The executive producer of TV soap EastEnders has revealed he scrapped the planned death of one of the soap's characters because the storyline lacked positivity

Dominic Treadwell-Collins was discussing the ratings grabbing trend of shocking soap deaths at the Edinburgh International Television Festival.

"You can get a ratings peak by killing off someone shockingly, but then in the long run, you're destroying a loved character but also you've got a responsibility," he explained.

"You're playing God in a way, and if you give these characters really dismal lives and then in the end they die in a really horrible way, it's a really bad message that actually you live this life and in the end you don't get any joy at all and you're just impaled on a spike or whatever it's going to be.

"That's not optimistic, that's not a positive message. We were going to kill someone, one of our characters, coming up and it was all set in stone and we suddenly sat down and went, 'That's horrible. Let's find another way of telling that story'."