Darrol Blake

Part III: Brookside (with a digression into Tucker's Luck).

DB. I’d watched Brookside before I got there in 1987, and the thing that I noticed, because I’d been a designer and I was fairly experienced by then. The first thing that I do when I watch something is that my brain prints out the layout of the situation or the set, and if somebody comes from the wrong angle I know that they’ve come from the wrong angle, because the bedroom door’s over there or whatever. Before I went up there watching Brookside as it was transmitted, I couldn’t work out the relationship of the houses. And once you’re there, of course it’s terribly easy; you know that there are two there, two there, two there and those two, where nobody ever asked what those houses were for.

LP. Yes, they never spoke to the neighbours that lived in those houses…

DB. One house was the canteen, the other was wardrobe and make-up and the other one at the far end was the technical block with the editing suite and all of the rest of it in, and the one on the corner was Phil’s office with admin downstairs. And of course, the other thing was that all of the rooms were pretty small, so you had to take one camera – except for special occasions – and you had to take all of the furniture out in order to do close-ups.

LP. Brookside started using the steadicam very early on, and I wonder if you had any thoughts about that. Had you worked with it before?

DB. I’m pretty sure not, though I had worked with handheld cameras. There was a lightweight camera that had come in on Emmerdale. When I first came to Emmerdale in the late seventies they still had what I called the gas cameras, these bloody great things, and huge vans for OB, and the first thing that you did when you were looking for a location was find a car park to put all your stuff in, it was just ridiculous. Then later this lightweight camera came in, and I took it down a mine, and all sorts of places. But you used handheld for atmosphere really, for a fight or something that was supposed to be a bit jazzy, but that was a great advance for us at YTV.

Of course, in most soaps the central location is the pub, and when Phil Redmond started Brookside – I don’t know what the actual truth of this was, but he always seemed to me to be like a recovering alcoholic -, he’d bashed everything that he could when he was a young man and had become very straight-laced and didn’t drink, so nobody else was going to drink and it was a dry station and all that sort of thing – so there was no pub in Brookside. Later on there was a nightclub, but there was no emphasis on people drinking at all.

Phil is a brilliant producer and writer and everything else. I had employed him prior to that because one of the things that I did after Triangle finished was a couple of series of Tucker’s Luck. Literally on the last dubbing session for Triangle I went into the gents and there was Edward Barnes, who had been the studio director on Blue Peter all those years ago, who was by then Head of Children’s Programmes, and he said, ‘We’re looking for someone to produce the next series of Tucker’s Luck’ so I said, “Ah ha! I’m available” Of course, Phil Redmond, because of Grange Hill, was the creator of Tucker. It was the BBC’s idea because they’d got such a response to Tucker, the character had left school of course. The BBC on Phil’s side didn’t think that there was going to be any more mileage in him, but they got such a massive amount of “Bring Tucker back” mail and they couldn’t bring him back to Grange Hill, obviously. At that time unemployed teenagers were much in the press, they were all coming out of school and there were millions and millions with no work. So, the BBC thought that there would be something there for a series with Tucker and his two mates. Phil thought this was a terrible idea, but he was happy to accept the money to get someone else to storyline it, they got a rather good director for the first series, and then they decided that they wanted it to go on and on. By this time, Phil had realized that it was actually working. It was organized that somebody else would do the storylines and the scripts, so I came into a fait accompli, but I went to meet Phil, because I needed to know about Tucker, who he was and what his creator thought ought to happen to him even though the storylines and scripts by somebody else were already there. So the assistant head of children’s programmes and I flew up to Liverpool and were given lunch by Phil and Barbara, his secretary from Phil Redmond Enterprises, and the entire lunch was about the fact that the BBC had not produced the Grange Hill bicycle, they had not produced the Grange Hill Easter egg… all he was interested in out of Grange Hill was the spin-offs and the money. Finally I got a word in and I said, “Tell me about Tucker – Who are his heroes?” “He doesn’t have heroes, he is a hero” and that was about all I got out of that meeting. He had to be consulted; he had to see all the scripts. We got up until about 48 hours before I was due to start shooting and he suddenly appeared in my office in Television Centre with Barbara, threatening litigation, because he hadn’t been consulted. And I’d rung them every other day and asked to speak to him, had he read the scripts, had he any comments, and he was never available, I was never once put through. So I was a bit taken aback, I had a sleepless night, I can tell you - he was really threatening. The next morning I went in and I said to my secretary, could you get hold of Phil’s contract, please? And there was a wonderful line in it which said, “Mr. Redmond is to be consulted on all matters artistic but the BBC’s word is final” So anyway, we decided to go around again for the third series and this time he was graciously pleased to do the storylines and deal with me face to face, which was better.

So in a sense I had actually already employed him before I went up there, and we got on like a house on fire up there. He liked what I did and he was pleased that I managed to get performances out of the people in a short space of time, so I went on being employed up there two or three times a year for fifteen years. Towards the end it was just awful, though. He’d lost interest and there were assistant producers, associate producers - all running scared of the channel, because they were threatening to withdraw the money every year: ‘Pull your socks up. Put in some middle-class people. Do this, do that’, and they’d all run round jumping to please the channel. The last three visits I did up there in 2001 and 2002 were just awful, because all these people were telling the director how to do it. I thought, “I’ve been a director for forty years, I don’t need this” So after the third one I came back and I said to my agent, no more soap, and the phone didn’t ring for a year. That last visit to Brookside was the end of my directorial career. They reshot a lot of those scenes because they didn’t like them, and they reshot them badly although they still put them out under my name. The day before I was due to start shooting, i.e. my camera script was all done, Phil Redmond called us all together and said that Brookside was going to be relaunched and that the camera had to be moving all the time and various other things – Cut! Cut! Cut! I thought, well, you’re going to lose your core audience for a start. I find that just irritating, when you’ve got two people in a room sitting down or stationary, and the camera’s pretending to be handheld for no apparent reason, so I didn’t do it. The editor was absolutely apoplectic, he said, “Phil will hate this – where’s all the other material?” “I did it in one take, in one shot”

LP. That was his initial aspiration for Brookside, to have an invisible style realized in a flowing way in as few shots as possible.

DB. Well, that’s what I was still doing! But it wasn’t the fashion of that week.

LP. How did working on Brookside compare to Eastenders? Because there are some similarities in the set-up of both series, although Eastenders obviously used a lot of studio shots.

DB. Eastenders is just a conventional BBC production, almost a sitcom. I thought that their sets were brilliant – that exterior set of Albert Square is just wonderful. I think it looks best in the rain and grey weather, while Emmerdale looks best in the sun. I always thought that the guy who designed that should have got the BAFTA – I cut out a BAFTA and gave it to him when I worked on Eastenders twenty years ago, because he was still around then.

I was not hired for Eastenders until after Julia Smith had left as producer.

BS. I’ve heard that she was quite fierce –

DB. Oh yes! Apparently, if things were going along smoothly she would go and do something to upset the applecart on Eastenders to wake everybody up, weird things like that, quite a strange woman.

LP. On Brookside, the design was quite clear, because they built real houses. It has that coldness that new closes do have.

DB. They had terrible problems with the sound, because the minute that you take all of the furniture out in order to take a close-up of somebody it echoes, so they had to use these mattresses to absorb the sound, then they got rid of those and treated the ceilings with acoustic tiles so you could shoot in there.

LP. Was the light a problem as well? The programme had a very cold sort of daylight.

DB. No, because they used a particular sort of light switch that can merge with daylight, and you’d always use another great arc light coming through the window. Some of the lighting guys were better than others; some would do it in a flash while others would make a great agony of it all. Even before I got there Phil had licked them into shape; the camera crews, the lighting guys and the props – they all worked beautifully and really knew what they were doing. It was quite interesting watching how they would direct to different directors, because when I was first there Phil was taking punts on quite tricky people – people who’d never directed actors before and people who had never directed television before. They all overran.

There was one girl who was a beautiful actress who I was a great fan of – as an actress. She’d directed in the theatre, so she came onto Brookside, she must have done a course somewhere. She just had no idea whether it was Sunday or Christmas. The directors’ office at Brookside itself was as small as a corner of a room and was meant for the six of us, but fortunately at any one time you had one writing, one preparing, one shooting, one working at home and one editing and so on, so you were never really working in there together. I remember her being in there and she came in and sat down and said, “Darrol?... He comes out of the house… and I’ve got…” She couldn’t complete a sentence. She was just totally, totally stunned. I said, “Is it the location shoot?” “Yes” “What have you got to do? Have you got to get him into a car, into the house? What’s happening?” “Oh thank you… thank you…” I don’t know what I said, but I presumably got the cogs working in some way or another. I watched her first episode – God, it was sinister, it was so slow! It was bonfire night in the Close with a big bonfire, and there were several conversations, some of which had the bonfire in the background, some didn’t because it had obviously gone out by then, and it was so slow that you thought that a bomb was going to explode at any moment, there was so much tension. But it wasn’t, it should have been swift, light-hearted banter around the bonfire in the Close – I would have done it in one shot. She’d broken it down into what she’d thought was manageable bits… and then she just ran out into the night and left before the second shoot. So, guess who was asked to take over? So, when I was first up there, there were a lot of people coming in. Some could actually cut it and were okay, but others just overran, so whoever was following them in would have to pick up their scenes as well as doing their own.

[That's about all that he told us about soaps, I'm afraid, though there's a lot more about his early career as a designer and starting out as a director at the BBC from the fifties to the early seventies. And we never even got around to asking him about directing hundreds of editions of Rainbow!]

	Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.	May 22, 2012, 02:38:51 AM
		Login with username, password and session length