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Brookside’s incest storyline is its most contentious yet.
Behind it lies an unresolved question about chattering class morals
Brookside, says its creator Phil Redmond, “is meant for a pluralist society. “I believe in pluralism”. For 14 years Redmond’s Channel 4 soap opera , the channel’s most popular programme - has tested that ambition to destruction.
From a suburban cul-de-sac in Liverpool, viewers have been gripped by date rape, a Down’s syndrome birth, heroin addiction, wife-battering and murder. But now Brookside is in the middle of its most contentious storyline to date: the incestuous relationship between brother and sister Nat and Georgia Simpson. As usual, the Daily Mail has led a denunciatory chorus, part of its wider assault against Michael Grade, the Channel 4 boss, as the country’s “pornographer-in-chief”. Redmond has been accused of glamourising his subject, not least by choosing for the roles of Nat and Georgia a pair of highly photogenic young actors: John Sandford and Helen Grace. “From the comments, you would think that we hadn’t thought about all of this quite carefully.” “We wanted the characters to be attractive says Redmond. and it was important that the family should be perceived as both educated and intelligent, so that there would be no suggestion that the situation had arisen through ignorance.”
Equally, the scriptwriters judged it right to make Georgia older than her brother - no hint of exploitation by the male sibling. The relationship, which started in the pair’s mid-teens and has continued despite their marriages, has been portrayed as a thing of joy, but one that exposes the couple to the harsh judgment of the law -a seven- year prison sentence is, technically, possible - and the turbulent misunderstanding of those around them. The incestuous lovers’ judgment of their own behaviour - “We’re adults, we love one another,” Nat tells his parents - is thus set against the social and legal constraints of Brookside Close. “We introduced the incest storyline at a time when the nation seemed to be debating morality. It was an opportunity to remind people that it extremely difficult to predict, prescribe or legislate for the complexity of sexual relationships,” says Redmond.
No-one can accuse the production team of approaching the affair lightly. As is usual with Brookside, there was extensive consultation with experts in social services, the police, the medical profession and the law. ” The difference was that on this subject, most would only give their advice off the record, because incest is not supposed to exist.”
Like any good storyteller, Redmond prefers to leave interpretations of Brookside to others.
As a close follower of the soap since its inception 14 years ago, I find the story of Nat and Georgia particularly rich in potential. By locating the incest plot-line inside the Simpson family, relative newcomers to the street and very much at the upper end of Brookside’ s social order, surely a wider point is being made about those who moralise about the poor. Mr Simpson Senior, Ollie, is a left-wing bookseller and writer of reviews and his wife Bel a former buyer for a big Liverpool store. Georgia is a Graphic Designer and Nat is studying architecture at university. Very different from their neighbours, window-cleaner Sinbad and Mick Johnson from the pizza parlour. The reaction of the parents to their children’s behaviour is crucial to the framing of the plot, as it will be worked through in the coming weeks.
Ollie, who prides himself on the enlightened manner in which he has raised his offspring, slaps Georgia across the face. Bel enters a state of frozen horror and stuffs herself with tranquillizers.
Perhaps inevitably, Bel and Ollie turn on each other, raking into each other’s pasts in a way that indicates much undischarged business. Ollie is rebuked for drug taking and casual sex as a young man. Bel is told that it is only through her husband’s gentleness that she has been saved from her own anxieties. When they first slept together, says Ollie, it was like having sex with a piece of wood.The story, says Redmond, is his way of re-examining the moral and social legacy of the sixties generation.
It is too early to say how it will turn out. Will the Simpsons come to represent the country’ s progressives - or its “chattering classes”, to use the familiar term of reproach - driven in upon themselves in a hostile moral and political atmosphere fanned by the Daily Mail and its ilk?
Will the Brookside writers find a way to redeem the Simpsons, enabling them to live confidently and openly by their own values, or will they be forced to adapt, humbled by changing times?
It has the making of a big theme and a climax as important as any that Brookside has engineered, and it recalls an earlier conflict between an artist, a broadcaster and the world of politics. “This is another clear case of the broadcasters trying to assault the public by pushing against the barriers of what is acceptable . . . another Bolshie poet seeking to impose his frustrations on the rest of us.”
That was Gerald Howarth, the Tory MP, commenting nine years ago on Richard Eyre’s Channel 4 film of Tony Harrison’s graveyard elegy V.
I don’t know whether they would welcome the comparison, but Harrison and the Brookside team have much in common. A northern context, a powerful sense of social responsibility, a loathing of the gentrification of culture and a marriage of the demotic with the intellectually acute. At the time, Eyre wrote: “if I had the slightest influence over educational policy in this country, I’d see that V was a set text in every school in the country. But, of course, if we lived in that sort of country, the poem wouldn’t have needed to be written.” Quite so. Keep watching

Channel 4’s controversial soap Brookside is to be censured by the Broadcasting Standards Council for its notorious storyline on incest.

The episode which first featured the incestuous relationship, broadcast in early August, showed brother and sister Nat and Georgia Simpson (played by John Sandford and Helen Grace) naked together in bed. The BSC, whose chairman is Lady Howe, will criticise the timing of the scene - it was shown before the 9pm watershed - the choice of the couple, and their state of undress.

The BSC, the Independent Television Commission, and the channel itself are still receiving complaints about the sibling affair, which included another scene where they emerged from their house scantily clad after their young brother, Danny, had caught them together in bed. Danny was run over by a car in the street as he ran away in shock.

The BSC and ITC are critical of Brookside’s choice of Nat and Georgia for the incestuous relationship. They suspect the pair - both in their early twenties - were chosen as they are so obviously attractive.

There is also concern at the reasons given by Nat and Georgia in last Wednesday’s episode for the start of their affair several years ago. They said they were upset by their mother devoting so much time to their younger brother and by the death of their grandfather.

The two were also disturbed by their recent move to Liverpool. They therefore turned to each other for comfort.

`It does not seem to tally with the causes most usually given for incestuous relationships,’ said a BSC source.

The episode which is to be censured was seen by more than 7 million viewers, well above its average August audience. The programme, condemned by parent pressure groups, was cleared by Channel 4 before broadcast. The channel said `incest is a perfectly acceptable subject to be aired as part of a pre-watershed drama serial’.

Brookside has already received several censures from the television regulators. The ITC gave it a formal warning over the knife scene where Trevor Jordache was killed by his wife and daughter. The BSC upheld complaints over the same stabbing scene as well as another involving Jordache beating his wife and, yet another, about cocaine.

After last Wednesday’s episode, the programme offered viewers a help-sheet on incest following a suggestion from the ITC. Channel 4, while not commenting on the forthcoming rebuke, has held talks with the programme’s producer, Mal Young, about its handling of the issue. Mr Young said: `Some people have called incest the last taboo. I’m sure that there are no more taboos, but if there are, we’ll find them.’

The BSC had 40 complaints about the episode while Channel 4 received more than 20. The Independent Television Commission, which will make its own adjudication on the incest scene next month, received 34 critical letters. The ITC is now holding talks with Channel 4 about the portrayal and scheduling of the story, which began in early summer and is still a major theme in the programme.

For those of us who like to stay in of an evening and watch the telly, there has been an awful lot of outing going on. Tony, the laddy drug dealer of EastEnders, has realised he would rather be with Tiffany’ s brother than Tiffany. “I’ll pray for you Tony” says his religious nutter of a sister when he comes out to her. Nat has come out as gay in Brookside mainly to cover the fact that he is sleeping with his sister. When his parents tell Max Farnham, who has already caught the incestuous pair in bed together, he simply changes the subject. “I must say the garden’s looking nice. What are they?” he says, pointing at flowers.
“Pansies” comes the deadpan answer from Nat’s mother.
A recent episode of the wondrous Seinfeld revolved around the idea that Seinfeld and his friend George were mistaken as gay by a student reporter. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that” was the line they kept repeating over and over again.

There may not be anything wrong with it but gay characters are still considered to be somehow risky. None the less they bring a certain amount of cachet to a sitcom or comedy that is prepared to roll with them. Gayness has become the all-purpose and often rather lazy signifier of authenticity, of tackling real issues, of telling the truth. Even The Archers, that supposed hotbed of loony sexual correctness, has got an unlikely gay publican who plays cricket.

So why can’t Ellen of all people come out? Ellen is a fictional character, a clueless bookshop manageress played by the comedian Ellen DeGeneres in the Channel Four series of the same name. According to her agent, DeGeneres wants “to break new ground and do something that hasn’t been done on television before”. She wants to present her popular character as a lesbian. Eat your heart out Anna Friel. The decision will rest with Disney executives as the programme is made by Touchstone Productions, a Disney offshoot. Disney prides itself on the promotion of family values and may be reluctant to associate itself with a programme based around a happy homosexual.

American TV channel ABC describes the character as currently displaying “a confused sensibility” . Closeted confusion is fine, overt declarations of sexuality may mean a boycott, a less “family-friendly” timeslot and a fall in ratings. Yet would Ellen being gay fundamentally alter the structure of the series? It certainly wouldn’t alter her dress sense. Ellen is already read as gay by many of her fans. Her attempts at having boyfriends drift into endless self-depreciation. She could never have been described as highly motivated in this area anyway.
So if Ellen the character becomes legitimately lesbian will that make Ellen the programme somehow more realistic, more reflective of the way we live today? When a load of gay Coronation Street fans were taken around the sacred street itself in a programme on gay icons, they were asked if they wanted to see a gay character introduced into the series. To a man and a woman they replied no. Corrie lives in its own gorgeous bubble, peopled with women tough enough to make a drag queen feel faint;they seemed to be saying, please don’t try and taint it in the dirty name of realism.
Our attitude towards gay characters is strangely earth-bound and literal in a medium which, while flirting with naturalism, is highly anti- naturalistic. If the essential truth of a person is limited to their sexuality then the only truth we can get outof a fictional character is by outing them, which has its own dramatic limitations. For we know, don’t we, that we soon become tired of issues masquerading as characters standing on street corners explaining the plot to one another. This is the common complaint about Brookside, which plays manic to EastEnders’ depressive. Brookie can do ‘roid rage, incest, breast cancer, the problems of single parenting and turn Sinbad into the weirdest sex symbol since, well …Ron Dixon, all in one episode and still get a laugh. EastEnders is currently in superbly miserablist form, the tracks of Ian Beale’s tears threatening to overshadow the romance of Tiffany and Grant, who are obviously warming up as the new Den and Angie.
However bizarre the plotlines of our soaps become, those involved appear to take them for real. Brookside’s Helen Grace, the actress who plays Georgia, sister and lover of Nat, lets us know in a press release that she “doesn’t condone incest”. Well, that’s reassuring. I trust similar statements will be released from Pam St Clement, the actress who plays Pat Butcher, saying that she doesn’t condone wearing Christmas decorations for earrings and running children over as her character does. Actually the fact that Pam St Clement is openly gay has had little effect on our perception of Pat, primarily because we understand that she is acting. When straight actors play gay, though, we have to be bombarded with evidence of their heterosexuality as though we can no longer make the distinction between character and actor.
As the soaps become more and more successful they too exploit this ambiguity between truth and fiction. Brookside, which goes out five nights the week after next with “a special focus on devastating developments in the affairs of the Farnhams” is on one level being promoted as ” a battle of the bitches” scenario with Max’s first and second wife fighting over him. Such a spectacle requires even more than the average suspension of belief. Yet these episodes are also being touted as somehow socially usefulas they increase awareness about breast cancer - Patricia fears hers is returning. We are caught somewhere between the meta-fictional heights of the Eighties soaps like Dynasty and some earnest public health pronouncement.
Soaps which have traditionally been defined as “closed communities in crisis” are always imagined communities. It is as if what can be imagined at the moment is clearly beyond the boundary of any one community, which is why scriptwriters are strainingour credulity. If you live in Ramsay Street, for instance, your chances of falling into a coma are enormously high; if you live in Brookside Close, maniacs, religious cults and Jimmy Corkhill lurk in every corner. If you live in Albert Square you are destined to spend every night of your life in the Queen Vic. None of this is likely, so why do we continue to pretend that it is? The most memorable episodes of a soap are nearly always the ones where you feel the writer chafing against the formulaic constraints of the medium. Yet we continue to invest these national narratives with a realism that they very rarely possess. TV realism, it is worth reminding ourselves, is always relative. Eastenders is realistic compared not to real life but to The X-Files. Our infatuation with soap stars therefore becomes a quest for further authentication. Some even oblige, such as Martine McCutcheon, who plays the marvellous Tiffany and who recently demanded to be flown from St Tropez to Ibiza. “I want somewhere with a decent disco”. Give that girl her own show.
Inevitably this kind of blurring between character and actor that much popular television tempts its audiences with has become a subject in itself for many American writers. The Larry Sanders Show, Seinfeld and Roseanne are about the world of television, of celebrity - in other words about themselves. As is Ellen. So if the fictional Ellen wants to come out shall we take it that the real Ellen is also coming out? Or is this all just a sophisticated come-on - that somehow, somewhere, there’s a real person in all this pretence? As if.

Channel 4 received a fresh rebuke yesterday from a television watchdog for glamorising incest in Brookside.

The Broadcasting Standards Council said incest was a subject that had to be treated with care and sensitivity and the programme had failed to do this.

Last week the Independent Television Commission ordered Channel 4 to broadcast an apology for showing brother and sister Nat and Georgia Simpson cuddling in bed in Brookside’s Saturday teatime omnibus.

The council, chaired by Lady Howe, went further, describing both the 8pm weekday and 5pm omnibus slots as “inappropriate”.

The council acknowledged the role soaps could play in dealing with difficult social issues, but its members had been troubled by “the absence of any insight into the motivation of the characters to behave as they did”.

It also criticised the use of attractive role models, actors John Sandford and Helen Grace.

Forty viewers had complained about a kiss and bedroom scenes between the couple.

Brookside producer Mal Young defended the storyline, saying it dealt with “the last taboo”.

Channel 4, in a statement to the council, said the series had a valuable role in bringing “untouchable” subjects to wider audiences.

Stories on drugs and date rape - and the incest story- had received a positive response from viewers and agencies working in these areas.

A steamy scene between a brother and sister screened Friday night shattered a taboo against incest on British television.
Viewers of “Brookside,” a serial about life in a housing project in the northwestern city of Liverpool, saw actors playing the characters Nat and Georgia Simpson kissing naked in bed after making love in a rented vacation cottage.
The prime-time programme, billed in advance by independent Channel 4 as: “an episode of Brookside you can’t afford to miss,” angered moral crusaders.
Even before it had been screened, Britain’s Broadcasting Standards Council had received two complaints, which it will consider Monday.
Newspapers reported that the Complaints concerned the timing of the broadcast — the program went on at 8 p.m., when many young children were watching television. Programs which include explicit sex or strong violence are normally shown after 9 p.m.
Mary Whitehouse, Britain’s most famous campaigner against sex and gratuitous violence on TV and radio, said the episode was “totally unacceptable at whatever time it was shown.” Whitehouse, founder of the National Viewers and Listeners Association added: “It normalizes that kind of behavior for the youngsters who are watching.”
But Helen Grace, the 24-year-old actress who plays maritally separated Georgia, said that “I thought as long as we’re not seen to condone incest, then it would be okay.” Mal Young, Brookside producer expected complaints.
“People will always blame TV for things going wrong in the world,” he said.

Last month the show screened the first scenes of incest in British soap history, the culmination of a three-month storyline in which brother and sister Nat (John Sandford) and Georgia (Helen Grace) tried to contain their mutual desire. In 1994, it broadcast British soap’s first lesbian kiss, between best friends Beth (Anna Friel) and Margaret (Nicola Stephenson). And, last year, the trial of mother Mandy and her daughter Beth for the “body under the patio” murder was sensationally stretched over five consecutive nights, and “guilty” and “not guilty” verdicts were filmed to maintain plot secrecy.
When the pair were found guilty, a group of women’s rights campaigners picketed the Liverpool offices of producer Phil Redmond.