Hollyoaks and Grange Hill creator says courage has gone out of broadcasting
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Soap supremo Sir Phil Redmond says that “courage has gone out of broadcasting” in recent years, and suggested that TV watchdog rules should be broken more often. TV writer Sir Phil, who created Hollyoaks, Grange Hill and Brookside, pushed for future schools-set soaps to be more gritty, and said social media is the “big issue” children are facing nowadays.
Sir Phil told BBC Radio’s 4 Today programme: “I think the problem is, is that the courage has gone out of broadcasting really, and there’s just too much risk aversion. “There is a place for something like Grange Hill, and from my career, I always found that the harder you made the storyline, the more you upset the regulators, but the more the audience appreciated it, because the audience live these issues, and what they want to see is their own life put on screen as realistically as possible.”.
Sir Phil also said that to make a programme such as Grange Hill you have to have TV producers with real “life experience”, such as growing up in a working-class background. He added: “I think at the moment, we’ve got too many programmes being made by people who just want to be in telly, people who sort of, they want to come into the media because they think it’s cool.
“And when I was looking at trying to find writers for all the shows, my first question is, ‘what do you want to write about?’. And they’d say, ‘I’ll write anything, you tell me what to write’. (I would reply) ‘I don’t want to tell you. I want you to tell me’.”.
