The creator of TV’s Brookside and Grange Hill tells Peter Stanford why the Church lost his respect

Growing up in Liverpool at the end of the 1950s, Phil Redmond thought very hard about entering a junior seminary.  So hard indeed that later, when he was making a name for himself as a TV scriptwriter (for Doctor in the House and Z-Cars, among others), he tried to persuade the BBC to commission his “Play for Today” about an 11-year-old altar boy, standing next to the priest every Sunday, trying to decide if God was calling him, or if he even believed in God at all. “The head of drama turned it down,” recalls 67-year-old Redmond.

Redmond had the last laugh, going on to claim a place in the history of British television by creating, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new generation of controversial, issues-based soaps such as Brookside and Grange Hill. Yet the rejection still irks him. “[The head of drama] was worried that the play might cause offence to many Catholics,” he tells me. His tone shifts as he speaks, from being as laid-back as his long, greying hair to something more passionate. “I said, ‘But I’m a Catholic and this is my experience.’”

The phrase echoes through everything he has made for the small screen. His Catholic upbringing, as one of three children of devout Irish parents on one of the post-war, slum-clearance council estates in Liverpool, is powerfully explored. It was there in the best-remembered storylines of his beloved “Brookie”, with the Catholic matriarch Sheila Grant agonising over divorce and remarriage, and when the idealistic young curate, Fr Derek, fell in love with the local nanny and swopped his vows for working with Cafod.
And now, Redmond acknowledges, it is part of his new career as a novelist. “Although I don’t say the characters are still practising Catholics, I hint at their Catholic background,” he says of Highbridge, the first of his planned trilogy of crime thrillers. “What I’m trying to reflect on are those Christian values that I have, because of how I was brought up.”