Close ENCOUNTERS

In the Summer of 1981, Phil Redmond hand-wrote the final draft of a short outline, summarising the kind of soap opera that he would like to watch himself. His ideas for this show had been bubbling away inside his head for almost a decade. It would be set in a middle class housing estate in his native Liverpool. It would be authentic, gritty, uncompromising, funny, daring and as free as possible from the props and splints of conventional television serials. Most of all, it would be grounded in reality. It would, in other words, be Brookside.

Today, that original outline is tucked away on a computer disc somewhere in Redmond’s office on Abbey Road, while the series to which it gave birth is fast approaching its thirteenth year and still ranks as the most consistently popular programme on Channel 4. From time to time, Redmond likes to click into the old framework document, just to see how well the practice has lived up to the theory.

“It’s stayed pretty faithful to its original concept,” he says proudly. “The outline was quite brief but there was a lot in it. Almost everything we needed was there. It’s funny, the original setting was the Close plus a row of shops but we couldn’t afford that scale in 1982. When we went three nights per week, I got out the document again and was reminded about the shops, so we built them then, and they turned out to be just what we needed at the time. It’s always worth going back to your original inspiration when you’re looking for new ideas.”

Before we go any further, I have to admit that I’m a fan. I don’t want to come across like Billy No-Mates here but on Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights, I don’t go out, at least until after 9pm. Brookside is that kind of show. Once you’re hooked, you’re hooked for life.

In recent years, Phil Redmond has stepped back a little from the day-to-day production of Brookside but, as Executive Producer, he still retains a guiding hand on the reins. The Brookside production schedule is remorseless. The show is filmed six weeks in advance. Three episodes are shot at a time, each batch overseen by one of seven directors who continually leap-frog each other. The team of writers (currently numbering ten) work independently and are commissioned, depending on their level of experience, to write single episodes, pairs or triples.

“Ideally, we like to have a writer doing one full week’s output as a single block,” insists Redmond. “It’s a complicated logistic show because it’s shot like film. It makes it easier if one writer is there trying to juggle around with each week’s limited resources or locations or whatever.”

Such is the depth of fervent devotion among followers of Brookie that a whole administration department has been set up to process the deluge of letters, comments and queries they receive each week. The soap’s undoubted appeal among the younger generation, and especially, it seems, among young people in rock bands, poses particular problems.

“The offices are stacked out with cassettes and CDs and t-shirts,” Redmond reveals. “Bands constantly send this stuff into us in the hope that one of the characters will refer to them or wear their t-shirt in the series. There’s a procedure that they just go back in the envelope and we say, ‘We’re very sorry but we can’t do this’. It probably all started with The Farm.

“We had a special relationship with The Farm because, at the very beginning in 1982, they were just a young garage band. We put them in one day because one of the actresses was into them and we thought it would be good for the character. Over the years, we’ve had a good relationship with them. One of the guys from The Farm, Roy Butler, is actually a writer with us now. He’s doing okay too.”

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Twice a year, Phil Redmond chairs long-term planning meetings with producer Mal Young and the team of series’ writers. At these pow-wows, Redmond unveils his ideas for new characters and storylines and discusses the issues that he would like to see the show tackling during future months.

After a meeting on March 25th, 1992, he wrote a two-page outline about a family called the Jordaches. “I remember the date because I was just looking at it again recently,” says Redmond. “I wanted us to do something substantial on the subject of wife battering and child abuse. The outline said that we would bring in this family, they would eventually kill the husband and we would leave the body buried under the patio for two years. Again, it was all in the outline.”

The plight of the Jordaches quickly became one of the most compelling tales on the Close, especially after eldest daughter Beth (played by Anna Friel) discovered she was gay. The introduction centre-stage of a lesbian character in a mainstream soap was in itself a benchmark, but the sensitivity, intelligence and humour with which her development was treated further elevated Brookside’s position at the forefront of contemporary British drama.

Crucial to this achievement have been the performances of all involved, not least the aforementioned Anna Friel. “We knew we had to get the casting right on this one,” Redmond avers. “The intensity and impact of the story would project the actors forward and they’d have to be able to handle that. We had to get someone with a bit extra to play Beth and Anna was exactly what we were looking for. Tiffany Chapman who plays Rachel has also been very important. I think she’ll be as big as Anna in the end.”

Inevitably though, there have been complaints from those who believe that a gay woman’s place is in a home, or some kind of institution, anywhere but on TV during peak viewing hours. Phil Redmond, however, has heard it all before.

“We got the standard you-shouldn’t-be-doing-that from the brigade who think we shouldn’t be doing anything,” he says. “But when we did the gay storyline from a male point of view about eight years ago with Gordon Collins, we got a hell of a lot more complaints. Lesbianism perhaps isn’t as threatening to men as male homosexuality is. Women, I think, can understand homosexuality better than men anyway. And, because Anna’s quite good looking, some of the men who don’t like the idea of homosexuality might enjoy watching her kissing other women or whatever (laughs). So, it takes you into all those kind of debates. It’s just another layer on the issue.”

Yet a further layer was added when Channel 4, on two occasions, decided to edit sequences featuring Beth kissing another woman from the Saturday afternoon omnibus edition, sequences which were deemed perfectly suitable for weekday broadcasting.

“That kind of thing has happened about four or five times over the twelve years,” maintains Redmond. “It’s always a disappointment and a shame. What happens is that somebody in Channel 4 gets nervous because of the antagonistic nature of the press. The tabloids try to whip up a kind of moral crusade against television. As we’re always at the leading edge, we’re always the ones that come under scrutiny. The regulators get geed up by the press and everybody starts to get a bit edgy. But when they cut it from the omnibus, they usually have about twenty times more phonecalls and complaints about the fact that they edited it than about the content itself. In the last case, they had two complaints about the content and a hundred and five complaints about the cut.”

Last week, the Jordache storyline reached its climax, or the first of its climaxes according to Redmond, with a special run of five nightly episodes, large swathes of which were filmed in Ireland (to where the Jordaches and Sinbad had fled from the bizzies, for those of you who have just this morning awoken from a coma and so missed all the hype).

“We felt that when the body finally came up, there’d be such a lot to do that it would stretch the bounds of credibility if we were to drag it out over two or three weeks,” he insists. “We’ll do another week of five episodes when we get to the Jordaches’ court case because, again, that will be such an intense height of drama that we’ll want to make as big an impact as we can. That’ll probably be in about three or four months. We all know how the British legal system works (laughs). We’ll try to streamline the process of justice.”

Is there a possibility that Brookside may eventually go out five nights every week? “That would be up to Channel 4 who’ll see how the ratings and the advertising go,” replies Redmond. “But I’ve felt for some time that, sooner or later, one of our soaps has got to go five nights. I think they’ll all end up that way. That’s the pattern that’s emerging all over the world. With increased competition and more choice, you have to give people more opportunities to actually watch the programme if you want to hold onto viewers.”

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Soap celebrity can be a double-edged sword. Those who surrender their personalities and their lives to the demands of the tabloids are doomed to find that, when the wind changes, they are stuck with them for life, as some of the stars of Eastenders and Coronation Street in particular have learned at their peril. Miraculously, however, virtually all Brookside cast members, past and present, seem to have resisted the temptation to go showbiz, whether by spilling their beans to the Sunday supplements or by releasing duff pop records.

“There’s two reasons for that,” Redmond argues. “It’s part of our casting process that we want to choose people who are interested in the drama rather than in finding the fastest route to being a celebrity. The other thing is that we make it very clear to new cast members when they join us that Brookside has its own particular place in the television culture. We feel that if we’re doing a heavy storyline, like the Jordache storyline, it would be quite inappropriate for one of them jumping up on a gameshow singing ‘Oh Bang Bang Doo Ba Doo Ba Doo Ba’. It would just debase what we’re trying to do, and they accept that.”

Money, of course, is the other big source of grit in the soap tray. Spiralling wage demands by actors have been the cause of more hasty exits from television serials recently than any amount of murders, suicides and strange tropical diseases. Phil Redmond claims, however, that the Brookie crew are too level-headed and too committed to the show to indulge in any kind of public salary-auction.

“They’re actually all reasonably well paid,” he says. “You often read stories in the papers about how on one soap they earn millions and on another, usually ours, they earn nothing. But it’s just not true. Equity’s there, the actors’ union, and they make sure that there’s a baseline and that people are paid accordingly. I think that the cast on Brookside are reasonably paid.”

Phil Redmond’s relationship with the British press has long been a fraught one. “We respect the fact that they have a job to do but that job sometimes doesn’t coincide with our interests,” he asserts tactfully. “One of my big frustrations is the way they treat the programme with their scoop! sensational! attitude about the storyline. I also continually get complaints from the viewers about the press giving away the storyline. We all appreciate that people love gossip, but when the press actually give out the storyline a lot of viewers get really upset. It’s like someone telling you the end of a novel that you’re only half way through.”

Security has become almost militarily tight on the Brookside set. Scripts must be handed in by the cast every day after use. They are then shredded and pulped.

“It’s very, very rare for somebody inside to sell the storyline to the press because everybody appreciates what we’re trying to do,” explains Redmond. “It’s their livelihood after all. But if we have to go out on location, you get people seeing the cast in the street. I remember one incident where the local radio station in Liverpool had the story that Heather Havisham’s boyfriend was a drug addict as the lead item on the eight o’clock morning news.

“That was because, the day before, we’d been shooting at the Liverpool Drugs Clinic. Someone had seen us out there and put two and two together and phoned up the radio station (laughs). You have to have extras in and they go home and tell their friends in the pub and they go and tell someone else. If we’ve got a big storyline coming up, we have to be quite careful and we think through how we’re gonna send out a bit of disinformation. We’re having to do that more and more.”

What does Phil Redmond make of the Harry Enfield characters, The Scousers, who some might say bear an uncanny resemblance to certain residents of Brookside Close?

“(Laughs) It’s good fun. The fact that we allowed Brian Egan (Terry) and Paul Usher (Barry) to go down and take part in the show shows the fact that we don’t mind that. We’ve got a good sense of humour.”

Does he watch any of the other soaps on British TV?

“Like everybody in the business, I probably don’t watch enough television. But I dip in every month or so, just to see what they’re up to. Technically more than anything else.”

Indeed, Brookside is rare among television programmes and unique among soaps in that its characters often sit down to watch television and sometimes even other soaps. Redmond and co. have also gone as far as to invent their own soap within a soap, Meadowcroft Farm. A little bit of post-modern de-constructionism or just a joke?

“That’s reality,” says Redmond. “If you look at the figures, everybody watches soaps and for us not to mention them every now and then would not be realistic. But in some soaps, they don’t even have televisions in the houses. I also like us mentioning other soaps because it winds all the others up. For some reason, they all hate it. We hear that it really winds them up and they don’t know how to handle it (laughs). I’ve always been into demystifying television and television characters. They’re not all these characters beamed down from the celestial heaven.”

* * * * *

The success of Brookside, and of other Phil Redmond productions such as Grange Hill (now in its eighteenth year), has earned their creator a reputation as something of a TV wizard who can breathe life into even the most moribund ratings-casualty. His consultancy services are widely and keenly sought. It was he, for instance, who helped revive the flagging fortunes of Emmerdale some time back, by infusing the series with more incident and more pacy storylines, beginning with that infamous plane crash.

Does he believe that he could’ve saved the risible Eldorado from the axe if the BBC had asked him to do so?

“Modestly, he says, yes I could,” asserts Redmond. “They needed to redefine the whole premise of the thing. There wasn’t really any kind of real link back to good old Blighty. Something set in the sun like that needed to be a lot lighter. But, I say that modestly, because I had a great time when I had a go at Emmerdale and it seemed to work.

“Inevitably though, I think the BBC will have another go at making another popular soap,” he continues. “There’s two irresistible forces there. One is the audience’s insatiable appetite for original fiction, the second is the broadcaster’s insatiable appetite for driving costs down. Drama is the most expensive kind of television to produce but the more units of any one programme you can produce the more cost-effective it becomes. Soap, or continuing drama, is the most effective way of satisfying those two needs.”

Soap doctor or not, it is the development of new ideas that most energies Redmond and, through his production company Mersey Television, he hopes to launch several fresh projects over the coming couple of years.

“I’m very keen to try and get a British Neighbours off the ground,” he declares. “Neighbours and Home And Away are fine as far as they go, but they’re from an alien culture. We should have one that suits our own culture. It would be light but could also deal with issues like Brookside does to some extent. Kids just really want to have fun, don’t they? At the same time, they’re interested in issues that are of concern to them. You could do things about, say, the impact of divorce from their point of view or at what stage should you lose your virginity and what does that actually mean and so on. It’s issues like that I’d like to look at but with a lot of comedy, a lot of fun, and a lot of action as well.”

Making at least one feature film is Phil’s long-term ambition but he’d also like to write and direct some shorter, more finite television dramas.

“I just fancy the idea of doing a six-parter that just finishes and that’s it,” he says wistfully. “I’d like to do a real action/adventure series too. I quite like doing that when we do it in Brookie and when we did it in Emmerdale, plane crashes and so on. The public like them and they’re good fun to do. But this is actually a very small business. There’s only really two or three original pieces commissioned each year. The problem with pitching original concepts to commissioning editors is that they only have historical yardsticks by which to judge you. That’s why people go in and say things like ‘it’s like Coronation Street meets Edge Of Darkness’. It means nothing but it’s on the basis of descriptions like that that TV shows get commissioned these days.

“At the moment, I’m working on a pilot for a new television programme, another contemporary drama. I’ve been developing it for a couple of years but have finally got round to writing it. It’s set five to ten years in the future and involves some of the issues arising out of the computer Internet and how it affects people’s lives. I’ve been trying to pitch this idea now for eight years.”

For all its drawbacks, however, Phil Redmond has no intention of ever leaving the television business. He wants to remain at the soap-face and is appalled by the suggestion that he might one day end up as administrator of any kind, even Controller of the BBC.

“I went through the TV mogul phase when we launched a bid for Granada but, in hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t get it because I would hate to have become a desk-bound politician,” he affirms. “The fun end is actually making the programmes, getting the idea and actually seeing it realised on-screen. I like to create all the mayhem and let others take the responsibility.

“Television is the thing that excited me when I was growing up in the ‘60s. It’s the place to be, it’s where all the excitement is. There aren’t many places where you could get both the instant reaction and the sense of real achievement of doing something like Brookie.”