up a mobile disco with Ian Beale (Adam Woodyatt), purchasing the equipment from a petty criminal named Darren Roberts (Gary McDonald). However, the equipment turns out to be borrowed via Hire Purchase, and when the repayments are not made, the finance company repossesses it all. When Barry is evicted from his flat, he decides to take a job as a DJ on a cruise liner in July 1988. Colin is saddened to see him leave. Barry returns briefly in February 1989 on the day that Colin leaves Walford. Colin departs saying a particularly heartfelt goodbye to Barry. More than thirty years later, Barry returns in December 2022 for Dot Cotton’s wake. It is revealed that he has reunited with Colin after the death of Colin's husband Eddie Tsang (Kevin Shen). Creation and development Barry was one half of Walford's first homosexual couple. His boyfriend, Colin, had already been introduced to the show several months prior to Barry's arrival and he had proven to be an extremely popular addition to the cast. Both the audience and the residents of Walford had been kept in the dark about the fact that Colin was gay. This changed upon Barry's first scene on-screen, whereby the audience learnt that he had spent the night with Colin after picking him up the night before (off-screen) at a gay club. Colin and Barry were two of the most controversial characters of their time — mainly because gay-orientated content was still relatively rare on prime time television during the mid-1980s. Gay characters that existed were usually farcical camp parodies, created purely for comic relief, such as Mr. Humphries in the situation comedy, Are You Being Served?. Although EastEnders was not the first UK, televised soap to include a gay character — Channel 4's Brookside had that distinction — the portrayal of an openly gay male — let alone a homosexual relationship — on a prime time, pre-watershed BBC programme was unheard of before Colin and Barry's introduction.<ref name="20years">{{cite book |last= Smith|first= Rupert|title= EastEnders: 20 years in Albert Square |year=2005|publisher=BBC books|isbn=978-0-563-52269-0|title-link= EastEnders spin-offs#Non-fiction books}}</ref> The licence-funded BBC held a far greater audience share than the commercially-funded Channel 4, thus public reaction to EastEnders' gay characters was much stronger and more widely documented in the British press. Colin was a middle-classed, well-meaning, slightly uptight yuppie, so the makers of EastEnders decided that his partner needed to be in stark contrast