Brookside Closed

First published in the The Anfield Wrap magazine, issue 5 - December 2013

It didn’t take long, really.

I mean, we’d heard all the talk that this was going to be a different kind of soap, that this was a bold departure from the comfortable insularity of Coronation Street or the creaking melodrama of Crossroads.  And we hoped it’d be a showcase for a Liverpool that was not usually shown in the media; a Liverpool that consisted of more than the dole and the riots and the crumbling, derelict buildings that told of a city left to rot.  In short, we wanted it to capture just a hint of our real essence, not just pander to time-worn caricatures.

Halfway through the first episode it was already obvious that, whatever we were getting, it wasn’t going be pretty.  As Barry Grant defends his errant younger brother from accusations of graffiti, on the grounds that “It couldn’t be our Damon – he spells ‘Bollocks’ with only one ‘L’”, you can almost hear the sound of tea-cups crashing to the floor across middle England.  Throw in a shamelessly glorious altercation between Damon and his endearingly gormless sidekicks which crowbars two ‘pissings’, one ‘piss off’ and a ‘dickhead’ into a 20 second exchange, and it was clear that Brookside was setting out its manifesto right from the start.

For the next two decades, it continually managed to defy expectations while too often failing to grasp just what those expectations were.  It moved from holding a mirror up on society’s injustices to feeding the same society’s craving for cheap, vicarious thrills and in the process it misplaced the very qualities that had marked it out as special.  When its end came, few cared.  And for a programme which set out to prove that soaps could, indeed should, be relevant, that was the biggest failure of all.

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It had all been so different in 1982 when Brookside first elbowed its way onto the nation’s television screens, the unpolished jewel in the infant Channel 4’s ambitious new schedule.  Different in all kinds of ways. 

It looked different.  These were real houses in a real West Derby estate.  There were no studio sets with their trembling walls and restricted camera angles.  When characters went upstairs we were able to follow them; when they went round to a neighbour’s house for a chat or a barney, we went with them.  There was no convenient central meeting point where the inhabitants could congregate and interact, no Rovers Return or Queen Vic.  This meant that storylines were largely self-contained, and wherever possible, the focus was on day-to-day living and what went on within families behind their own front doors.  A bit like real life.

It sounded different.  Of course, by the early 1980s there was nothing new about regional accents on television, even Scouse ones.  Since the heady days of The Beatles, a certain cachet, a kind of rough glamour even, had been attached to the Liverpool dialect, though, ‘Boys From The Black Stuff’ aside, this was very much within the context of what the establishment was prepared to endorse.  It’s fair to say that Cilla, Tarby and Tom O’Connor were perhaps not wholly representative of a city still trying to put out the fires of Toxteth.   But Brookie changed all that.  This was the sort of language we could recognise.  Lads called each other ‘dickhead’ and ‘divvy’ every day – why shouldn’t that be reflected in a programme apparently designed to show us as we were, warts, wedges and all?

Of course, a media outcry ensured that the rougher edges were soon smoothed down and dialogue more acceptable to an early evening audience was introduced.  Though it’s interesting to note that by the time of its demise Brookside had come full circle, then pushed on a bit further just for kicks, with widespread effing and jeffing and a return to the uncompromising verbals of its early days.  It wasn’t big and it wasn’t clever, but it was the last flicker of a flame many thought had long been extinguished.  And, it reminded you that, at its best, Brookie was never afraid to kick against the pricks.

This was most evident in the issues and themes that ran through the programme’s early years.  And in this, the difference between Brookside and its contemporaries was clearly defined. While Coronation Street could command viewing figures in the tens of millions, it had become for many an escape from everyday existence, not an echo of it.  Though solidly written and acted, it had moved away from its kitchen-sink origins to embrace a more absurdist, cartoon depiction of working class northern life.  Brookside creator, Phil Redmond, wanted his new soap to be the antithesis of that.  And to achieve this, he placed the emphasis on social realism and the inevitable fall-out when families have to deal with the weight of everyday living.

So we got politics.  Not just the odd murmur about the cost of a pint of milk. Real politics. Discussions, arguments about the issues that were genuinely affecting the people tuning in.  The despair of unemployment, the impact of redundancy, the emasculation of trade unions, the conflicts and consequences of industrial action, the alienation of the young, the black economy, the NHS, the impact of religion on personal relationships.   All played out against a backdrop of Thatcher’s ideological war on the north, its industries and its social values.  It may not sound like a recipe for prime-time success but for a while it made for compelling television.  And it showed that a soap could be gritty and serious and issues-led whilst maintaining the personal interactions and lighter touches that viewers had come to expect.  Over at the BBC someone was clearly taking notes, as within 3 years Eastenders was launched, eager to poke its head through the door Brookie had kicked open.

Of course, it would have been easy to dismiss Brookside’s approach as patronising and opportunistic, had it not been for the quality of its contributors and the artfulness and conviction with which they brought the storylines to life.  It became a breeding ground for a generation of writers and actors who went on to achieve great things and who are rightly acknowledged among the best in their field.  People like Jimmy McGovern, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Shaun Duggan and John Godber, all of whom cut their writing teeth on the Close.  People like Sue Johnston, Ricky Tomlinson, Amanda Burton and Anna Friel, whose skills were honed and whose careers were launched via Brookie’s suburban dramas.

While we’re at it, it also threw up some of the most intriguing, well-developed, perhaps morally ambiguous, characters yet to be seen on British television.  Of course there were the staples, the Grants (the anchor and heart of the programme for its initial years), the Jacksons, the Collins’s and the Corkhills.  But even on the periphery Brookside was a treasure-trove of charismatic wannabe gangsters and loveable oddballs, encapsulated by the formidable Tommy McArdle and personal favourite, Gizzmo Hawkins, a greasy teenage mix of Roy Cropper and Bobby Gillespie.  We will never see their like again.

Inevitably, it had its faults.  At times, it was guilty of portraying a questionable attitude towards female characters.  Perhaps reflecting the struggles of a society in transition, the Close’s women were frequently defined solely in terms of their relationships with men and, as such, largely excluded from any position of economic power.  Attempts to advance beyond the traditional confines of the kitchen resulted in their on-screen ‘punishment’, through any combination of rape (Sheila Grant), guilt-tripping (Patricia Farnham), domestic violence (Mandy Jordache), accusations of infidelity (Doreen Corkhill), murder (Sue Sullivan) or the eventual side-lining and departure of the character (Chrissy Rogers).  Though this also served to highlight the insecurities of the male protagonists, its main function was only to reinforce established gender stereotypes.  It represented a chance missed.

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For a programme that had blazed a trail in the 1980s, its decline and eventual demise were a symptom of both a changing political climate and a shift in the media landscape.  The introduction of the Brookside Parade, a development of shops, restaurants and bars, marked a geographical shift away from the Close and mirrored the growing national obsession with entrepreneurship.  It also marked the point at which Brookside abandoned its political and social roots and began the evolution towards increasingly outlandish, melodramatic plots.  As quickly became apparent, there’s a fine line between cutting-edge drama and gratuitous sensationalism.

Perhaps the battles of the 80s had all been fought and there was no more call for a programme documenting what were largely working class concerns, particularly when the working class was, to all intents and purposes, in retreat.  Thatcher had gone, to be replaced by John Major’s neutered, cardboard cut-out approximation of a Prime Minister.  The viciousness of Tory ideology had ostensibly softened (or rather, had gone into hibernation before brutal rebirth 20 years later), leaving in its wake a watered-down facsimile that inspired apathy rather than outright hostility.  In the eyes of the media, we were all middle class now.   And, so the premise ran, we wanted to be entertained, not preached at.

And, as the battle for viewers intensified, we got ever more ludicrous storylines.  Incest, the body under the patio, sieges, the lesbian kiss, Lindsey Corkhill the drug smuggler, religious cults, a killer virus, Lindsey Corkhill the gun-toting gangster, bombs, explosions, more sieges.  When Lindsey Corkhill (of course Lindsey Corkhill) got embroiled in a lesbian love triangle with her own mum, it was clear that Brookside hadn’t so much jumped the shark as parascended over Sea World and pissed in Flipper’s eye.  And when a police helicopter fell from the sky onto the Parade, it seemed as much an act of mercy as a desperate grab for ratings. 

So, after 21 years, it was yanked off our screens.  Oddly, in its death throes it managed to recapture at least some of the spirit that had once made it essential viewing.  In the final minutes of the final episode, with the darkness, and the credits, closing in for the last time, uber-scally Jimmy Corkhill held court in an armchair on the lawn like a Scouse Canute, raging, raging against the dying of the light.  In a scattergun polemic that could have been titled ‘Phil Redmond’s Last Stand’, Jimmy rails against all manner of power structures and cultural elites – television, newspapers, the ruling establishment, food distribution, drugs policy, religion.  Yes, it was self-pitying, self-serving and frankly all over the place ideologically, but it was also kind of thrilling.  It harked back to a time when Brookside wasn’t afraid to confront the political consensus head on and offered one of the few dissenting voices in the mainstream media. And it serves as a reminder that Russell Brand wasn’t the first drug-addled scruff to shine a torch on the failures and hypocrisies of the governing class.   Jimmy Corkhill was there ten years before him.  Face it, you never got that with Ian Beale.

But then Brookside always was a different kind of soap.  It might have moved away from its roots; it might have turned into the kind of programme it initially offered an alternative to; it might have ended up pulling its punches. 

But for a while, at least it knew who to punch.  And that’s no bad thing.