Tony Holland

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tony Holland (born in London, England) is a television writer. He is most famously credited as a writer and co-creator of the BBC soap opera EastEnders.

His career in television began on the popular police drama, Z-Cars as a writer and script editor. It was here that he met producer and director, Julia Smith and started a long and successful working relationship.

Tony and Julia became an established producer/script-editor team during their time on Z-Cars and went on to work for the BBC's hospital drama, Angels.

It was during their time on Angels that the format of the programme was expanded from weekly hour-long episodes to a bi-weekly half-hour serial, with the further possibility of the show being aired all year round. And in 1983 the BBC approached Tony and Julia to produce a new experience for their channel, a bi-weekly soap-opera that would rival efforts from the long established ITV favourites, Coronation Street, Crossroads and Emmerdale Farm. The BBC wanted this new serial to reflect "London, today!" and together, Julia and Tony came up with the idea of a programme set in a Victorian Square within the East End of London, focusing on its close working-class families and eccentric Cockney inhabitants. Thus, EastEnders was born.

Tony and Julia wanted a primary focus of EastEnders to be a large extended family, representative of the type most typically found in the East End of London. Tony was from a large London family himself, and in creating some of the show's characters he was able to use some of his own experiences as inspiration for EastEnders central clan the Beales and the Fowlers. In creating the stories and characters, Tony delved into family stories, past and present. His aunt Lou Beale came to inspire the Eastenders character of the same name, along with her two children Peter (Pete) and Pauline. Tony also used some of his experiences as a bar-man in London's pubs and clubs to create the dynamic pairing of Landlord and Landlady Den and Angie Watts.

Tony worked on EastEnders for four years, initially as script-editor and going on to script many episodes himself. Thanks to the genius of its two creators, and their inate ability to understand the workings of popular British drama, the show experienced huge success. But after only four years, Tony and Julia decided to call it a day, leaving EastEnders together in 1989. In 1991, they were famously tempted back to the 'world of Soap' by the BBC to produce Eldorado, loosely based around the lives of Ex-pats in Spain. Their new show was launched in July 1992, but plagued by a string on and off-screen problems, it received little of Eastenders immense success, and was subsequently axed a year later, in July 1993.

Since the failure of Eldorado and the death of his working-partner Julia Smith in 1997, Tony has all but disappeared from the writing-credits of popular British drama, contributing mainly to television-serials overseas.

In 2002, he was awarded with a Special Achievement Award from the British Soap Awards, and in 2004 he appeared on the Channel 4 documentary How Soaps Changed The World.

 v  d  e EastEnders
Characters

Ian Beale | Dot Branning | Pat Evans | Phil Mitchell | Peggy Mitchell | Lucy Beale | Peter Beale | Ben Mitchell | Jim Branning | Billy Mitchell | Charlie Slater | Garry Hobbs | Mo Harris | Patrick Trueman | Minty Peterson | Gus Smith | Mickey Miller | Bobby Beale | Yolande Trueman | Jane Collins | Darren Miller | Keith Miller | Stacey Slater | Jean Slater | Naomi Julien | Dawn Swann | Honey Mitchell | Deano Wicks | Bradley Branning | Kevin Wicks | Carly Wicks | Bert Atkinson | Chelsea Fox | Denise Fox | Libby Fox | Rob Minter | Max Branning | Tanya Branning | Abi Branning | Lauren Branning | Sean Slater | Janet Mitchell | Stella Crawford | May Wright | Preeti Choraria | Li Chong | Shirley Carter | Jay Brown
Past characters | Pets | Families

Crew members

Julia Smith | Tony Holland | Matthew Robinson | John Yorke | Louise Berridge | Kathleen Hutchison | Kate Harwood | Diederick Santer | Simon May

Locations

Residences | Buildings | Albert Square | Walford | London E20 | Walford East tube station | The Queen Victoria | Scarlet

Storylines

1980s | 1990s | 2000s | Christmas | Off-set storylines | Two-handers | The Firm | The Banned | Sharongate | Who Shot Phil? | Shannis | Get Johnny Week
Births, marriages and deaths

Spin-offs

Television spin-offs | Dimensions in Time | EastEnders Revealed | A Question of EastEnders | EastEnders Xtra
Merchandise | Books | "Anyone Can Fall in Love" | "Every Loser Wins" | "Something Outa Nothing"

Further information

History | In popular culture | Theme tune

Portal
Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.