EastEnders in popular culture special episode of "A Question of Sport", "A Question of EastEnders", was screened in 2000 to mark the show's fifteenth anniversary. A sketch in a 1995 episode of "A Bit Of Fry And Laurie" is set in the Fowlers' kitchen, with Fry, Laurie, Imelda Staunton and Clive Mantle parodying the speech and mannerisms of the characters of Pauline Fowler and Pete Beale. The dramatic drums at the end of every episode were parodied by "SMTV Live" in a "Friends" spoof entitled "Chums". The name "EastEnders" is spoofed in a series of pornographic films called "RearEnders", which also spoof the "EastEnders"
Pauline Fowler the show for nearly twenty-two years. The character of Pauline was a cornerstone of "EastEnders"; the lynchpin of the Fowler/Beale family around whom the soap was originally structured. At the beginning of the serial in 1985, Pauline was a 40-year-old married mother with two teenage children, Mark and Michelle, and another child on the way. The fictional history of her younger years has been told via behind-the-scenes books such as "EastEnders: The Inside Story", and the second tie-in novel by Hugh Miller, "Swings and Roundabouts", which explains that Pauline was born and raised at 45 Albert Square, where she lived