https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3iikB9MkNk hahaha nice shorts phil wtf......

Oh my God

This was class

Phil and Grant were great then.

Decent legs back then though come on

phil looked a right melt back then

Forgot about Ricky and his long hair! I almost miss these 'holiday' episodes they used to do

I can't even remember the last one they did..

How odd, i was thinking about these episodes just the other day. They should be shown to anybody that claims that EE is incapable of doing humour - they can (or at least could) as everything about that week was wonderfully crafted from the running joke of David's chat up phrase in Spanish which he gave to Steve actually meaning "My Wife is an Accountant", to the Mitchell's being the poster children for every bad cliche about the englishman abroad to the Whitehall Farce climax of Sam ending up in bed with her ex father in law's stepson whose secret daughter is dating her ex husband whilst her brothers who are staying at the same villa turn up.

EE really was at its peak around that time.

God, yes, that's a question.

Foreign filming wise i think it might have been The Spain/portugal one where poat and Frank reconciled and Irene stayed behind but that must be about 13 years ago? Then there was Frank's fake funeral episodes when they introduced Kim Medcalf.

There have been UK holidays since then like Southend a few years ago.

1995 was an epic Eastenders year. I'd love to rewatch the entire year in full. 1994 aswell.

1994 to 99 was the shows peak for me.

Ah yes, remember that! They always seemed to go to Spain or around that region I think the Mitchells and Ian went to Italy (?) chasing Cindy and the kids.. maybe it was France..

It's a shame we don't have these kind of episodes any more but I don't know what current crop of characters I would really want to watch in that setting

There are hardly any episodes on Dailymotion from 1995 aswell

It was Italy chasing the kids - 1998 I think.

They had two shoots in Paris, one in 93 when Kathy and Phil first got together, and Pat and Frank visited the pregnant Diane and another in 97 (I think, wasn't long after Tiff and Grant got together following courtney's birth) when Phil and Kathy broke up.

Originally the episodes introducing Archie were meant to be aborad but the budget got cut so they claimed it was weymouth although i don't think they actually filmed there. I don't remember there being anything which screamed Weymouth at me and it has fairly distinctive architecture and scenery.

It really was. 94-96 is probably my favourite era, except for the original 3 years.

But in some way the mid 90s were better as they'd honed their craft by then, as with any new show there were settling in problems and characters that didn't work at the beginning which are often overlooked with people focusing on Den and Angie.

I really can't think of anything that was wrong with 94-96. Even 'background' characters like Gita and Sanjay were okay and the primary ones like the Mitchell's, Jacksons, David, Ian, Cindy, tricky dicky were fantastic.

Re it always being Spain, i think it is probably just taking advantage of the cliche of that being the place that 'working class' common Londoners go (that is the cliche, not my opinion) going to basically behave exactly as they would at home with food and alcohol but with sun as well.

Plus, practically, mid 90s, they might still have had an infrastructure in place re crews and even locations to keep costs down because of Eldorado.

Thinking about it, the raymonds, Butchers, Evans one might have been southern France rather than Spain. I'm not sure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M8rt5Sfk2E