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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 365688" data-attributes="member: 22">It struck me as fascinatingly perverse that, after the episodes that occur on the day of Gavin's death where it's all about Petra, the following week's episodes, dealing with his funeral, are (as far as I remember) shown almost exclusively from  the Collins' point of view, with Petra little more than an extra.Brookside really broke all the rules of narrative structure and pacing that had existed in soaps thus far. I vaguely remember reading that on Coronation Street (and possibly Crossroads), no storyline lasted longer than six weeks. If not wholly resolved, it would at least be put on a back burner for a long period. Brookside, however, was unafraid to play things out in something like real time, even to the point of monotony. So Petra's grief goes on and on and on ... and on, just as Sheila's postnatal depression later would. (On any other soap, a grieving widow would have gotten two or three weeks in the spotlight, then taken a backseat until she was "better"). Similarly, Alexandra Pigg isn't afraid to play Petra as unsympathetically or mundanely or awkwardly as the situation calls for. The priority seems to be being truthful to the situation rather than entertaining to the viewer (which is probably why they started bringing in bigger characters like Alan, to offset all this truthful mundanity.) I think she's amazingly good.Another rule-breaking way in which Brookside went on and on and on is in the length of its scenes. Over on Coronation Street, when an argument reached such a pitch that a character would storm upstairs, the scene would naturally end -- if only because upstairs simply didn't exist: the set hadn't been built. And without realising it, viewers became accustomed to that rhythm: shouty climax, slam of door, end of scene. With Brookie set in real houses on a real estate, however, such a situation could continue indefinitely and often did, with characters able to follow each other upstairs, from room to room, even house to house. One of the remarkable things about the Sheila/Marie showdown [USER=2]@Ome[/USER] mentioned is the rhythm of it (or lack thereof): it builds, explodes, dies down, reignites, changes configuration, continues ... before ending on an oddly melancholic note. At the time, it felt totally unpredictable, even disorientating: this isn't how TV was supposed to work! (Same goes for that first Den and Angie two-hander on Enders.)Given its dedication to realism, it's funny that Brookside would utilise the flashback convention at a time when UK soaps just didn't do that sort of thing. They'd occasionally play with disorientating camera angles as well. It's a very effective way of keeping the audience off-balance, an anything-is-possible feeling tossed into the almost documentary naturalism of the rest of the series.Fascinating take: I'd never considered that she might have partially engineered the moment, but it makes absolute sense. And then the trauma of that incident collides with the comedy of Sheila crashing Bobby's car with Barry caught between the two women. Have you reached the episode Barry pays Karen to cook Sunday dinner for him and Pet yet? I'll say no more about it in case you haven't.This is the first of four illicit affairs Brookside covers in its first 350 episodes. All the others are shown from a specific viewpoint. This one, as I recall, is shown fairly equally from Heather's and Roger's points of view. It's great!Yes, one could read some foreshadowing into Gordon's attitude to Heather but I actually think that makes it less interesting. It "explains away" all of Gordon's wonderful  idiosyncrasies a little too neatly for my tastes. I'm remained of the running gag in Friends where people keep assuming Chandler is gay. As a result, a significant proportion of the audience thought that the character should come out as gay, but as Matthew Perry explained, that would have killed the joke, which was all about Chandler's insecurities and anxieties about his masculinity. When Gordon 2 arrives, all he is is gay -- righteously, boringly gay. All of the little details that made Gordon 1 so fascinating and believable have been completely flattened out.Thinking about it, it's only Paul and then Harry who are particularly prone to reminiscing about the past. I guess it makes sense given both are older and remember the war. Only much later, towards the end of the decade when I'm getting ready to switch Brookside off for good, do we get into the more conventionally soapy secret pasts of some of the other families.</blockquote>

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