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By last September, however, a much-hyped celebration of Beatlemania in the city had been cancelled owing to a “communications breakdown” and Redmond, deputy chairman of a 14-strong Capital of Culture committee, was left to face the music.
Admitting the festival’s organisation had lurched from “crisis to crisis”, he called for the committee to be scrapped as “just a talking shop”. In the event, its members were cut to six.
Despite these concerns, Redmond, with his mane of grey hair and bushy black eyebrows, has presented an affable foil to the media’s questions.
He would not recognise the Liverpool of his youth any more than Starr, who confessed last week: “We were driving around today and you couldn’t let me out of the car because I’d be lost.”
The centre of Liverpool resembles a vast building site, mainly because of a £1 billion regeneration project. Some buildings, such as St George’s Hall on whose roof Starr performed, have been magnificently restored. But the extra 1.7m visitors the festival is expected to generate will find that much of the other promised refurbishment has not been completed.
Redmond has brushed aside such worries: “Anybody in their right mind knows that if somebody announces a £1 billion scheme and says it’ll be ready in April 2008, that’s going to slip.”
There are other worries: the event kicked off without an artistic director and two of the city’s most senior politicians are under investigation for allegedly conspiring to remove the organising body’s chief executive, currently on sick leave and reported to be due a £250,000 pay-off. A bitter feud between the former leader of the council and its chief executive resulted in both men resigning.
Liverpool is the first British city to win the Capital of Culture accolade since Glasgow in 1990. Whether it can emulate the Scottish city by reinvigorating its economy and turning its image around are moot points.
Yet some things are changing, according to a book produced by the Liverpool Echo & Daily Post. An old joke ran: “What do you call a scouser in a suit? The accused.” A new gag runs: “Now that Liverpool has been named Capital of Culture, the cars are propped up on piles of books instead of bricks.”
Redmond contended that an image makeover would be a misreading of what is happening. The aim was “to bring renewed confidence to the people of the city”, he insisted.
“You’re making a mistake thinking that we actually care what people think of us. The reason why all of this building work is happening is not because investors are worried about the image of the city. It’s going on because they think there is a return to be made.”
The same cannot be said of Liverpool council, which has a £29m gap between what it expects from the government this year and its planned spending, of which £20m relates to the festivities. Redmond’s hope is that by the end of 2008 “our built environment changes from a sandstone and cobble 19th-century city to being a glass and steel 21st-century city”.
The thought horrifies the writer Beryl Bainbridge, who was born in Liverpool and trained as an actress at the Rep. “The city I was so fond of has been destroyed,” she said. “They have ripped the insides out and say it will work. I am probably being unfair, but when you are born somewhere and changes take place in your lifetime you notice it. I wish them every luck.”
Born in 1949, Redmond has clear memories of growing up in Huyton in freezing winters: “I had a path from my bedroom to the kitchen which involved avoiding the cold slabs on the floor.” He passed the 11-plus, only to end up in one of Britain’s first comprehensives, the Catholic St Kevin’s, in Kirby.
“The system failed me,” he said. “The idea was that big is beautiful, so you had 2,500 boys together in a kind of detention centre. I admit I enjoyed it. But the whole concept was a mistake.”
He left school with one A-level and four O-levels in 1968 to train as a quantity surveyor in the building trade, working on schools, police stations and other public buildings in the northwest. Deciding five years later to become a writer, he took a social studies degree at Liverpool University.
After cutting his teeth as a wordsmith for comics such as Harry Secombe and Mike and Bernie Winters, his first break was writing a script for the ITV sitcom Doctor in Charge.
In 1978 Redmond came up with the idea of a BBC children’s drama set in a comprehensive school - Grange Hill. “I wrote Grange Hill so kids would have something to relate to,” he said.
“We wanted to move away from the Enid Blyton, middle-class drama the BBC had been showing and portray the realities of school life.” It was an edgy hit, tackling issues such as bullying and teenage pregnancy.
In 1981 he set up Mersey Television and created Brookside. Fans planned their week around the scouse soap, in which the bodies of abusive husbands were buried under patios and Catholic priests shared the beds of young women.
The budgets were tiny and Redmond called on his quantity surveyor skills to cut costs further by building a permanent set, instead of wasting two hours each day laying and removing cables. “We removed the 26 grand overhead every week,” he said proudly.
In 1995 Redmond created Hollyoaks, set in Chester, as Britain’s first home-grown teen soap. Initially reluctant to deal with difficult issues, it was panned by critics until one of the the characters popped an ecstasy pill and died at a party. It took off and has run ever since.
Meanwhile, Brookside’s storylines began to meander and bore viewers as government propaganda crept in. There were revamps and relaunches amid stories of acrimony, but in 2003 Channel 4 pulled the plug. Although billed as executive producer, Redmond claimed his role was purely to write scripts and even then only when there was a big story development. He blamed Channel 4 for not promoting the show properly.
There were other failures. Waterfront Beat, a cop show made for the BBC and set in Liverpool, was meant to be an updated version of Z-Cars to take on ITV’s The Bill. Panned by critics, it lasted only two series.
The Capital of Culture project may turn out to be Redmond’s most thrilling drama yet. Last week he wrote in the Liverpool Daily Post: “Stay tuned as the cultural soap continues to twist and turn as the plot unfolds.”
Source:
Times Online
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