Following in the footsteps of a good many soap families before them, the EastEnders Miller family now look set to relocate to Norfolk. As another fictional family prepares to make the trek from Albert Square to Norfolk, KEIRON PIM asks why our part of the world seems such a favourite with soap writers.

It appears to be the equivalent in soap-land of Outer Mongolia. When the writers want to get rid of a character without actually killing them off, what's the next best thing to do?

Send them to Norfolk. After all, no one will ever come across them again there.

And that's the fate now facing the Miller family in EastEnders, after Rosie Miller found a housekeeping job advertised in a magazine.

She wants to make the move from the East End to East Anglia but her layabout partner Keith isn't so keen, and the prospect is dividing the family in two.

While Rosie wants to take the job, and her daughter Demi wants to make a new start following the death of her baby's father from a heroin overdose, the others - Micky, Dawn and Darren - join Keith in trying to dissuade them from making the move.

If the Millers end up taking the plunge and swapping the dubious delights of Walford for life as rural housekeepers, it won't be the first time soap opera characters have been exiled to our region.

The writers of Coronation Street and Emmerdale have both done so - last year, Sam Dingle left the latter show for a new life in Norfolk, and Coronation Street's Reg Holdsworth was posted just over the Suffolk border to Lowestoft's branch of Bettabuys.

EastEnders' previous Norfolk exiles include Kelvin Carpenter, who featured in the show's early years and left to study at UEA, and the Tavernier family, who left in the early 1990s.

So what is it about this part of the world that makes it such a favourite for relocating characters that have run their course?

Perhaps it's that Norfolk is considered far enough away to ensure that the characters are out of sight and out of mind, but near enough that the writers can work in the odd reference to ongoing characters having travelled to visit them.

Norfolk-based writer Lilie Ferrari, who worked on EastEnders in the 1980s and 90s, said there was no conspiracy to paint the county as a soap character graveyard - but the idea was a bit of a running joke in script meetings.

"Occasionally it would amuse people to say 'I know, let's send them to Norfolk', when they couldn't think what to do with a character, but I don't think it would be done on purpose," she said.

"The production team on EastEnders is such a movable feast, it changes all the time because it's a very high- pressure job, and so I don't think the people working on it now would be the same as then."

During her stint working on the show, Lilie introduced the di Marco family and worked in a plot that saw several characters travel to the Broads.

She also worked a Norfolk influence into hospital drama Casualty, writing an episode in which many characters' surnames were drawn from the Norwich City team of the time, such as Fleck, Polston and Akinbiyi.

She explained that for a scriptwriter it made far more sense to relocate characters than to kill them off altogether.

"I think that as a writer you kill people off at your peril because you can never know what the future holds. Once you've killed them off you can't bring them back - apart from Dirty Den, of course!", she said referring to EastEnders' Den Watts, who returned to the soap in September 2003 a decade after apparently having been shot dead. Two years later he was polished off, presumably for good, by his wife Chrissie with a blow to the head from a dog-shaped doorstop.

Lilie, who lives at Oulton Street, near Aylsham, added: "Killing characters off is rather an ungenerous thing to do for writers in the future, because it leaves them no one to come back to. I always think that's slightly mean because it closes off opportunities."

So although every soap has its moments of apocalypse now and again - most notoriously, Emmerdale's writers cleared out an array of stale characters by having a plane drop out of the sky on to the Yorkshire farming community - there will always be a fine tradition of putting characters on hold by introducing a sudden job opportunity elsewhere in the country.

And in the Millers' case, not for the first time, that involves moving to Norfolk from London, just as others have done from the equally action-packed communities of Weatherfield and Emmerdale.

If they do eventually make their minds up and pack their bags they would be swapping life in the East End for a relatively peaceful part of the world, low in crime and renowned for its natural beauty.

Perhaps that explains why so many have made the journey up here from grimy Albert Square, where murders are 10-a-penny and all family arguments have by law to be conducted at top volume in the local pub.

After all that, you can't blame them for wanting a bit of peace and quiet.