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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 409391" data-attributes="member: 22">I have to confess to giving up on Making Out after the first series. I got kind of Margi Clark’d out.  I think it’s probably fallen off the iPlayer by now. But Boys From the Blackstuff is on there, and that’s full of Brookside-adjacent stuff: Bobby Grant as a doctor, Vicky Cleary as a DHSS spy, a really lovely performance by Tracey Corkhill’s real-life granddad, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg (even if Alan Bleasdale wasn’t exactly a Brookie fan as I recall), plus Julie Walters in one of her best roles.I think the film might have been The French Connection (which is also on the iPlayer for the next fortnight, along with another early 70s crime classic, Get Carter starring Michael Caine, Britt Ekland and Alf Roberts. I'm planning to re-watch them both).I really loved the exchange between Heather and Charlie at Paul and Annabelle's barbecue, thrown to conceal Gordon's sexuality from the neighbours. "They're gay, aren't they?" Heather asks coolly. In that moment, she is too preoccupied with trying to make sense of her own situation to care less about the Collinses and their strenuous efforts at concealment. .Instead, she and Charlie find themselves unintentional co-conspirators, both in on the secret the neighbours are frantically trying to hide.As petulant stepchildren-to-be, Ruth and Scott got off to a bit of a soapily generic start, but I really warmed to them this time around. As the cracks in Nick's persona start to show, they both become increasingly more interesting.The scene where Ruth goes round to the Corkhills for tea and teams up with Billy to make fun of Rod's plans to join the police reminded me of the dynamic when Karen's old army boyfriend Mike came home on leave and started with palling round with Barry and Terry, leaving Karen herself out in the cold.Yeah that was a great little moment, and the Heather/Nick bedroom scene that preceded it was one of several  wonderfully nuanced 'scenes from a marriage' between them, full of fascinating little shifts of emotion: from romance to intimacy to suspicion to resentment ... I could have watched the two of them circling each other forever. But it's Heather's ball-shrivellingly withering "The world is full of I-could-have-beens" speech (written by - surprise, surprise - one J McGovern) that has lingered in the back of my mind for decades.Aw, Gail! With her dreams of having a jacuzzi "like Joan Collins or Krystle", she might just be my favourite of Damon's girlfriends. Since returning from his summer job with short hair, we've seen a newly mature, sober Damon, which has been both plausible and oddly moving. Gail gets him in touch with his mischievous side again, even if she's far nuttier than he ever was.Oh, interesting!I remember my housemate at the time laughing at Pat and Sandra's overwrought final embrace, saying it looked like they were eating each other's hair.With New Gordon, everything's about Being Gay, but it's all external. He gets interviewed for TV about ... Being Gay. He orders a magazine about ... Being Gay. He wears a badge that symbolises ... Being Gay.  Tellingly, his reunion with schoolfriend Chris takes place entirely off screen. From the first time we see them together, they are singing from the same Being Gay hymn sheet. Chris works in a gay bicycle shop (or something) because ... well, of course he does. It's another external. From watching these episodes, you wouldn't think that being gay had anything to do with anything internal:, anything to do with emotion or desire or shame. "I'm not ashamed of being gay," huffs Gordon at one point. "Of course not," Annabelle replies dutifully. But It would be more dramatically fruitful if he was ashamed, or at least ambivalent, or really anything other than just blandly, self-righteously, all-purposely Proud.When Gordon explains, blandly and proudly, the significance of his badge to Barry and Sheila, I was reminded of the OG (Original Gordon) and how, every time he would encounter Damon and his mates on the close, there was always an awkwardness, a tension, about him, even when they were all getting along. It didn't have anything to do with Being Gay, it had to do with smaller, subtler things: upbringing, class, insecurity (all of which were kind of encapsulated in that small but brilliantly illuminating conversation between him and his dad where he admitted to  resenting Heather for being so beautiful.) Now all those quirks and idiosyncrasies have been ironed out. As well as being recast, Gordon has been reprogrammed. He is no longer Awkward, Interesting Freckle Boy; he is now Well-Adjusted Gay Character. And that's all he is. There are numerous smaller characters -- all of Damon's and Karen's friends, every person Heather's ever worked with -- who have felt more rounded, more real than New Gordon.The show's unwillingness, or inability, to get beneath the surface of Gordon's character means the focus is continually put on Paul and Annabelle's reactions to his sexuality, and those reactions can apparently only be dramatised by the threat of someone finding out, so it becomes about externals built upon externals built upon externals. On EastEnders, the most overtly negative response Colin faced to his sexuality was from Dot Cotton when, after months of thinking he was the bee's knees, the penny finally drops that him and Barry are "that way". As with Carol, the discovery arises out of a domestic cleaning situation. Doing Colin and Barry's service wash in the launderette,  Dot can't understand why there's only one set of bedsheets to clean -- until she does. Again, as with Carol, there's an immediate fear of AIDS, but as Dot is Dot, her reaction is 100% in character and the Square (and the soap itself) is big enough to accommodate both Colin and Dot until such time as he can get through to her and they can become friends again. In comparison, I felt Carol was used - as a sacrificial lamb, yes, but also as a kind of scapegoat .Going back to Paul's zebra-crossing campaign storyline, which I didn't hate but didn't love, I think my main problem was there wasn't really anything emotionally at stake. Somehow, the heart of the story was missing. Perhaps logically, that heart should have belonged to the woman whose son had been killed in the first place, but I can't even remember her name. Nothing wrong with the actress, but she existed solely for Paul and Annabelle to react to, just like Carol does here. Two working-class women whose anger and intelligence the show pays lip-service to (for there would be drama without them), but isn't really interested in. If Brookside was coming at this situation from Carol's point of view, I could imagine her realising Gordon is gay, quietly fearing the worst, and rather than kicking off hysterically, simply never showing up for work again -- but that wouldn't have given Paul and Annabelle anything to react to, and they seem to be the only prism through the show can confidently deal with anything to do with Gordon's sexuality.(I'm aware I'm being more picky here than I would be about another soap but really it's Brookie's fault for setting such a high standard for itself!)Of all the plots to externalise Gordon's gayness, I remembered this one as the most  painfully contrived -- of course Gay Gordon reads a magazine all about Being Gay and of course he insists on having it delivered to his parents' house and of course it goes to the wrong address -- but it actually wasn't as bad as I was expecting. Gordon's explanation about having to order the mag because it's hard to get hold of at least makes sense, and Rod and Billy's homophobic reaction to it felt refreshingly honest. (That said, it's funny how their - completely believable - prejudices surface for that one scene and then completely disappear again. It's a bit like the episode of Friends where they've managed to to secure a brief cameo by a big rock star at the end and so for the duration of that one ep, everyone's the biggest fan of Sting in the world, and then he too is never mentioned again). Two minor discrepancies I noticed: everyone involved in the story insists on calling Gordon's publication a paper when it's clearly a magazine (even when they're holding it in their hands), and when Billy and Rod are tussling over it, they manage to pull the cover off, yet when Billy subsequently hands it to Paul, it's miraculously intact again. In and of themselves, these fluffs are totally unimportant -- I mean, who cares? -- but it's kind of emblematic of the disconnect between the subject Brookside purports to be tackling and the way it's presented on screen: unconfidently, from a distance, with kid gloves.The "I'm Sting's biggest fan" syndrome manifests itself here too, with Annabelle's otherwise kindly instructor making an out-of-the-blue homophobic jibe about his bitchy helper. (Again, this is more an observation than a criticism.) The bitchy helper himself was a reporter in the Grants' Mother & Baby Photo Competition story the previous year and I think he pops up again in Damon & Debbie.</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?