The creator of some of Britain’s best-loved soaps has said the “courage has gone out of broadcasting” and suggested that television bosses should not be afraid to flout Ofcom rules.
Phil Redmond – the brains behind Hollyoaks, Grange Hill and Brookside – said there was “too much risk aversion” in television, with producers afraid to upset regulators even if it meant pleasing audiences.
Redmond told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think the problem is that the courage has gone out of broadcasting really, and there’s just too much risk aversion.
There is a place for something like Grange Hill, and from my career, I always found that the harder you made the storyline, the more you upset the regulators, but the more the audience appreciated it, because the audience live these issues, and what they want to see is their own life put on screen as realistically as possible.”
He also said future soaps set in schools ought to be more gritty, with social media being the “big issue” that children are facing. To make a programme like Grange Hill you need television producers with real “life experience”, he said, such as growing up in a working-class background.
Redmond added: “I think at the moment, we’ve got too many programmes being made by people who just want to be in telly, people who want to come into the media because they think it’s cool.
“And when I was looking at trying to find writers for all the shows, my first question is: ‘What do you want to write about?’ And they’d say: ‘I’ll write anything, you tell me what to write.’ [I’d say:] ‘I don’t want to tell you. I want you to tell me.’”
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When asked by the Today programme’s guest editor, the former chancellor Sajid Javid, what he would tackle today, he said: “I think the big issue you’d want to tackle is the impact of social media.
“There’s no counterpoint to that, and that’s what Grange Hill used to offer. It didn’t matter what the issue was … Grange Hill would always offer some solution or some way to go and ask somebody about this issue, but at the end of it, it’s basically: you’re not on your own.”
Meanwhile, Ofcom’s chair, Michael Grade, said there was “absolutely no harm” in upsetting Ofcom and praised Grange Hill for not being “preachy at all”.
Grade said: “This was an amazing, amazing show. It changed television in more ways than I think people realise.
“Prior to Grange Hill, life was [like the world of the children’s author] Enid Blyton, gentle comedy, there was [the school comedy] Please Sir! on ITV, which was brilliant, but very gentle, it didn’t really deal with the angst of growing up.
“Coronation Street was fluffy and lovely and warm and cosy, and then along came Grange Hill, [about] the anxiety as you go through growing up, there it was in the raw.”
By contrast, the long-running soap Coronation Street has recently come under fire from its fans and former cast members for an excess of dark, issues-led plots.