EastEnders is television we can Adam and Eve in

It won seven awards, including a lifetime achievement award for Barbara Windsor, who plays Peggy Mitchell, the demented dwarf-landlady with big hair.

At the Queen Vic pub they will celebrate, probably by exposing who shagged whose sister-in-law, and tossing fit women under the wheels of taxis. There will be no knees-up, although there will be knees in the groin.

Because EastEnders is London on crack - harder, darker and more frightening than the real city. But they are miserable together.

They are a community of misery, like a nicotine-stained kibbutz with bad make-up. It holds a filthy mirror up, and we watch it in our millions, sucking ready meals.

Because EastEnders is the cosmic opposite of Hollywood, and its antidote. It is the Real Life and Times of Ordinary Woman - it is really about disappointed women, and in the city that doesn't do self-reflection, our soap heroines do it for us.

The EastEnders men are habitually lost, but they feel like ciphers. I don't believe in Ian Beale - no one does - but I believe in Dot Branning (nee Cotton), the woman who is part survivor, part cigarette, and Pat Butcher, the woman who was a prostitute for 10 minutes in 1968 and has spent the past 40 years talking about it. 

Dot doesn't belong in a Madonna video, and she knows it - she belongs in the launderette, smoking and forgotten. 

In many ways Dot is actually a dot, but in EastEnders she goes primetime - she gets whole episodes to herself, where she can expound about dull female misery for 27 minutes, uninterrupted. Take that, Charlie's Angels - you're in the real world now. 

Dot's fellow matriarch is Pat. I feel I know Pat better than I know myself. I have her soul; I have seen her knickers.

When she finally rejected Frank Butcher, her one true love - catchphrase "'triffic" - in a self-hating apocalypse of pain, she ran into The Square, screaming, "Fraaaaaaaaannnnk!"

It was the climax of many years of disappointed love, and I wept for Pat, while wondering why she didn't just call him on her mobile, to say that she had changed her mind.

But there are no happy endings in EastEnders. That is its metier, and its genius. Everyone is broken; sometimes they think they are not broken enough, and so they have to pretend to have brain tumours.

Peggy Mitchell lived with breast cancer, and survived; her recovery didn't dent her obsession with her hair. I recently tried to estimate how many hours Peggy has spent in the hairdressers since she was born in 1309.

I came up with 2,356,703 hours - and that is a conservative estimate. The soap gong should have been a great, golden hairdryer.

EastEnders is, for me, a far better soap than Coronation Street. Coronation Street is too witty and too whimsical. It's really a comedy, full of Butlins' rejects smiling through their tears and hotpots that never arrive.

Mike Baldwin dying in archrival Ken Barlow's arms? I don't believe a word of it. But EastEnders, with its brittle, brilliant heroines is one of the few authentic shows left on primetime television.

EastEnders is our Samuel Beckett now. We are not Waiting For Godot, not now, not any more. We are waiting for Peggy.