Would you Adam and Eve it? EastEnders is inspired by Sodom and Gomorrah, says producer Speaking to an audience of media executives and religious leaders yesterday, Miss Robins also likened the programme's tales of murder, sexual abuse and domestic violence to some of the great figures of western literature including Milton and Goethe. Addressing the BBC's "Re:Think: conference, organised by the team behind programmes such as Songs of Praise, she dismissed claims that the programme was tawdry, sensationalist or immoral. Citing examples of storylines involving paedophilia, a gay Muslim sham marriage and assisted suicide she said the programme was often close to a "morality play." She said the programme offered its viewers "hope" and "lessons in how to live" as well as helping make stories from the Bible "relevant" to a younger generation. "EastEnders slays all before it when it is moral to its core," she insisted. Like the parables it offers hope and a morality where the good are rewarded and the bad punished either by death, rapid exit or karmically bound forever on a wheel of fire. Despite the twists and turns of the plot lines all our conclusions are essentially moral: good triumphs, evils is punished and the value of human life is asserted. Claiming that the saga of Dirty Den and his first wife Angie was a version of the story of Faust she went on: "It is in these fundamental archetypes that the success of soaps lie. "The prototype of every EastEnders story can be traced back to one source: David and Goliath, Daniel in the Lions" Den, Samson and Delilah, Sodom and Gomorrah, the fall, all the Bible stories." Delving into one of the thorniest questions in the whole of theology, she added: "The sagas of Albert square are a saga of free will where the individuals chose to be either good or bad but all of them have knowledge of the serpent. The good are always rewarded, the bad are always punished and individuals are tested to find out which camp they belong to. And if sometimes Albert Square seems a brutal and arbitrary place I would argue no more so than Biblical Egypt, Israel or the Garden of Eden. But she conceded that the script writers had often struggled to incorporate Christian characters without making them seem "boring [and] Bible bashing," unlike followers of others religions. She insisted that the plot-lines were the result of intense research and consultation. But there was laughter when one member of the audience, Dr Robert Beckford, a theologian from Canterbury, asked her: "Where then does the storyline about the mad black murdering Christian fit within that consultative process and the wider Judeo-Christian discourse?" He was referring to Lucas Johnson, a black pastor who strangled his love rival in a car. "I've got to be honest that was before my time," she said. In our nearly 5,000 episodes over the last 27 there have been some howlers there is no escaping that.