ON NOVEMBER 2, 1982, the first residents of a freshly-built cul-de-sac on Lord Sefton’s estate moved into their new homes.

Within three months, one would be dead of a brain haemorrhage; in three years, another would be shot during a siege; by 1987, one would be the victim of rape, another of physical abuse, and a teenager would be stabbed to death on a trip to New York.

If the incidents that took place in Brookside Close had been dealt with by Merseyside Police, local crime figures would have soared. Shortly after the series began, all the houses in the street were burgled and, in its later years, there would be explosions, murders and even plague.

Yet, when Phil Redmond first came up with the idea of a soap opera set in Liverpool, he had been inspired by an altogether more gentle television show.

“I grew up as a child of Coronation Street which after ’66/’67 dropped into its groove and started to age with its audience,” he explains.

“It perpetuated a myth of northern England. I wanted to write something that reflected Britain in the 1980s, rather than the 1950s that Corrie was doing.”

A quantity surveyor turned scriptwriter, Redmond decided to base his new programme around the new housing estates that were springing up all over Liverpool.

The opening episode aired on the launch day of a brand new television station, Channel 4, that aimed to open up broadcasting to new talent by commissioning work from independent producers rather than creating shows itself.

Considering the plot-lines that were to follow – lesbian kisses, incest, religious cults – in retrospect Brookside’s first year may seem tame, but it is the early days that Redmond, 58, remembers most fondly.

“If you look back at what Brookie was doing in ’82/’83, that was completely different to what it was doing even in ’84/’85 because the pressures of working under the television regulations and the broadcasters meant that it was softened up,” he says.

“The most obvious thing was in the depiction of the working class and their language. In ’82, we were trying to represent the nation as it was then, warts and all, but most people didn’t want to see that, they wanted to see life the way it should be rather than the way it is.”

In 1980s working class Liverpool, “life the way it is” meant unemployment, battling trade unions and strikes. In the early days, Brookside’s storylines focused heavily on issues such as these, including walk-outs at the fictional company Fairbanks Engineering, where the main character Bobby Grant was a union leader.

Changes in TV regulations would now make it more difficult to come down so heavily on the side of the trade unionists, especially when they were using violence or breaking the law for their own ends.

The more the rules tightened, the more melodramatic the plot-lines became. Channel 4 couldn’t get away with showing characters swearing, but they could show brothers and sisters sleeping together, a teenage bully being drowned in a pond and a body under the patio.

In 1982, life in Brookside Close seemed pretty representative of working-class Liverpool. Bobby Grant was out on strike, Lucy Collins was worrying about being bullied at school, and the neighbours saw in the New Year with a conga round the cul-de-sac.

By 1999, Lindsey Corkhill had stolen £60,000 and a car from a gangster and then hired a hitman to kill him. You can bet the residents would have had no idea where to find a hired assassin back in the early ’80s.

Redmond blames stricter TV regulations for the demise of Brookside, although the constant shuffling around the viewing schedules can’t have helped either, but thinks that modern Britain may be more in need of such a soap than ever before.

As for the storylines, he has plenty of ideas.

“At the moment, if you look across education, there isn’t a cohesive policy any more. We’re looking at whole swathes of the population who are being forced to follow a National Curriculum with absolutely no relevance to their life or their future prospects,” he says.

“The National Health Service has lost its way, the care and dignity of the old is still a huge issue. If we look across social policy, you’ll find the throwing out of Asbos like Scout badges is not actually tackling problems. I think we’re directing too much money into technology to manage traffic instead of putting the money onto the street.

“The whole issue of selling our jobs abroad and not letting our young people into the job market. The fact that you can’t get a National Health dentist . . . there are millions of things Brookie could be doing.

“Time’s now probably more right for a programme like Brookside than it was in 1982. Then we still did have a paternalist social state but we seem to have drifted away from that to an authoritarian, box-ticking bureaucracy.”

As well as launching the careers of actors such as Amanda Burton, Ricky Tomlinson and Sue Johnston, and writers including Jimmy McGovern, Brookside established a media industry in Merseyside. Its Childwall-based production company Mersey TV also made teen soap Hollyoaks and Grange Hill, and was sold to the multi-national All3Media in 2005.

“I’m proud of the number of people who have gone through Brookside and into the film business, and we also showed the rest of the industry that you can shoot outside the capital. People said I was mad and I couldn’t do it,” recalls Redmond, who is now leading the charge to involve more local people in Liverpool’s Capital of Culture year.

“It was a role that was unrecognised at the time. We created a workforce of 500 people and a platform for writers and actors to display their talent but, like all these things, they tend to go unrecognised by the local community because in the end they just accept that it’s there. One of the things that gives me a big kick is seeing the sports guys running up and down the touchline using steadycam, because I was the one that introduced steadycam to TV through Brookside as well.”

Brookside was finally axed in November, 2003, just a year after one book released to mark its 20th anniversary stated “(the soap) is setting out on its next 20 years with the same ambition, determination and quality that marked its debut in 1982”.

It ended with the Close being boarded up and sold. The final episode mainly constituted a monologue by drug dealer-turned-teacher Jimmy Corkhill bemoaning the state of TV and modern society. Redmond, who penned the episode, had had the last word.

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