EastEnders has featured storylines about exploited African migrants and racially motivated murders of immigrants after hiring campaigner Ade Lamuye in 2022. Similar influence operations have shaped sympathetic asylum-seeker characters in the other popular long running British soap Coronation Street. The milder public messaging about weather reports and soap storylines sits alongside far more radical demands. Some German climate groups have openly called for total deindustrialisation of their country within 15 years, treating economic self-destruction as a moral necessity. Packham's EastEnders pitch is the latest attempt to keep the emotional temperature high after the hard data has cooled.