“Remember me?” asks George “Lofty” Holloway on his return to EastEnders. “No,” would be the honest answer for many viewers, given he was last glimpsed in 1988 leaving Walford with his tail, in its default position, between his legs.

Lofty, gamely reprised by Tom Watt, is a gangly, unlucky, hopeless character who dates back to the very earliest days of the show, a sort of soap sauropod if you will. It is nice to see him again, even if the circumstances, being Dr Harold Legg’s funeral, were rather sad. The same goes for that other returning refugee “Punk Mary”, as she was known (that being quite an anachronistic form of rebelliousness by the late 1980s, it must be added). Mary (Smith, played by Linda Davidson) got the hell out of Albert Square in 1988, in her case hopping on a Routemaster bus, infant in arms, sticking two punky drug-addled fingers up to the lot of them, and in particular to that interfering, moralising, chain-smoking busybody Dot Cotton (June Brown, then, now and forever).

I always think that if you don’t shed a tear at a funeral you can’t count yourself fully human, and I certainly feel a little weepy at this fictional one. Scriptwriter Rob Gittins skilfully extracts the maximum pathos out of long gone and quite knotty storylines. I do remember Lofty, as it happens, but have only a fuzzy recollection of just how much of a misery the EastEnders (BBC1) producers made his life – bringing up another bloke’s baby, his partner aborting his own natural child and, in the end, getting jilted at the altar by his unrequited love, Michelle Fowler.

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Twenty-first century Lofty is still very recognisably 1988 Lofty: well-natured but wet. His young, slightly bemused features are now so grizzled and lined he looks like a thin version of the late Sid James. We now learn he “owns 15 pubs”, which is supposed to make him very rich, and he leaves a cheque for £20,000 for the step child he’s not seen for decades. This wasn’t quite so convincing, given the high rate of pub closures and corporate failures. Maybe someone should have said about Lofty’s commercial success: “Despite Brexit…” And, by the way, why hasn’t the Queen Vic been turned into a gastropub or a block of “regeneration” flats by now?

The references to Lofty’s and Mary’s backstories, so unfamiliar to many, don’t feel too much like everyone is just reading pages off www.walfordweb.com (“The online home for EastEnders discussion since 1997”). Thus, Mary and Dot (now Branning) are able to reminisce in a surprisingly jolly vein about the days when Dot threatened to shop Mary for being on the game, and helpfully arranged for Walford Borough Council social services to take her daughter into care. Ridiculous, but somehow it works.

The most touching story is that of Dr Legg and his late wife Judith. When the ceremonials for his Jewish funeral are getting underway they push his casket past the empty lot where the Leggs’s house once stood, where Judith was killed by wartime bombing. We witness the Jewish volunteers arriving for the washing and cleansing, the prayers at the synagogue, the coffin draped in the Star of David. We hear all about how the good doctor had “fought against hate” all of his life, as Sonia Fowler/Jackson (Natalie Cassidy) tells the congregation in a lovely tribute delivered on behalf of Dot. We see Masood Ahmed (Nitin Ganatra) offering a small Islamic prayer, and the whole square closing their curtains in respect, as tradition (and Dot) demands. Deliberately or not, it has an added poignancy, given today’s controversies about antisemitism.