With the latest admonishment from Ofcom still ringing in its ears, EastEnders has announced it plans to tackle the taboo subject of child sex abuse in a forthcoming storyline.
The plot will revolve around Bianca Jackson's 15-year-old stepdaughter Whitney and her jailbird dad who will arrive in Albert Square later this year.
The BBC1 soap's storyliners have already introduced the subject of child abuse in a series of episodes last year in which Phil Mitchell's son, Ben, was psychologically and physically abused by his father's unhinged fiancé.
But now they're taking things one step further by working with the NSPCC on a storyline about child sex abuse, a move that's bound to have Mediawatch UK and others sharpening their pencils.
EastEnders' history is littered with taboo-busting storylines. The show opened in 1985 with a dead body propped up in a chair and things just got more and more depressing from there. Kathy Beale was raped (or rather "waped" as husband Pete Beale pronounced it). Dirty Den slept with his friend's teenage daughter, which led neatly to a teen pregnancy storyline for Michelle Fowler. Mark Fowler, meanwhile, contracted HIV and his arch enemy Nick Cotton spiralled into drug addiction.
Phil Mitchell was a violent alcoholic. Mental illness featured in Arthur Fowler's descent into a nervous breakdown and of course the first gay British soap character, Colin Russell, moved into the Square in 1986.
More recently we've had surrogacy going badly awry, a spousal murder attempt using the "burial alive" method, leading to a ticking off from Ofcom, and a wave of gangland crime - cue more slapped wrists by the regulator.
Is this latest sexual abuse storyline a good thing to position in a pre-watershed soap opera, or should the EastEnders storyliners stick to a less controversial brand of misery?
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