Brookside axed after 21 Years
Channel 4 has finally laid to rest its one-time flagship programme after a year of uncertainty over the production. Brookside will bow out in the same month it celebrates 21 years on air.
“Brookside has been a fantastically creative and brilliant programme… But television has changed radically and it is no longer an environment in which we believe Brookside can exist and thrive.” Said Chief Executive of Channel 4, Mark Thompson.
The soap hit the air as a twice weekly serial on November 2nd 1982 becoming a ground breaking soap thanks to airing on the new network Channel 4. ITV and BBC serials and soaps were unable to show the kind of graphic speech and plots Brookside did due to a stricter policy of regulation at the time, however Channel 4 was seen to be the alternative channel and with that a more relaxed regulation was in place.
Programmes the IBA banned from ITV screening often ended up on the forth network in the early days, including a rather tame compared to today’s standards stand up show with comedian Mike Elliott, deemed too rude for mainstream ITV viewers, however quite acceptable on Channel 4.
Not that the network came without criticism. Early episodes of Brookside were attacked for the violence and language used before the 9pm watershed. The show aired at 8pm. Phil Redmond devised the series and wanted it to be visually different from the other soaps of the day. It was the first to be shot entirely on location, in a specially built outdoor structure of houses, there were no internal sets. Although gaffs still happened, such as supposedly steaming hot food clearly bone cold being served up and the street lights not working for a year, fluffed lines and some iffy acting -but we passed over that as one thing Brookie did bring was scripts that were alive and characters that would define the decade.
Soap expert Vivian Summers told us, “Apparently the end of Brookside will tie into its 21st anniversary, although no revelations on how the show will end has been revealed as yet. I suspect a gas pipe may leak and the entire cul-de-sac will be left a pile of rubble.” Chris adds, “Channel 4 tell me that the serial has been under review by bosses at the network since last year, when they moved it as you’ll recall from its three times a week evening slots to just a 90 minute weekend slot, which itself has moved from afternoons to late night.”
Channel 4 stated that despite their best efforts and a recent revamp of the programme it ‘could not be saved’ and they felt there were better avenues to take to spend the £16 million a year it costs to make the Mersey Television produced saga. The story of Brookside revolves around a cul-de-sac in Liverpool which was built in 1982. The first episode sees the new residents moving into the close with a mixture of middle class and working class families merged together creating the early drama.
It pioneered a more visual way of story telling, no longer just relying on viewer imagination from the scripts and words spoken as previously the soaps had to mainly rely on in the past. In recent years however from heights of 8 million the show has fallen to one million and less in recent times and most put the blame at the show trying to ‘out-do’ itself.
“Too many sensational plots, too often.” Says Vivian Summers, “just far too often. You can get away with explosions, hostage situations, helicopter crashes, gangster shootouts and such happening one after the other in a blockbuster Hollywood movie, but when it becomes a regular occurrence in a soap you lose all sense of reality and credibility. Brookside lost what it was good at. Storytelling through brilliant scripts with the occasional strong visual scene to provoke a thought, or even a reaction.”
The show saw many of its actors and actresses go onto bigger things including, Sue Johnston, Claire Sweeney, Ricky Tomlinson and Amanda Burton.