Monthly column on the arts

Brookside, Channel 4's 20-year-old flagship Liverpool TV soap opera, is on its way out. It's official. The programme, previously screened on weeknights in prime time slots, has had dwindling audiences for some time now. It has been moved to a Saturday omnibus edition - broadcasting shorthand for 'We're taking this programme off air very soon'. When the news broke, Asda staff on Merseyside donned Scouse wigs and moustaches and launched a petition to persuade Channel 4 to change its mind.

Brookside (Brookie, to its fans) had become tough viewing, even for a Merseyside exile like me. I stopped watching a while back, when one storyline had become so plain nasty that I decided I couldn't stand it any more. Brookie disappeared from my life just as Neighbours and others did before it. But in its day, it was formidable television, with gritty narratives that made little concession to entertainment. Coronation Street offered Manchester-suburbia through rose-tinted spectacles, Dallas provided Hollywood glamour and sun-tanned stars, Neighbours was just one long beach barbecue, but Brookie gave you verisimilitude.

The first episode was broadcast in November 1982 on Channel 4's opening night. Audiences were 8 million ten years ago - nothing like Dallas figures, but very high for Channel 4 - but had shrunk to 1.5 million by the time the axe fell. 1982 was the year of the groundbreaking Boys From the Blackstuff. TV was then thought to be losing its cutting edge, but Alan Bleasdale, like Willy Russell, gave an authentic voice to the disregarded, the unemployed, the poor. Brookie's private housing estate in a fictional Liverpool suburb, Manor Park, added a further dimension, as different social strata rubbed shoulders with each other every week. And over the years a procession of the weak, the poor, the disadvantaged, the criminal and many more appeared in the episodes. The actors ranged from the bad (Michael J. Jackson's Ollie Simpson was frankly terrible) to the very fine. Some, like Sue Johnstone, Anna Friel and John McArdle - went on to bigger things. One child actor, Raymond Quinn, is currently winning awards for his portrayal of the bullied school child Anthony Murray.

Strong storylines

Brookie thrived on strong storylines. The big 20th-anniversary story - a siege followed by a dramatic helicopter crash, planned long before the news of closure broke - was so strong that many thought it a last-ditch attempt to claw ratings back. In fact, the soap's creator Phil Redmond has said that it was an ironic reference partly to the siege story in the soap's fifth anniversary year, and partly to a sensational story in Emmerdale.

Strong storylines in the past 20 years have covered abortion, murder, marriage break-up, romance between social strata, the shooting of an unarmed burglar, the killing of a husband by his bullied and persecuted family (including a daughter he'd sexually abused), the burial of the body under the patio, numerous sagas of the criminal underground, drug wars, protection rackets, at least two rapes - it's a very long list and much more than your average private housing estate experiences. Perhaps nitty-gritty realism forces you to ever-increasing trauma, especially when sampled in half-hour doses.

Brookie appeared often in the watchdog Independent Television Commission's complaints rulings, usually because of material that had gone out before the 9 o'clock watershed. The most notorious example was Anna Friel's lesbian kiss, but even last July, knuckles were rapped over an unduly intimate bedroom scene.

Integrity

But there was often considerable integrity. Brookie pioneered the very extended story line, such as the traumas of the Jordache family, the bullying of Anthony Murray and the long aftermath of Nikki Shadwick's rape. Such stories had time sensitively to portray the long-term effects of trauma, the sense of sin coming home to roost, if you like.

Brookie can claim to have launched intelligent discussions on many topics: bullying, for example, about which there must have been numerous conversations after recent episodes. How far can you go in retaliation? How far is too far? How far can a parent go to protect his or her child? These are ethical issues that got a good airing on Brookie and among its viewers. There are not many places in modern secular Britain where ordinary people can do ethics. Brookie has been one of them.

Distortion

As Christians we will dislike Brookie's grotesque distortions of the church and its members, of Christianity and much more. Brookie did us no favours in that respect. But soap operas have always been excellent vehicles for starting the conversations that the church would dearly like to see started - on abortion, on the family, on faithfulness and much more. We can be grateful for Brookie's substantial contribution there.

And perhaps, if we appreciate good acting, some extremely strong, well-told plot lines and a fair proportion of excellent storytelling, we might want to shed a tear for a soap opera that never set out to please Christians, but often found itself fighting alongside us, if not on our turf.

To the Great Omnibus in the sky

Strong storylines

Integrity

Distortion

David Porter

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