text: 1980s broadcast history Press coverage of EastEnders, which was already intense, went into overdrive once the show was broadcast. With public interest so high, the media began investigating the private lives of the show's popular stars. Within days, a scandalous headline appeared – "EASTENDERS STAR IS A KILLER". This referred to Leslie Grantham, and his prison sentence for the murder of a taxi driver in an attempted robbery nearly 20 years earlier. This shocking tell-all style set the tone for relations between Albert Square and the press for the next 20 years.
  The show's first episode attracted some 17million viewers, and it continued to attract high viewing figures from then on. By Christmas 1985, the tabloids could not get enough of the soap. "Exclusives" about EastEnders storylines and the actors on the show became a staple of tabloid buyers' daily reading.
  In 1987, the show featured the first same-sex kiss on a British soap, when Colin Russell (Michael Cashman) kissed boyfriend Barry Clark (Gary Hailes) on the forehead. This was followed in January 1989, less than a year after legislation came into effect in the UK, prohibiting the "promotion of homosexuality" by local authorities, by the first on-the-mouth gay kiss in a British soap when Colin kissed a new character, Guido Smith (Nicholas Donovan), an episode that was watched by 17 million people.