EastEnders
"EastEnders" is often filmed on location, away from the studios in Borehamwood. Sometimes an entire quartet is filmed on location, which has a practical function and are the result of "EastEnders" making a "double bank", when an extra week's worth of episodes are recorded at the same time as the regular schedule, enabling the production of the programme to stop for a two-week break at Christmas. These episodes often air in late June or early July and again in late October or early November. The first time this happened was in December 1985 when Pauline (Wendy Richard) and Arthur Fowler (Bill Treacher) travelled to the Southend-on-Sea to find their son Mark, who had run away from home. In 1986, "EastEnders" filmed overseas for the first time, in Venice, and this was also the first time it was not filmed on videotape, as a union rule at the time prevented producers taking a video crew abroad and a film crew had to be used instead. In 2011, it was reported that eight per cent of the series is filmed on location.
BBC Elstree Centre
When ATV was restructured as Central Independent Television in 1982, one of the conditions of its licence renewal by the governing body of the ITV network, the Independent Broadcasting Authority, was that ATV should vacate any London-based facilities and become more focused on the Midlands, the region of the United Kingdom for which it held the ITV franchise. For the last 18 months of its use as an ITV production studio, they were under the ownership of Central Independent Television as ATV ceased to exist as a company at the end of 31 December 1981. The studios remained in operation by Central up until July 1983 (the final production under Central ownership being a Max Bygraves-era episode of "Family Fortunes"), when its new main production centre in Nottingham was completed. When the BBC bought the Elstree site in 1984 to produce its new soap opera "EastEnders" (first aired on 19 February 1985), it did not purchase the equipment within the building.