arrives at Tony's house with the disturbing news that her new lover, Neville Agard (Gordon Case), had been beating both her and their daughter Cassie. Tony is furious and promptly confronts Neville, returning later with Hannah and Cassie's belongings and a cut lip. Tony and Hannah reunite and she and Cassie move in, however, Tony is confused when Hannah wants to live in the flat above Tony's instead of with him. Problems still persist, however, and Hannah regularly nags Tony and makes it clear to him that Walford is not good enough for her. Things reach a climax when Tony hits Mehmet Osman (Haluk Bilginer) the following year for making a pass at Hannah. Hannah is furious and cannot condone Tony's violent actions. Hannah subsequently decides that the marriage is over and she leaves Walford to live with her sister. Tony spends the rest of the year doing odd-jobs and driving a car for Ali Osman's (Nejdet Salih) cab firm. He gets himself into trouble when he buys some stolen silverware from Nick, who later tries to blackmail him. Tony tires of life in Walford and a few months later he departs Albert Square for Trinidad, leaving Kelvin in charge of his property. Character creation and development Tony Carpenter was one of the original twenty-three characters invented by the creators of EastEnders, Tony Holland and Julia Smith. Tony was originally intended to be named Alan, and his son Kelvin Carpenter was originally named Kevin. They were the first black characters to appear in the soap. Black and Asian characters were two ethnic minorities that had previously been under-represented in British soap before EastEnders aired. Holland and Smith knew that for the soap to succeed there needed to be a varied group of characters, so that several different sections of the audience had someone to identify with. Additionally, if the programme was to be realistic, it had to reflect the cross-section of society that actually existed in the real location. For these reasons, different sexes, ages, classes, religions and races were all included in the original character line-up. Both Holland and Smith had been at the forefront of the move towards 'integrated casting' in television and had encountered an array of ethnic diversities in the process. Even though the ethnic minority groups were deemed the hardest to research, Holland and Smith called upon their contacts to relay information about their origins