Brookside C4
The Million Pound Property Experiment BBC2
Looking For Victoria BBC1
The Victoria Cross: For Valour BBC2
The Queen's Lost Uncle C4
Even though I haven't watched it regularly this century, I felt a strong obligation, nay compulsion, to catch the final episode of Brookside, broadcast in a graveyard slot last Tuesday.
We go way back, Brookie and me. Coincidentally, when I was a revoltingly stroppy teen and the soap was a mewling newborn, both of us appeared in Channel 4's launch-night schedule in November 1982. As a member of the audience at a live broadcast gig (which must have seemed like a good Channel 4 idea at the time), I wore a hormonal howl of a hairdo, an explosion of blonde dreadlocked extensions and zebra stripes fetchingly accessorised with air-dried chicken wishbones.
Brookside Close, however, was far more upwardly mobile-looking, the new red-brick houses (several of them detached! All of them real!) ensuring that whatever kind of soap this was going to turn out to be it was already worlds away from the cardboard cut-out sets and characters of Coronation Street.
Behind the storm porches and neat nets, Brookie (almost called Meadowcroft: 'Croftie'? I don't think so) was shouty, confrontational and, to a southerner, occasionally unintelligible. It liked a big issue and a birrova class war (crazy-paving the way for EastEnders ) and, after a shaky start, inevitably made household names of its original cast: Sue Johnston and Ricky Tomlinson as the Grants, sons Barry (Paul Usher, the Den Watts Jr of his day) and brother Damon (sex thimble Simon O'Brien), not to mention Amanda Burton, in an early Sam Ryan incarnation, as ghastly yuppie Heather Huntingdon.
Laughs were not, and never have been, Brookside 's strength. The biggest 1980s storylines were the unlikely yet oddly riveting siege (in which eight million of us tuned in to see Kate Moses shot), Damon's death (in the first TV soap bubble, Damon and Debbie ) and Sheila Grant's rape, inspiring performances far stronger than serial drama's traditional camp light entertainment. For the first time, a soap was perceived to be the launch pad for a potentially Bafta-bothering career.
Though it scorched its way through some headline- grabbing plots (bodies under patios, lesbian kisses, more bodies. And yet more bodies), by the end of the 1990s the ratings-chasing strategy was failing: Brookie looked dated and desperate.
The final episode needed to tie up a few loose ends and evoke some nostalgia for the glory days, so Paul Usher and Claire Sweeney returned, as Barry Grant and fiancée Lindsey Corkhill, while the Close's resident evil drug dealer, the amusingly-named Jack Michaelson (Channel 4's former controller Michael Jackson made the decision to axe the show) was hanged from his own bedroom window by his public-spirited vigilante neighbours and mourned by no one.
But the show really belonged to Dean Sullivan's Jimmy Corkhill, who had fun delivering a lengthy, thinly disguised rant of a soliloquy along the lines of 'look-here-you-bloody-ungrateful-Channel-4-executives-we're-not-going-gracefully': 'I can remember when the telly meant something. If you watched a documentary, watched a drama, they made you think about life and not whether you had the right wallpaper to match your kecks. What's that all about?' etc.
'It's like putting nails in your own coffin,' he sighed while boarding up his home, spraying the words 'GAME OVER' on windows, turning on lots of taps and, finally, touchingly, added a 'd' to the Brookside Close sign. It wasn't funny or wildly clever but it was gritty and bittersweet and it worked. For much of its 21 years, the same could be said of Brookside .
I don't know how much Phil Redmond and Channel 4 paid for the Close back in 1982 (I did call Mersey TV but the girl in their press office seemed quite shocked by the question: 'Oh, I don't know that! And I'm sure I wouldn't be able to tell you if I did, but I'll go and ask someone and call you back.' She didn't), still, it's probably fair to say that, property prices having risen several hundred billion per cent since the early 1980s, it's been a smart investment.
But instead of smothering the houses with hundreds of blue plaques and giving them to Simon O'Brien (the former Damon Grant is now a property developer) to revamp and flog on the open market, they will be kept as the north west's answer to Universal Studios' Main Street USA. The next time we see Brookside it'll probably be called Meadowcroft.
Even if Jimmy Corkhill would hate the idea, the BBC's Million Pound Property Experiment should have a lot going for it: 1) it's a property programme (inexplicably, we don't seem to be sick of them yet) with a bit of a twist; 2) specifically, it's Property Ladder meets Grand(ish) Designs , but 3) it's also about making lots of money for a good cause and 4) it's not presented by Laurence Llewelyn Bowen, or, indeed, 5) Linda Barker.
Unfortunately, all these positives were outweighed by negatives, including the fact that breaking out of daytime (Trading Up, Housecall) into primetime seems to have brought out the very worst in the presenting partnership (in life, at work, on-screen) of Justin Ryan and Colin McAllister, but particularly Justin.
The plan - a good one when it was hatched a couple of years back - was that interior designers Justin and Colin would be given £100,000 by the BBC to invest in a property which they would renovate and sell before investing in another, thus dragging themselves up the property ladder while fulfilling many of our own greedy petit bourgeois home-owning fantasies en route, culminating, theoretically, in the sale of a property worth a million. At which point they would give the BBC back their cash, with interest, and pass on the whopping profit to Children in Need.
Unfortunately, rather than following the progress of doing up a two-bedroomed terrace in Birmingham, I found myself initially distracted (and eventually quite gripped) by Justin and Colin's relationship dynamic. And when hapless project manager Nigel Leck failed to see the design integrity of Justin's powder-blue Smeg fridge or recognise the innovative brilliance of situating a hob underneath a window (even though the glass would soon end up spattered with a challenging layer of fat effects), the project looked like it might get as domestically edgy as a Wife Swap .
Unfortunately, instead of a big old barney we got huffy passive-aggression and a series of hissy fits - 'I refuse point blank to have your gloom sap away our glamour' (Justin to a nonplussed Nigel) - while Nigel will have summed up the feelings of many viewers feelings with a succinct: 'I hope Justin gets laryngitis'.
But my favourite line was Justin's relatively understated: 'We don't want any Victorians dictating how we use our space', as he carved three bedrooms out of two, because, on a whim, I'd already decided that this week I was only going to review programmes with references to Victorias or Victorians.
This would have been eas ier than you might imagine, kicking off with the second part of Prunella Scales's entertaining BBC1 odyssey Looking For Victoria, before segueing into the best programme Jeremy Clarkson has ever made, BBC2's informative and poignant The Victoria Cross: For Valour, then skipping through ITV1's fluffy Beckham's Body Parts (admittedly quite a gratuitous Victoria here but, I think, justified under the circumstances) before taking in The Million Pound Property Experiment and wrapping things up neatly with Channel 4's documentary The Queen's Lost Uncle.
Except that, frustratingly, the latter, a profile of George V's son George, Duke of Kent, didn't have any references to Victoria or Victorians at all, though there was some compensation in getting to know a series of fluffy toffs called 'Baba' (Lady Alexandra Curzon, Prince George's first love, taught him to drive), 'Poppy' Berry (George's great love, rejected by the king as an unsuitable princess), Kiki (close chum, died of a morphine overdose in Claridge's) and, most deliciously, Fruity Metcalfe (stood in for George as best man at Edward's marriage to Wallis Simpson), as well as conjuring up the irresistible image of the prince (who liked a drink, often before brekker) wearing drag and swaying through the streets of Soho on the arm of Noël Coward.
[The royal family] could get away with that sort of thing then,' George's biographer told us, with just the merest hint of a raised eyebrow. Naturally...
