Multi-award-winning Cracker and The Street creator Jimmy McGovern has revealed that classic Channel 4 soap Brookside’s lack of response to the Hillsborough disaster was a key driver in his decision to quit the show in 1989, the same year 95 people died in FA Cup semi-final tragedy – a further two people have since died as a result of injuries sustained on the day.
McGovern, who began his career on the ground-breaking soap and also won one of his four BAFTAs for the 1996 docudrama Hillsborough, about the disaster, was speaking to Lacey Turner about the early days of the soap, what drives him and why he won’t be writing forever, in the fifth episode of her podcast We Started Here.
Addressing his departure, McGovern said: “Part of the reason I left – there were lots of reasons – but part of the reason I left was we had no response to the Hillsborough football disaster, and I thought there should have been a response.”
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McGovern also revealed on the show that it was on Brookside where he learnt some of the most valuable lessons of his long writing career: “My great progress in Brookside was when I decided, I cannot slavishly follow this storyline. It’s not working,” he explained. “I had a story about Damon Grant, who was a character aged about 14 at the time and he breaks a window. I just put stuff from my own life, I’ve broken many windows, and I’ve had many windows broken on me. So, I simply put my reactions to breaking or having a broken window, which doesn’t seem very radical, but, then for me, it was radical. I was suddenly for the first time writing about my life and investing it in characters on Brookside.
“I was walking past the actor, Simon O’Brien, he played Damon Grant, and he says ‘that was good, that Jim,’ and I just grew. Oh, that’s what you do!”
McGovern also admitted that his learning curve at Brookside was a steep one, describing the show as “diabloical” in its early days: “I said to myself, I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know anything about a television script. I simply wrote everything that had been decided at the storyline meeting. I stuck slavishly to that, because the people who had written that, had written television drama before, and I hadn’t, so they knew what they were talking about, and I didn’t,” he said.
“I put nothing of myself in it whatsoever because I didn’t dare do that. I simply wrote, bang, according to the storyline, and it was dreadful. Nobody says this enough, the first six months of Brookside were diabolical…it was rough and raw and gritty, yes, but often rough and raw and gritty for all the wrong reasons.”
Things did improve, however, according to the decorated scribe: “Bit by bit, we were all learning,” he added. “It was a brand-new soap opera, on a brand-new channel, with brand-new people who’d never done television before. It was, it was an amazing achievement, really.”
McGovern, now 75, also admitted during the interview that he doesn’t see himself writing indefinitely, and has even started turning down projects that he feels are better suited to a younger writer: “I’m a certain age now as you can possibly tell, so I won’t be at it forever, but I like to think I’m still improving. I like to think I’m still getting better,” he said. “There is stuff I’ve turned down. Somebody approached me recently, I can’t go into detail here, but a really notorious incident in the history of our country. I said what I know to be true: It needs a younger man. You’d have to go and research it and talk to everybody who wants to talk to you and really give it a hundred percent.
“I actually wrote that, ‘this needs a younger man’, and it hurt me to say that, but I know it needed a younger man.”
We Started Here is commissioned by BBC Studios Drama Productions and produced by BBC Studios Drama Productions and Colour It In Studios. It is available on all podcast platforms, and the Jimmy McGovern episode will launch tomorrow (Tuesday February 25).
