Scouse sultan of soap

Profile: Phil Redmond; The provocative creator of 'Brookside' has invented a new TV genre. By Andy Beckett

LAST Tuesday a mother with sad, resigned eyes was sent to prison for life for murdering her abusive husband; her daughter, a pretty young medical student, received five years for conspiracy. Their trial had been on television for a week: 6 million people watched every night as the jury agonised towards a verdict and a kindly looking judge imposed the mandatory sentence.

It was gripping, moving even, and it was a soap opera. Many people, however, acted otherwise. Hundreds called Channel 4 to complain about the verdict; the director of the battered wives' charity Refuge issued a condemnatory statement, with the backing of the fictional wife of the victim and the real-life wife of the Leader of the Opposition. The tabloids rushed out "Free The Brookside Two" headlines, rather more quickly than they had done for the Guildford Four. And, outside the redbrick headquarters of the show's Liverpool producers, Mersey Television, members of Women Against Domestic Violence waved placards declaring the innocence of the condemned characters, Mandy and Beth Jordache. Eventually, a 45-year-old Liverpudlian with long greying hair called Phil Redmond, the company's owner and Brookside's creator, was forced to go outside and justify his programme.

His defence was simple. Mandy and Beth's sentences were the only realistic ones under current law. And their being found guilty was a dramatic way to call attention to the issue. With heavy hints that other characters will start a (fictional) campaign to free Mandy and Beth, Redmond and Brookside are looking forward to some more headlines.

He has been using his tools of realism and melodrama to polemical and popular effect on Brookside for 12 years now; his caustic comprehensive school series Grange Hill has been doing the same for seven years longer. He's used to the hair-trigger controversies generated by his insertion of serious social issues into "light" television. Indeed, this is why he makes soap operas: "I always wanted to do contemporary drama that, while it would entertain, would raise people's awareness of contemporary issues."

He may sound like a polytechnic lecturer, but Redmond invented a new brand of soap, perhaps now the most powerful on the television market. Where, before, soap operas quietly pursued questions of personal morality and politics through personal relationships, Brookside - which predated the similarly ambitious EastEnders - screamed out, sometimes literally, the universal issues. The despair of unemployment, the state of the NHS, getting used to a gay son, even the lure of cults: all of these have been delivered to us from Redmond's lectern.

He has a shrewd populist eye, too, and seems to know, more often than not, precisely when to reach for an issue to fit both the drama of Brookside and the concerns of the world outside. Mandy and Beth buried their tormentor's body under their patio where it lay while police made eerily parallel discoveries in Frederick West's garden.

And lurid as this sounds in outline, Redmond is sensitive to the gap between what some viewers recognise as everyday life and what they will welcome on their televisions. In the early Eighties he tempered Grange Hill by refusing to feature glue-sniffing, for fear of "copy-cat experimentation" among its school-age audience. Meanwhile he resisted the efforts of pressure groups to foist their particular issues on Brookside, preventing it becoming "nothing more than a documentary with a Scouse accent".

Some of this sense of responsibility comes from a sense of importance. Besides running and owning Mersey Television, with its 200 employees and turnover of pounds 12m, Redmond is a script consultant on Emmerdale Farm, and an honorary professor of media studies at Liverpool John Moores University (formerly Liverpool poly) - which runs a television production course in cosy partnership with Mersey Television. He earns over pounds 500,000 a year, and says he is worth "considerably more" than the director of a privatised utility. He gives formal lectures and indiscreet quotes on the state of the industry. He no longer writes Brookside, but makes six-monthly interventions as executive producer at strategy conferences with the 12 people who do.

Above all, Redmond sees himself as an ambassador for Liverpool. He resolutely refuses to base his production anywhere else, employs locals and, via the clean, green suburban vistas of Brookside, tries to change unflattering notions about his city. "We actually did have a director who scattered rubbish in a park 'to make it look like Liverpool'," he says. "We said, 'This is Liverpool', and told him to reshoot."

REDMOND was "born and bred Scouse" on a council estate in the garden suburb of Huyton in 1949. He went to Catholic schools, passed his eleven- plus - and was sent to one of the first comprehensive schools as a guinea pig, an influence that would lead to Grange Hill.

But he didn't know he could write; he studied sociology at university and started work as a quantity surveyor. He says it taught him about budgets, but after two years he was sick of counting bags of cement, and resigned "to see if I could write". For a year he rushed up and down the motorway to London to press his services on television executives. In 1973 he talked and wrote his way into LWT's sitcom Doctor In Charge, then secured an introduction to the BBC's head of children's drama, Anna Home.

Redmond told her he wanted to write a realistic series about a comprehensive, not about Billy Bunter. "He struck me as somebody who had a fresh new attitude," says Home. Grange Hill started in 1978. It went down well. Another series was commissioned - and this time Redmond decided to write about what a school in London was really like. Shoplifting, hair-pulling in prefab corridors, teachers smoking fags and complaining in the staff room: people were horrified, called Redmond a Marxist, said he would ruin his young viewers.

His young viewers loved it, ratings shot up, and Grange Hill began its generation-influencing run. Crucially and innovatively it didn't patronise children, but took their point of view in theme and technique (it was shot from special low angles). After three years Redmond was ready to move on - colleagues say he can't stop pitching ideas - and Brookside came into creative focus.

Where Grange Hill was very Seventies municipal, with its state school and its state funding, Brookside was more Eighties entrepreneurial. Redmond set up his own production company, bought a real close of houses (so he could sell them if the project failed), and filled them with C2 characters trading up from the inner city. Channel 4 broadcast it on its first night in November 1982.

Initially, the language was a little too modern, and ratings crashed as the tabloids ran "Channel Swore" headlines. But Redmond took out the expletives and the soap dug out its influential niche. He stopped writing for it and started taking other commissions; with the BBC cop show Waterfront Beat in 1990, Redmond had three series on air simultaneously.

By the following year the Redmond empire had grown profitable and confident enough to bid for an ITV franchise. And not just any franchise - but Granada's, the makers of Coronation Street. Redmond assembled an ambitious proposal for "people's television", including a daily programme for every town in the region. He talked about "when" rather than "if", and bid pounds 26m more than Granada.

He lost. His failure (on the quality criteria) was seen as hubris, all the more so because Brookside was slipping. "Phil was very concerned about the franchise and he took his eye off the ball," says Channel 4 commissioning editor Peter Ansorge, who admits that "we actually put out tenders for other soaps". Redmond promoted a Brookside stalwart called Mal Young to be producer, and the programme began to get viewers back. That it did so with lesbian kisses and virus outbreaks attracted criticism. Was the architect of modern television realism going sensationalist?

But even writers from rival programmes defend the new Brookside. "It's brave. He kills off favourite characters much quicker than EastEnders," says one. "I'd love to get away with that stuff." Brookside is Channel 4's one consistently mass audience programme, especially in the North, and is the soap favoured by the trendy middle class in London. But its ratings are still barely half that of EastEnders; as many are put off by its mould-breaking as are attracted to it.

Perhaps Redmond knows this. He has sold another, more facile, soap to Channel 4 for the autumn, about aspirational teenagers in Chester. It will be an English Neighbours: "The kids are going to have mobile phones and enjoy life."

Redmond understands aspiration. He drives a Range Rover, and has an obsession with hot water in the two houses where he lives with his second wife and children. He does not think "any one political party has a monopoly on social issues". He works very hard, and expects his employees to love doing the same.

And, every now and again, he reminds us that he can still be a writer too. In March 1992 he made a suggestion to Young. What if, he asked him, we bring a new family on to the close with an abusive husband, and the wife and daughter kill him, and stick him under the patio, and get caught when he's dug up, and go on trial, and get sent to jail, and ... Young says no more.