Media: She's mad, bad and dangerous. And we can't stop watching her

The soap wars are hotting up, and the BBC is using its biggest gun - Cindy Beale from EastEnders - in an all-out assault on the covers of TV magazines. Glenda Cooper reports

Her photograph stares out from cover after cover on the news-stand. She is looking through the fringe of her blonde cropped hair, her eyes sometimes cast down, sometimes challenging. She looks beautiful.

"She can put as much as 40,000 copies on a magazine if she is on the cover," says one awed magazine editor. No the blonde is not the late Princess of Wales but the Queen of Soap, Michelle Collins, better known as Cindy Beale of EastEnders: "Walford's wicked woman" as the Radio Times dubs her, "Sinful, sensational Cindy" (Woman's Own) " [She] makes Cruella de Vil look like a saint (What's on TV).

For those with shorter memories, Cindy Beale left EastEnders last year after she had an affair with her brother-in-law David Wicks, hired a hitman to bump off her husband Ian, and when that failed, snatched two of her three children and fled to Paris. Just an ordinary few months in soapland.

The viewers love her. Cindy fulfils the great soap queen potential - she is the supreme bitch (see actions above) but has also been sinned against as well as sinning (let down by David Wicks, separated from her daughter Lucy by Ian). On top of that she is blonde, photogenic, has a fleeting resemblance to Princess Diana and is willing to pose in pictures dressed in leopardskin accompanied by large dogs. She is a soap's dream come true.

The BBC are celebrating her return to Albert Square this week with five episodes, as rival soap Brookside also goes nightly for a week. And, in a great triumph for the corporation, and for Michelle Collins herself, she has made the front cover of Woman's Own, What's On TV, TV Times and TV Quick. She also makes a small appearance on the cover of Inside Soap: that she does not dominate the cover is "only because of pure logistics," explains the editor Jonathan Bowman.

"We come out every fortnight. We came out the week previously, so we couldn't have Cindy as the cover, although if we could we would," says Mr Bowman. "But we did get the story before everyone else; it wasn't a case of bucking the trend. Often the same stories are on the covers of these type of magazines. People go for the big story of the week."

Similarly, Liz Vercoe, assistant editor of Radio Times, explains why Cindy narrowly missed out making the front cover of the magazine: "In this case, the launch of a major new classic drama series (Tom Jones) happened to clash with EastEnders. We took the editorial decision to feature the new series on the cover but had a stunning shot of Michelle in our `Everybody's Talking About...' slot"

"She is immensely popular," says Lori Miles, editor of TV Quick. "We had her on the cover practically every other week at one stage. She is very strong. She is really our number one girl.

"It's great to have her back because she is so evil and she's looking so good at the same time. She's perfect."

Cindy on the cover of all the magazines is something that you would not have seen three years ago. It is the result of furious soap wars and of the BBC taking the initiative.

"What used to happen in the old days," says Ms Miles, "is that Coronation Street and EastEnders would allow you to have a cover but you had to book it ages in advance. It was like `You can have this and you can have this and TV Times can have that' and it was like having to stand in a queue."

She says, however, that EastEnders, in their quest for ratings, decided to relax the system and allow more than one magazine to have the story. "They reaped the benefit of it. Of course magazines didn't have exclusives now but it meant that everyone just did it."

The BBC also aided them by hiring good photographers who then shot the character in many different ways, sending out a slightly different pose to the different picture desks. The magazines like this because it saves them from having to hire a photographer and set up a shoot themselves.

For a character like Cindy, "we used to put on sales of between 20,000 and 40,000, which was terrific," says Ms Miles. "It was particularly good when she was having the affair with David Wicks because - I think it was an editor of one of the women's magazines who said this - David Wicks was the Princess Diana of women's weeklies. Put him on the front and it was fantastic."

She warned, however, that such things went in cycles. "Neighbours is still up there in the ratings but no one would do a Neighbours cover now - it's completely out of fashion. As for Cindy, I hope she can still do it. It's only the first week but I think she'll be OK."