Asian Families In East Enders

The Ferreiras






In East Enders, The first Asian family to join the Albert Square was introduced in march 7Th 2003.

They were called the Ferreiras. They moved in into the house where Mark Fowler used to live before he quit the hit soap. The head of the family, Dan Ferreira, brings with him his three sons Ronnie, Ash and Adi and daughter Kareena.

All these characters will be known from their previous films and also some of these characters will be noticed by Bollywood fans as they have appeared in Bollywood before.








The Masoods







The second new Asian family for Eastenders The Masood where introduced on the 21st May, 2007.
Some of the main character in this family is actress Nina Wadia and newcomer Zahra Ahmadi. Ms Wadia will play tough-talking businesswoman Zainab Masood while Ms Ahmadi has been cast as her daughter Shabnam. They will be the first Asian family introduced to the BBC soap since the Ferreira family in March 2003 and axed four years ago in Spring 2005.


Zainab Masood has been cast as a strong-willed woman in her early 40s who owns a string of post offices. Her direct manner can be hugely intimidating and sparks will fly with Denise [Wicks]. Underneath her fierce manner, however, Zainab is great fun and has a wicked sense of humour."Nina Wadia briefly played a nurse in Eastenders in 1994. She said: "I'm thrilled to join the show and I can't wait for Zainab to come to the Square and cause some trouble.

The Eastenders source added: "Shabnam's definitely going to turn heads. She's 21, fresh from university and has no idea what she wants to do with her life. To keep her going, her mum gives her a job at the Post Office."Eastenders executive producer Diederick Santer said: "I'm enormously excited to welcome Nina Wadia to EastEnders. She's a brilliant comedy actress and I'm sure her character Zainab will showcase all her comic and dramatic talents."He added: "Newcomer Zahra is a real find. She's warm and great fun. I'm confident the Masoods will be a big hit with viewers."


From the time i used to watch east enders when i was young the Ferreiras were still around but i wasn't following the soap that much at that point until 2004/2005. I have to admit that the new Asian family have really s[iced up the action and i feel that our trailer will be good if we include an Asian family and me and the group have come to the decision that we will have an Asian family on our trailer i was really excited when i heard this because I'm really into Bollywood actors and i feel that they are great actors.




We have decided to choose Asian characters that have no link as in relation terms i fell bringing them together will be good to see how they react because Asian people are loving and friendly I'm sure while were filming we will not have many disagreements to what they want to do and what they cannot do. We all know that Asians are really strict with their religion but the characters we have included are British Asian but we also want them to wear the religious clothing just to add on the realism.




My aim with this post was just to show my research to my group members and to let them know that our plans we discussed sound good and our research can prove that if we work hard and stick to our plans we will end up with great results and i am really pleased for the fact that we have included an Asian family in our soup it shows that we are targeting a wider audience in terms of representation of Race and Possibly religions.

British Asian Families

Analysing The Hollyoaks "Asian Family"

The Roy Family Characters:

Ravi-Brain tumour

Laila-rebel and extremely great in creativity, even though her parents expect her achieve more higher.

Anita-anorexia, bullying, racism School girl that lives a life of hell

Mother & Father have left the show for now..

I decided to take a deeper insight into the British Asian families within soaps.

My main research was based on Hollyoaks as my group had decided the specific soaps we would focus on.

Due to many posts on the internet that Hollyoaks needed an Asian family, they finally hired Asian characters and presented each character in a way that helped people become more familiar with the behaviour, the culture and their reaction to the racist comments that they have in real life. This adds realism as it emphasises just now important bringing multi-cultural characters into the soap to enable more interest in the audiences.

Being able to bring an Asian family will help us get further insight into how we can encourage our Asian characters to bring in their cultural ethnicity and offer our audience a more realistic viewing on what problems would arise in their current lives and what other situations may happen that anyone else can relate to.


The next step we have to achieve is maintaing a specific atmosphere, to ensure that our Asian scene is as succesfful as our wedding scene, to do this we need to carefully select our props and background, perhaps persuade the characters to bring in traditional clothing to set the mood or we could discuss whether these characters are modern Asians, therefore wearing normal modern clothing such as jeans, like in the contemporary UK now, these little changes such as clothing, way of speech & actions will show the audience that this family is different to others, more vibrant in terms of their decisions and more free in the aspect of traditional morals, therefore can go out for longer, their outrageous storylines can represent the panic within Asian families and the day to day problems they face, for example the things that are looked down upon, such as divorce, pork consumption etc.

Hollyoaks demonstrated this through Anita, who drank and was introduced to drugs, following her ordeal with peer pressure and longing to blend in with a "perfect" in her world) society, she manages to spin out of control just to prove shes dangerous. We hope to introduce this panic phase and the abrupt connection within the family through out characters, the next plan is to choose our characters.