Brookside 2859 - 2861 (28th June 2003)

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I quite like this slower, tighter focussed style. I don't think it would have a mass appeal, especially to anyone unfamiliar with Brookside. It wouldn't pull in any new audience. And it's fairly weak for something running at 90 minutes with ad breaks. But it has a charm, it's more like the heyday of Brookie than when it went all gangsters and guns. I dunno, I flip-flop on my opinion of the final year of the show. The quality and style of the stories fluctuated wildly from week to week, it was very hit and miss by this point. It wasn't sustainable in this format for any kind of long term future, but if it was to continue and get reinstated in a primetime slot then this would have helped to just calm things down a bit from the OTT stuff and get back to its roots of simpler storytelling. It's not amazing content, but it was heading slightly back in the right direction.