Debbie Bennett Wonders if the 1980s were Soapier than the 21st Century

1980s me!

I was born in 1964, so most of my supposedly formative years were in the 1970s and 1980s. I remember our family having the first colour television on the street – hired from Radio Rentals as were they all back then. I remember having just three TV channels and the excitement of the launch of Channel 4 in 1982. I also remember the launch of Brookside, the new hard-hitting Channel 4 soap set in Liverpool. I’d just started at Liverpool university and if you got up early enough at university, you could watch them filming in the city. 

Brookside was supposedly targeting ‘gritty social issues’ – did it? I honestly don’t know. I didn’t watch any other soaps, so I had nothing to compare it with. I had vague memories of the local charming-but-deadly gangster Tommy McArdle, and then of course there was the infamous body under the patio and the first televised lesbian kiss, both of which catapulted actress Anna Friel to fame. 

But compared to modern soap, Brookside is tame. I know because I’m watching it again! 

I was looking for something online recently and stumbled across a reference to the soap. I think it was something to do with the fact that most of the estate used for filming was comprised of real houses, which were later sold to actual families when the soap ceased production. And I found that an app called STV lets you stream the entire thing. From the very first episode … 

So off we go. TV quality wasn’t great in 1982, was it? Everything is stretched and slightly blurry on my modern Samsung television, but we have the familiar music and credits. Little soundbites of 25 minutes (twice a week as I recall). And I’m fascinated. By many things. 

Also 1980s me!

The credits – the writers. I had a friend who wrote for Brookside and introduced me to one of his other co-writers. The late Jan Needle also invited me to the premiere of Broken at the Lowry some years back, because it was written by Jimmy McGovern, a writer he knew I greatly admired. Jan even gave Jimmy one of my books and when I got to meet the man, he was very complimentary. Apparently, he later told Jan I should speak to Russell Davies – as in THE Russell T Davies! Like I move in those circles! 

I’ve written blog posts here before about the community radio project Littlewich Ways on which I was the lead writer. Think The Archers, but darker and funnier. Sadly ‘creative differences’ and later COVID killed the project completely, but I still have the scripts and I’d like to do something with them eventually. But I was curious as to how Brookside would stand up to modern soap and how our script-writing efforts would compare. 

It's true what they say. Modern audiences of the 21st century have short attention spans and want everything now. 1982 soap is sloooow. Whole episodes where we have the interactions between a few groups of neighbours, but nothing actually happens. It’s all conversation. In the early days, I get it – when you are setting up your characters, you establish them by their interactions with other characters. This isn’t fantasy, or sf or anything where you have to world-build; the background is relatable to everybody and all you have is characters and plot. And plot comes from characters – at least it does in 1980s soap. Modern television will often throw in an ‘incident’, the odd plane crash, train derailment, some catastrophe to kill a few people off, but back in the early/mid 1980s, we just have characters and they’re mostly normal people. Even 200 episodes in, they’re normal people doing and talking endlessly about normal things. We have affairs, we have a death – although he died in his sleep – and we have a suicide that happened way offscreen. But it’s mostly factory strikes, trade unions, accountancy audits (yes, really), stealing food from freezers and the conflict of contraception in the Catholic church. 

Why did we watch this stuff? What was Coronation Street like in the 1980s? And Crossroads? I recall Eastenders being much darker, but that didn’t air until 1985. Maybe that’s why we had the lesbian kiss in 1994, in an attempt to increase ratings and compete. This article I found talks about how ground-breaking it was, but I’m not seeing it yet and it doesn’t compare with what you see on television today, when there seems to be a murder or other violent event every few weeks.

IMDb says there were 2,915 episodes of Brookside. It’s going to take me a while to get to the end.

www.debbiebennett.co.uk