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Brookside's first outing, on Channel 4's opening night, won 2.8 million
viewers, the fifth biggest audience of the evening. It was an inauspicious start
for the soap, commissioned from Grange Hill (BBC, 1978-2008) creator Phil
Redmond at a hefty £3.6 million for its first year. But Brookside would
ultimately become the channel's longest-running drama and one of its most
successful creations.
Redmond had bold ambitions: "I wanted to use the twice-weekly form to explore
social issues, and, hopefully, contribute to any social debate... From the
outset one of my main aims was to try and reflect Britain in the 1980s."
Brookside's dedication to such issues would eventually wane, but for much of the
'80s it successfully married rounded, believable characters to stories of real
social relevance.
Redmond's pursuit of a new soap realism led Brookside at the outset to allow
its characters to swear, until it became clear that this was alienating the very
working-class audiences whose 'real' lives the serial was professing to
represent. By July 1983 the regular audience had fallen to a dismal 500,000.
Redmond agreed to clean up the scripts, and audiences recovered steadily, and in
1985 the Brookside reached a decade peak of 7.5 million viewers.
Storylines in the serial's first decade tackled such themes as industrial
relations (through Bobby Grant's active trade unionism), delinquency (through
Damon Grant), unemployment (through the experiences of Damon, brother Barry and
their neighbour Billy Corkhill) and the aftershock of rape (Sheila Grant's
attack precipitated the breakdown of her marriage to Bobby). Other stories
explored sexual harrassment (through Billy's daughter, Tracy) and the tragic
love life of Heather Haversham, culminating in her marriage to the
heroin-addicted Nicholas.
This last storyline, and the extended 1985 armed siege that saw the death of
nurse Kate Moses, were early evidence of a tendency towards sensationalism that
would ultimately displace the realism. Indeed it was a perceived decline in
Brookside's political commitment at the end of the decade that led to the
departure of actor Ricky Tomlinson, closely followed by one of its most prolific
and effective writers, Jimmy McGovern.
It's worth remembering, though, that Brookside was addressing unemployment
and the decline of Liverpool's traditional industries nearly simultaneously with the critically
lauded Boys from the Black Stuff (BBC, 1982). Eastenders (BBC, 1985- ), which in
its early days was especially heavily 'issue-based', was commissioned by the BBC
as a direct response to the Liverpool soap.
Mark Duguid
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1. 'Not one to jangle' (Harry, Ralph and Julia) (1:25)
