Twenty years on from the airing of its final episode, we look back at the daring show which changed soaps forever
WORDS: DOUGLAS MCPHERSON IMAGES: ALAMY, CHANNEL 4
Brookside was a new soap for a new channel and a new generation in a new era. Set in a brand new housing estate in Liverpool, it showed life as it was in the Britain of the early 1980s.
With its bright, bratty portrayal of social upheaval, it couldn’t have been more different to the cosy, established worlds of Crossroads and Coronation Street and paved the way for the grittiness of EastEnders, which followed three years later.
Even the synthesiser music of the theme tune perfectly evoked its time.
“I think we shocked people,” said Simon O’Brien, who played teenage tearaway Damon Grant. “I know we shocked people!”
Brookside was the brainchild of Phil Redmond, a long-haired young writer and producer who had created the equally groundbreaking school drama Grange Hill four years before.
While other soaps were filmed on studio sets, Brookside had an almost documentary look. It was filmed in real houses in a real close.
Given a £4 million budget, Redmond commissioned Broseley Homes to build 13 houses in Croxteth, Liverpool.
Six were used for filming, the rest for production facilities, canteen and admin. Everything happened on site.
To go with the realistic set, Redmond chose a cast of raw talents who came across as real people.
“When we went for auditions, he made us ad-lib about robbing a stereo out of a car and stuff like that,” Paul Usher, who played resident bad boy Barry Grant, said. “Whoever gave the best gab, he said come back next time.”
Trade unionist Bobby Grant was played by Ricky Tomlinson, a real-life union activist who had served a two-year prison sentence for organising flying pickets during a national strike in 1972.
The Grants were the first family to move into Brookside Close. Viewers were captivated by the tension between Bobby and his devout Roman Catholic wife Sheila, played by Sue Johnston.
Despite Bobby’s socialist views, they bought the biggest house, having lived previously on a rundown council estate.
The family’s upward mobility was contrasted with the falling fortunes of the upper class Collins family, forced to downsize into the close after Jim Collins was made redundant.
“We were immediately talking about class, talking about politics and the big divisions
