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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 390402" data-attributes="member: 22">I’ve pondered this question so many times over the years! The actual siege apart, by this point I’ve already started fast-forwarding through any of Pat and Sandra’s scenes that don’t involve Kate or the neighbours, which is something I’ve never done with any other series (not even Sons and Daughters during its painful final years)*. Yet those same scenes will often be sandwiched by brilliant stuff happening elsewhere on the close.(*Ok, maybe through a couple of characters' scenes in Coronation Street just before I finally lost track of it circa 2011)The only explanation I can come up goes back to Brookside’s original USP as a soap: it isn’t an ensemble show about a larger community into which new characters can be easily assimilated and absorbed. The weaker ones can’t just be given the task of pouring tea in the local cafe for weeks on end while the writers figure out how best to utilise them in the long run . Each household must stand or fall by their believability as a self-contained unit right from the start. And because the close is so much smaller than your average soap street or square or motel and the amount of intermingling between families is so minimal, each individual household has far more screen time than they would on any other soap and so any weaknesses are that much more exposed. There’s nowhere to hide.At the risk of going off at too much of a soapy tangent, to my recollection there have only ever been four families on EastEnders who have moved into the Square en masse as completely brand new characters, without the audience being familiar with at least one of them beforehand: the Taverniers (Michelle Gayle’s lot) in the 80s, the Di Marcos (Louise Jameson’s) in the 90s, the Slaters (the most successful) in 2000 and the Ferreiras (the most legendarily disastrous) a few years later. Tasking a disparate (often multi-generational) bunch of actors with the job of making us believe as if they know each other inside out while simultaneously delivering a moving van's worth of clunky exposition is never easy, but with the exception of the Jacksons, this is what Brookside has to do every time a new group of people move in -- at least until Number 10 becomes a kind of Corkhill halfway house around 1990 and then Patricia Farnham's mum and dad move in next door to her. The nurses is the first time they've failed to do so convincingly; the Corkhills Mk I is, in my opinion, the last time they fully succeed.And maybe the other fundamental factor in why the nurses were such a failure (at least for me) goes back to what I said before about why having an Australian air-hostess in the TARDIS on Doctor Who just never rang true for me. It feels in like both instances, they were conceived less as characters than as marketing opportunities. Remembering early publicity shots of Pat, Sandra and Kate, they look like a cross between Tight Fit and Pepsi & Shirley -- more Pineapple Dance Studios than underfunded NHS. They're young, smiley, colourful, energetic and Fun with a couple F -- the very antithesis of Brookside's image during its first years as a grey, grim, dour and gritty series that's so depressing hardly anyone watches it. "A breath of fresh air" as the TV Times no doubt would have described them.[ATTACH=full]51344[/ATTACH]And somehow they were never able to transcend that initial brightly-coloured, multi-accented novelty "thing" and become something more real. Little wonder that the writers would return to familiar territory, ie. the very estate the Grants came from, when creating the close's next household.Yeah, Kate's death felt shockingly tragic (things like this just didn't happen on soaps), partly because it was such a waste, which gave the story some lasting gravitas.  If it'd been Pat or Sandra, I'd have probably cheered.I guess the prospect of a Pat and Sandra romance was too much to resist, again if only as a TV Times-ish marketing opportunity.Yes, desecration, that's the word!I actually missed the siege first time around because I was up in Edinburgh for the festival -- about twenty teenagers sleeping in three rooms performing two shows a day for a month while getting drunk every night, it wasn't unlike a siege situation itself, with a bit of Lord of the Flies thrown  in for good measure -- so hearing vague whispers of what was happening in fictional Liverpool at the time sounded very surreal. Pat and Sandra living at Terry's was where I caught up with the story again. Bobby Ewing must have died soon after because for years I had a home-recorded VHS cassette of the final few eps of that season's Dallas and, thanks to the atypical length of 'Swan Song', there was a longer than usual gap at the end of the tape where most of a Brookside omnibus survived intact, these scenes included.Something about the post-siege atmosphere -- even down to the crisp, white, baggy clothes Pat and Sandra are wearing, which look very mid-80s, but are also the kind of thing you might choose to wear after living in the same soiled outfits for so long -- has always felt strangely authentic to me. So has the awkwardness of the funeral scenes (despite some ropey acting).I remember this as one of those potentially interesting Jimmy McGovern mouthpiece scenes which fuses soapy melodrama (the siege) with political reality (Harry voting for the government that made the cuts to the NHS that resulted in the John Clarke situation). But then Pat appears and kills the whole thing. He's meant to be the peacemaker, but instead he just starts cluelessly shouting all his lines, presumably because the other two actors are shouting theirs, and as usual turns it all into generalised nothingness."I love idealists. They're cheaper." The grubby tabloid reporter is such a cliche now, but felt quite fresh then.Yes, it looks as if it might work -- again, Sandra's almost good, and there's that weird normality in the aftermath of something so strange and terrible -- but then Pat appears and all of a sudden it's like Kate who?Edna's collapse reminds me of the scene in early Coronation Street where Florrie/Edna is in the corner shop oblivious to her mother on the other side of the wall, sliding down to the floor unseen.Sadly, the actor who played Kevin died the other day, around the same time as John Savident and Pamela Salem. I didn't realise he was a regular in Grange Hill, another Phil Redmond series, in which he again was a teacher.Enders did exactly the same thing in 2000, with the Slaters arriving in the Square in a removal van at the same time as Ethel's funeral procession was leaving it.Lots to say about the Corkhills but I'm sure we'll get there in due course!Yes, Brookside seems determined to lighten the mood, post-Kate and Edna. The camping stuff was loopy but worked and the Mother Baby stuff at the Grants always makes me laugh. I always remember Sheila's slightly deflated expression as Neil tactfully directs her out of the shot he's taking of Karen and the baby.Gosh, that's really quite poignant!</blockquote>

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