Brookside - the end of an era

Ha ha!

the seminal brookside quote: "one thing i've learned from all our shenanigans is that life goes on" - irritating yet totally apropos

the other, repeated SEVERAL times, both in real-time and flashback: "you know i'll be here fa yeh!!!"

anyway i totally enjoyed it, even though i know none of the characters and had to be filled in on this shady barry grant character. great switcheroo where we thought HE was going to be the prime mover in the drug dealer's comeuppance.

Loved what they did to 'jack michaelson' and what it means in MediaWorld.

what made the lawn rant specifically BROOKSIDE, as far as i understand the concept, was that nikki is sitting on the lounger sort of half-listening and going "well then" and "you're really off on one now"

Shelagh O'Hara as Karen Grant changed my life in 1985 - for better or for worse.
RIP the Grant Family and Harry and Ralph.

RIP....

Jimmy - who has been convinced to 'retire' to Our Linz an' Barry's enormous Beckingham Palace-type pile, or a cottage on the grounds - has a hesitation, he doesn't want to leave. Cue rant about substance v. style where he goes rather impressively Old Labour in front of Nikki Shadwick while both are watching a brazier burn and chucking papers and crap from their houses into it. The lynch mob members leave the Close all winking at each other, until Corkill is the last guy standing. He remembers Tim saying how he'd prank the place on leaving , then carries out a bit of light vandalism with taps and paint. Game over...

Looks like St Bernard missing whiskey cask with XXX written on it.

Who was that pantomime villain? What was Tinhead doing driving a limo? Why did I bother watching it? Well as the opening credits came on I thought "ooh, I'm actually going to miss this." After about half an hour, however, I couldn't wait for it to be put out of its misery.

And - ha ha - less than 2 million people watched it. Phil Redmond is kidding himself about it living on as a DVD series.

By the way has anybody else seen that Closer advert where Lindsey "chip shop scrubber turned gun-toting lesbo gangster" Corrrkkkhhhkkhill promises to reveal all her secrets on staying slim and sexy? Like anybody ever in the history of the world has woken up in the morning thinking "ooh, I wish I was slim and sexy... like that Lindsey Corkhill"

1. billy and jimmy's do-the-house-over-to-make-it-look-like-burglars-did-it-hide-the-gear-in-the-loft insurance scam. doreen almost has a heart attack as jimmy did the smashing up of the crockery a little too realistically.

2. morissey's cameo in the spin-off SOUTH, the tracy corkhill-and-jamie-go-to-london story.

3. harry cross and ralph's last goodbye at lime street station. after years of living together like 'men behaving badly' with slippers (following edna's death) they had a huge row about the fact that ralph was moving away to new pastures leaving our h on his own.
having refused to speak to him on his last day in the close, actually going so far as to shut the door without a word, harry eventually realised the futillity of it all, and made a last minute taxi-dash into the train station to say sorry, hug and be friends. tears everywhere. and not just onscreen.

4. free george jackson. all over the city at the time this slogan. poor old everyman george innocently provides hoods with a map of a warehouse (doh !) and gets stitched up by dapper blue-suited big- cheese gangster tommy mcardle. goes down, loathes chokey, goes a bit nuts. breaks down and asks wife marie to get him the hell out. she hijacks all manner of local media, spray paints scouse landmarks, shakes stuff up, he gets off.

5. that kiss.

6. mandy jordache offs tevor. bloody, graphic, slow. aided and abetted by beth, mrs j finally gets the clan free of nasty ole shifty-off-of-Bread by way of painkillers and a bread knife. the fact that they buried the body under the patio overshadows his lengthy all-too-realistic demise and the reason that necessitated it in the first place. it went on for ever but by *god* he deserved it.

7. billy and sheila finally get it together on new year's eve 87. life had been real tough for both billy and sheila (rape, prsion, fiddling the leccy, god knows what else) so it was a hard hearted sod indeed who didn't cheer when they finally smooched in billy's front room. they got married in the end.

8. the siege. the 2 nurses and their would be rock-god mate pat are held hostage by a shabby fruitloop they met at the fair (!?). he has some long-forgotten socio-political point to make, they take him home and make him tea. so he pulls a gun on them. the gun goes off *eventually* after what feels like a month. in reality it was about a week. neighbour terry manfully goes into the house to be greeted with the unforgettable sight of kate lying dead in a pool of blood on the floor.

9. sinbad. just generally.

10. billy corkhill cracks. a year or 2 before robbing the supermarket manager in the street and a good few months into being jobless, mr c. drives round and round his own garden in his own car in tears. screaming about life's injustices, how grim it is to be on the dole, and how hateful the neighbours are, it was jimmy mcgovern-scripted and it was ace.

it effectively finished years ago but god those golden years !

1. Mike Dixon giving Bel Simpson the clap

But Oooooooowwwwweeeen Ah luv yer

The bit at the end was very cringey last night, like the end of a kids tv show or a government ad or something.

Alan Partridge's drunken rant around the close one Christmas

The Collins family! Paul's redundancy. Lucy (Karin Cartledge RIP).

Billy Corkhill - "come 'ead, come 'ead, 'ave me wife, only 5 quid!"

Ralph (Ray Dunbobbin - anyone remember him in the Liver Birds)

Karen G on the front cover of the NME.

Karen's voice : 'ah'm just washin' me huuur'

Terry Sullivan!

And.... the real life Damon (Simon O'Brien) introducing my friends' band 'Shelia Grant's Baby' onstage in 1985. (Another ILXer witnessed this!)

Man the internet's great (Vol 250)

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Beth+Jordache+Lesbian+Romance+With+Margaret+From+Brookside+

brookside went madly wrong in the last 5 or 10 years and jimmy corkhill was one of the the main reasons it was so crap.

the bag i use daily was from a 2nd hand shop - it's made by jordache and has the jordache logo on the handle. i think of the jordache family every day now because of it.

I blame the Jordaches for Brookside's decline. Or at least, the whole Trevor under the patio thing. That was the beginning of the end for me.

The last episode of Brookside I saw, Sinbad was having his legs sawn off.

it's quite disappointing that most of the youtube brookside-action is jordache related.

My strongest Brookside memory is of Billy Corkhill going mental and doing donuts on his neighbours lawns. Billy and Reenee were the best. The whole armed robbery storyline was one of the best soap storylines ever.

Nate o.t.m.
The original armed robbery episode of BROOKSIDE is one of my fave tv moments ever. Same day as the yuppie wedding. Oh man...

That scene when Billy's in the line-up, I can still remember the butterflies in my stomach.

Brookside had the most macabre storylines sometimes for a british soap.

i loved the wacky religious cult story, where Terry got brainwashed by soft-talking 'simon'

Many classic episodes now online! Fer free la' !

http://www.channel4.com/search/?q=brookside

A former Brookside actor has been charged with murder after a man was shot dead outside a Liverpool pub.

Brian Regan, 53, of St Mary's Road, Garston, who played Terry Sullivan in the soap, has also been charged with perverting the course of justice.

Oh, Terry.

Shockah

Surely they've got the wrong man, it was Barry.

haha was the villain in the final episode really named Jack Michaelson? That's brilliant

Yep.

loads of amazing Brookside clips!

http://www.youtube.com/user/sinbad0p?feature=watch

DO US ONE WILL YE?!!

Had a good time reading over these Brookside threads, had a few laughs. Funny that people are so polarized by Jimmy's big end speech. And some say Brookside used to be really good? I just imagine that soaps are always bad and only get praised when people are surprised when they're not completely awful. But I was far too young to judge the quality and I do have some warmth towards it that I cant quite understand or explain. I always preferred Brookside and the Australian soaps to Coronation Street and EastEnders, both of which appalled me somehow, Emmerdale was easier to watch.
I think I started paying attention to Brookside a couple of years before the murder+garden burial story and stopped watching in 2000 but my memory probably isn't reliable.

The Shooting Stars parody was hilarious because Bob Mortimer looked just like Mick.

I used to roll on the floor and shout "I didn't rape Nicky Shadwick" in the voice of Luke Musgrove. I think I was still in primary school.
There were just so many lines that seemed to be repeated endlessly, or was it that I watched the repeats? How many times did Bev really say to Ron that she wanted a "fresh start"?

My sister was once tormented by a nightmare of Patricia turning into a wild cat and killing Max.

I barely remembered any character names until I saw them mentioned here.

Ouch at Suzy on Claire Sweeney.

they're now uploading this from the very start on the STV Player, ie the Scottish iPlayer. They're adding ten episodes a week. We've watched a couple and it's very different from the gangsters-and-incest Brookside of the 90s I remember from growing up - it feels very static and slow compared to the soaps today, yet every scene feels tense and significant. I'm really enjoying it.

it prided itself on the drama of the mundane until it caved in and became murders-a-go-go

I loved early Brookside but missed the first 6 months or so as Channel 4 wasn't initially available where I lived. I'm tempted to very belatedly catch up.

every time I watch Corrie these days there's always either another serial killer on the rampage or someone is in jail for a crime they didn't commit, and it feels so obviously a transparent attempt to ape these big Trevor Jordache/Richard Hillman storylines from twenty years ago. The worst is Hollyoaks - every week there's an explosion, or a murder, and there's no real character development in the ensuing grief - everything is just shrugged off, because the impression is that it's the stunts and disasters that keeps viewers, rather than the characters and performances.

after (literally) a lifetime watching Corrie, i finally gave it up around a year ago primarily for the reasons you mention. it just got too much and too repetitive. i have been surprised by how little i have missed it and can't imagine it will ever win me back.

during lockdown I watched a few episodes of Classic Corrie which are being repeated on one of the ITV network. There was a really nice episode I caught where Hilda Ogden had went to Stan's grave on the anniversary of his death, laid down some flowers, shed a quiet tear, and then went back to her everyday life. It was really moving, totally understated and so true to how grief doesn't ever really leave you. Similarly I remember in Brookside from the 90s how everything that happened to Susannah was shaped by her kids dying. I'd be amazed if I ever saw an anniversary marked in Corrie now - people seem to die constantly and nobody ever seems troubled by it. If I lived in Weatherfield I would simply know better than to have a chat with any of my neighbours during the finals week of Britain's Got Talent because it would be too traumatic.

It doesn't help that they're all on five or more times a week. Everything has to happen on-screen, be dragged out, and be recapped in case you've missed a dozen episodes. We joke that the first fifteen mins of Corrie on a Monday is always "oh wow, can you believe that happened last week?" "Oh I didn't know, I was too busy with what happened to me last week. Anyway this week you better not do the thing you said you were going to do last week"