on Thursday as Kathy Beale shocked with her return, and we learned what happened on Good Friday.

The BBC EastEnders Twitter account had a global reach of over 43 million whilst Facebook went on to reach 36 million people.

BBC iPlayer saw a huge soar in requests for the show with 11.5 million people watching EastEnders related content on the service last week - 1 million of those made up of the flashback episode within 24 hours of it being broadcast - achieved only by three other programmes.

Executive Producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins commented: "We are all over the moon that we captured the nation's imagination with our Who Killed Lucy storyline and Kathy's surprise return. My dedicated cast and crew have put so much time and love into our 30th anniversary celebrations, knowing that we have created a little piece of television history is the perfect reward for all our hard work.

Controller BBC Drama Ben Stephenson added: "It is testament to the original vision of Tony Holland and Julia Smith, as well as our amazing editorial team lead by Dominic Treadwell-Collins that after 30 years EastEnders remains at its peak of creativity, ambition and modernity."


by for www.femalefirst.co.uk
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