Well, suffice it to say that this is the episode that showed the best and the worst of Brookside. Ace acting all around from the likes of Margi Campi, Neil Caple, even Suzanne Collins and Bernie ‘Hardface’ Nolan. But poor Sarah White! This woman is the veritable star of the show, and -purely in order to provide Dean Sullivan’s overexposed and over the hill character with more mileage, she’s reduced to grunting, sweating and writhing on top of a pool table and under Sullivan in order that Brookside find yet another copulative combination. Trust me, it DOESN’T work - except to denigrate Brookside.
First scene. Hotel Corkhill and Jerome is putting away his fancy duds that he’s required to wear nightly at the bingo club. He seems a bit down in the mouth, for Jerome is a character of extremes. He’s either wearing a broad grin or a sad clown expression and this morning, it’s the latter.
He explains to Nikki that he’s been docked some pay because of an altercation between two punters the night before that happened on Jerome’s shift and veered out of control. But there’s more. He suddenly tells Nikki that he’s caught up with playing piggy in the middle in the war of wills that’s currently being waged between Jessie and Helen.
Nikki is surprised. This is the first she’s heard of any disagreement between Jessie and her new-found stepdaughter.
Jerome discloses that Helen collared him last night with a mouthful about Ray. Jessie had especially made a trip that evening to the bingo club, solely for the purpose of nobbling Helen. Apparently, according to Helen, Jessie reckons that she’s barged in on the Hilton family with a view to getting some dosh off old Ray. Jerome feels guilty because he had unknowingly given Jessie a lift to the club. He feels sorry for what’s about to descend on Ray, especially now that Helen wanted nothing to do with him anymore.
Nikki is furious.
Adele and her new, attractive friend Laura (as it seems Michelle has been consigned to being mentioned only, much the same way Cassie of the garage was) are walking along, when Laura receives a text message on her mobile. It was from their other friend, Stacy, who’s organising the proposed girlie holiday.
Stacy’s confirmed that the deposits have been paid and the holiday’s booked. They muse briefly about the 5 beaches and 12 clubs to be found on Ayia Napa and the fact that they’ve got £25.00 down and have to find (each) another £545.
Jimmy and Bev are in the bar, along with three very separate punters, each of whom sit at separate tables. The atmosphere is that of a morgue. Bev is musing about proposed plans for speicality nights. At first she considers a Quiz Night, but dismisses it as too unoriginal. Everyone does quiz nights. What about a schoolgirl night, where all the girls come decked out in school uniforms?
No, she dismisses that. All they’d get from that is a bunch of pervy punters. She’s desperate as she needs to place an advert for the place inthe Liverpool Echo. Glancing around at her sparse clientele, she sarcastically suggests a ‘Shy Night’.
Honestly, she whinges to Jimmy, looking at the three, they could at least try to bunch together and give the place a bit of atmosphere. She’s depressed, she tells Jim. Did he realise that for the whole of the previous evening, her grand opening, she only took in thirty quid? Not only that, but the hand-dryer in the ladies’ busted! Another call-out fee. Most of the people who even looked in last night were asking directions for The Shelf.
No, she’d been away too long, she admits. She comes back and what does she find? Max Farnham’s place going great guns, a new bar by the chippie - even The Swan has been tarted up and is under new management. Bev’s Bar didn’t have a prayer!
Adele and Laura are now back at Sitcom House, seated at the sitcom table and perusing their holiday brochure.
Marty enters the room suddenly with a bottle of Dr White’s Limmo in a brown paper bag. He jokes that it’s a gift for Adele and asks where Dire is. Adele replies that she’s in the bath. Laura’s ever-present mobile alerts her to a text message. It’s Stacy again, she says aloud, about the-
Er, HOMEWORK, interjects Adele suddenly.
When Marty leaves the room, Adele confesses to Laura that she’s yet to tell Dire and Marty about going on holiday. She’d mentioned it to her Nan, she says, but if Brigid’s reaction were anything to go by, her parents would go off their heads at the thought of her going off on holiday by herself.
When did she plan on telling them? Asks Laura.
Tonight, Adele says decisively, after Marty’s had a few beers.
Laura suggests that maybe she should stay and be there when Adele broached the subject. That way, maybe her parents wouldn’t kick off.
Adele shakes her head. Dire doesn’t do embarrassment, she says, ruefully. She wouldn’t back off just because a guest was there.
The mobile sounds again, alerting a text message. Laura reads it aloud. Stacy wants to know if they think they should go topless on holiday.
Adele laughs and reckons if one does it, they all should do it.
Rachel is over visiting Jacqui, thanking her for minding Beth. She tells her about their romantic meal at Bev’s. Oooh, says Rachel, she didn’ alf feel ‘barrassed fer Bev. ‘Twere nowt there!
She asks Jacqui if Max had made up for working the previous evening by bringing her breakfast in bed and roses.
Jacqui’s visibly disgruntled. No, she says sullenly. And there she’d forked out a bundle for some swish cufflinks for Max and all she got from him was a cheesy card from the garage and left-overs from the restaurant.
She shows Rachel a small heart-shaped Valentine’s cake that Max had brought home. In fact, says Jacqui pulling out a kitchen knife, she was so arsed, that she was of a mind to cut that cake and share it with Rachel right now.
Oooh nooo! Screams Rachel, as Jacqui cuts the cake in half. Oooh better not! What if cake were paaaht o’ Max’s plan - Jacqui were meal and cake fer af-tehs?
Jacqui relents.
Any rood, continues Rachel, did Max l-eye-ke cooflinks?
Jacqui admits that she had such a cob on that she went to bed and didn’t give them to him.
Back at Sitcom House, Laura is preparing to take her leave of the Murrays. She explains that she’s staying at her mother’s (obviously a victim of a broken home) and her mum was picking her up at the end of the Close. She says good-bye and Adele, playing the dutiful daughter, asks if Dire would like some tea and Marty a beer.
Dire declines, looking out the window at the departing Laura. As Marty says ‘yes’ to the offer of a beer, Dire remarks that it looks as though Laura, the dozy cow, had lost something. Marty glances out the window. No, she’s just using her mobile phone, texting, he explains to Dire. Part of the zombie generation. He glances teasingly at Adele.
Still, Adele speaks up, she, herself is not a bad’un, is she? What she means is, she pays her way, doesn’t she?
Her parents agree.
And that, says Adele in one fell breath, is why she’s planning to have a two-week holiday away with her mates in July.
Nikki strides purposefully across the Close to Number 8, rings the doorbell and when Jessie answers, pushes past her inside the house. Before Jess can open her mouth, Nikki’s lambast begins. Nikki starts by saying that she’s surprised to find Jessie at home. Shouldn’t she be somewhere else - like down at the bingo club, apologising to Helen?
Jessie is taken aback by Nikki’s sudden tirade. In fact, she’s downright gobsmacked.
Nikki continues. And where did Jessie get off anyway, accusing Helen of being selfish?
Jessie stammers that she was only thinking of Ray. It seems she thinks that Ray might be expecting too much from this newfound daughter.
Nikki argues that Jessie had accused Helen of being a gold digger, when what Helen wanted wasn’t money-
‘Whose money?’ Bellows Ray, suddenly appearing at the top of the stairs.
Jessie’s face is a picture of shock.
Marty and Dire are having a shock of their own, with Adele’s revelation that she’s planning on going on holiday.
A holiday with just her ... Er, mates? Marty queries tentatively.
Just girls, clarifies Adele, in exasperation. Four of them. For goodness sake, she reiterates, did Marty think they were about bringing meat to a butcher’s?
Immediately Big Dire asserts her stepmotherly right. As far as this was concerned, she pronounces with finality, the answer is no.
No to the holiday? Queries Adele cheekily.
No to the holiday and no to going abroad on her own, says Dire.
But everyone else was going - Laura and Stacy and Michelle. Adele protests.
Hearing Michelle’s name, Dire looks askance. Well, if Michelle’s going, she suggests, Dire would just ring her mother to check that piece of information out.
And make a fool of herself? Counters Adele. All the rest of the girls had secured their parents’ permission with a minimum of fuss. Not her. Not Adele. Go on, she urges Dire. Ring Mrs Tam. Make a show of it.
Not this year, speaks timid Marty, seeking to appease the situation. Maybe next -
Tough, spits Adele. She’d paid her deposit, with her own hard-earned money. And she’d go on this holiday whether her parents liked it or not. (Go, Adele!)
It seems Ray has overheard Jessie’s and Nikki’s conversation. With Nikki hanging out in the background, Ray and Jessie are enjoying a slanging match at the top of their voices.
That’s a sly trick Jessie’s pulled, Ray says.
Jessie is trying to extricate herself from the shameful situation. She offers to go, herself, and talk to Helen. She’s certain there’s been a misunderstanding -
He’ll talk to his own daughter, thank you very much, Ray asserts. Or doesn’t Jessie trust him?
Rachel wanders into the proceedings in her usual dozy way, only to be assured by Jessie that Beth was upstairs, fast asleep.
Jessie returns her attention to Ray and plays as stiff as Ray’s stout. No, as a matter of fact, she doesn’t trust Ray.
Ray storms out of the house in a huff, slamming the door.
Upstairs, Beth begins to cry, awoken by the noise.
‘Nice one, Nan,’ quips Nikki.
Dire’s giving it her best shot at thwarting Adele. Adele needn’t think she was so cocksure about getting her way, Dire warns. There was a lot of things Dire wanted to know from her.
Like what? Counters Adele, sullenly.
Well, Dire begins, pulling her party piece of exaggerating her facial features and bulging her eyes, first there’s Adele, sneaking around like some guilty schoolgirl, then the girl has the bare-faced fall to put her parents in their place by maintaining that she’s and adult.
Well, Adele sasses back, she happens to think she’s in the right to stick to her guns about going. In fact, the whole episode of the holiday abroad only serves to show her parents how grown-up she is. For example, she continues, she showed initiative in using her wages from the garage to pay the deposit for the holiday, and she was well prepared to do extra shifts in order to pay for the rest of the fare and also for her spending money.
It’s not that, Dire explains, bluntly. She simply doesn’t trust Adele’s judgement. Adele didn’t know what these holiday resorts were like. Why, people get carried away for the brief time they’re there -
Oh, that’s Adele all over, Adele exclaims, sarcastically, a string of abortions before she’s eighteen! Dire must really rate her if she thinks she’s that sex mad.
Dire protests. She didn’t mean that at all about Adele. Adele was simply unlucky.
Adele grimaces knowingly, understanding the bitter gist of her hypocritical stepmother.
Nikki is still verbally tussling with Jessie, reprimanding her grandmother for the way she treated Ray, insinuating that she didn’t trust him.
It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Ray, Jessie moans, wretchedly, it’s just that these days, it seems that she has to tease things out of him.
Helen IS Ray’s daughter, Nikki bluntly reminds Jessie.
‘She’s muscling in on MY family!’ Shouts Jessie.
Rachel asks her to keep the noise down and Jessie automatically apologises.
Why is Jessie being so hostile to Helen? Nikki asks.
She’s not hostile, says Jessie, defending herself. She certainly wasn’t hostile when she had the woman to lunch and found out that Ray had a secret granddaughter.
Upstairs, Beth begins to cry again. Rachel calls from the top of the stairs, asking that they please keep the noise down.
The problem with Jessie, observes Nikki, was that Jessie always wanted to be the boss on the domestic front.
Now it’s Jess’s turn to storm out. As she stamps toward the front door, poor Rachel calls out to her not to slam the door, but the door bangs anyway. Nikki follows her grandmother, calling after her.
In the other ensuing argument, Adele informs her parents that it’s her life and she’ll chose how to live it.
It’s nothing to do with anything Adele’s said before, pleads Dire, changing her tack and becoming maternal. But Adele should think about this. She’ll be on her own, mixing with other people, what if she wasn’t able to hold her drink?
‘That’s it,’ quips Adele. ‘Me, the raging alcoholic.’
Not at all, scoffs Dire, but what if she had her bag nicked. There would be no one there for her to turn to if she got in trouble. It’s just that Dire worries about her.
Dire needn’t try to prove to Adele that she cares more about her stepdaughter than other mothers do, Adele observes, looking at both her parents, because Dire doesn’t. And furthermore, Adele knows that if Plank had wanted to take a holiday with his mates when he was sixteen, they wouldn’t have stopped him from doing so.
And, like the Adele of old, she flounces from the room.
On their own in the deserted bar, Jimmy and Bev sit at a table, having a talk. Bev is telling Jimmy about the six months she was gone from Liverpool. Six months in Rio, she says, and not a decent buttie in Brazil!
The bread was so bad there, she reminisces. Why, Bev used to dream of waking up to a nice, thick piece of buttered toast.
Jimmy remarks that he stopped dreaming when he was on his tablets.
Marty and Dire sit on the sitcom sofa, Marty snoring whilst Dire watches a movie on the telly. She nudges Marty awake. She’s been thinking, she informs him (a first). Perhaps they WERE being too hard on Adele. What the girl had said about Plank was right. They did treat him differently. Adele accuses Dire of treating her thus because of her abortion, but it wasn’t that, really.
Marty listens, unable to get a word in edgeways.
If only Adele had picked a different time to ask them about the holiday, Dire moans. She honestly wanted to be able to spread a little good news about, so at least one of the brood could be happy.
Marty assures her softly that the pair of them WERE good parents. And they weren’t bad people either.
Then why does everything awful happen to them? Cries Dire again. They deserve a break, surely.
Marty picks up the abandoned holiday brochure.
‘Well,’ he jokes, ‘Ayia Napa looks nice this time of year.’
Jacqui Dixon Farnham stands forlornly in the middle of her lounge, watching her exhausted husband sit and enjoy a snooze.
Bev gazes sadly around the empty bar. There were drunks in this bar once, she says to Jimmy, wistfully. Never thought she’d see the day when she’d miss them.
Jimmy looks at Bev and observes SAGELY that poor Bev appears to have lost her sparkle.
That had nothing to do with the bar and the way she found it, Bev sighs.
Jimmy makes the observation that he thought Rio would have been her sort of place and the Brazilians her sort of people.
Oh, she enjoyed the beach and shopping, Bev says. And she even took some salsa lessons. The trouble with her, she admits, is that she lives too much for the here and now.
Carpe diem, quoth the Sage. 'Seize the Day.’ (Nice to know Jimmy’s seen The Dead Poets’ Society.)
Is Bev certain she didn’t leave her heart in Rio with some beach bum? Jimmy teases.
Oh, Bev says lackadaisically, she met people, but she just couldn’t connect. She used to wander the street and peek into people’s houses, looking at family life. And snog! The Brazilians snogged anyplace and anytime. She felt out of it.
Max and Jacqui have moved upstairs to the marital bedroom, Jacqui wearing her Jackie Corkhill Original bathrobe. She sits expectantly on the bed, but she’s disappointed. So, she begins, was all she had to look forward to on Valentine’s Day that cheesy card and leftover cake?
Max doesn’t understand.
She shows Max the cufflinks she gave him. They have a bit of a repartee about cynical greeting cards, befoe they make up and collapse in a snog on the bed.
Bev is still pouring her heart out to the Sage, who listens intently. Bev admits that she thought Rio might be different. But then, she was always the eternal optimist, and now she’d turned into a desperado. And the biggest shock was coming back to Liverpool and feeling as though she no longer fitted in.
Just look at everyone now, especially the men, she says. People all have to be cool, she observes. A person meets a fella and they can’t say anything like what they mean for fear of ‘not being cool’.
Jimmy again makes a sage remark about youth being wasted on the young and young women being wasted on young men.
Bev thanks Jimmy for the cack-handed compliment. What she meant was that people feel that they have to constantly pretend.
Jimmy remembers when he was a young dude. He piled it on then, he says. Kept them guessing, he did, all the time. But then, he was dangerous. (HA!)
But, Bev remarks, he was still Jimmy Corkhill.
Yes, says Jimmy, and Jimmy Corkhill had found himself one day on a roof, wearing odd shoes.
Jessie has now returned to Number 8 and sits uneasily with Rachel in the lounge, half-heartedly watching television. She hears a car outside and springs up to look out the window.
Rachel asks if that’s Ray returning.
No, replies Jess, dejectedly. Jerome. She suddenly decides she has to have a word with Jerome and dashes to the door.
Rachel calls out hopelessly to her not to slam the door, as Jess bangs it shut.
Bev is still expostulating self-pity. Now she’s moved onto the subject of age. Age is just another way of being lonely, she says. And she’s ashamed to have said that. The older she got, it seems the lonelier she got.
Jimmy remarks that a person can be lonely in a big family. A person could even be lonely in a marriage. He accepts that he’s a divorced, bi-polar 50 year-old pop man with no assets.
And not much of an ego, chimes in Bev.
Jimmy observes that he misses his ego. That frightened him. One thing about his tablets, when he was on tablets, he felt safe.
Safe is good, says Bev.
But on tablets, life wasn’t the same, Jimmy says. For example, if he were on tablets now, he wouldn’t be able to smell the scent of Bev’s perfume.
Bev admits she wasn’t wearing any.
Or see the sheen on her hair, says Jimmy throatily, milking an awful script.
Bev admits that that was down to her conditioner, which might account for the scent. It was pineapple.
Cornily, she’s beginning to breathe a bit heavily, to match Jim’s stentorian huffs.
If he were on tablets, Jimmy continues, eyes narrowing, he wouldn’t want to touch her hair.
Did he want to touch it? Asks Bev coyly.
Jimmy growls ‘Inappropriate behaviour’, and the two exchange a lingering look that’s supposed to be sex-charged but succeeds in only being embarrassingly laughable.
‘Carpe diem,’ huffs Jimmy, breathing heavily like some sort of pervert.
Jerome has returned to Hotel Corkhill and promptly asks Nikki for a paracetamol. It was an awful night, he explains, exhaustedly. There was some kick-off on the National Claim.
Nikki says she’s had a rough day too. In fact, she’s beginning to think her Nan should go for some marriage guidance.
At that moment, Jess enters the house. She asks politely if Jerome would mind driving her around in search of Ray, who hadn’t been home since that afternoon.
Jerome reluctantly agrees and Jess leaves to ready herself.
Jerome remarks to Nikki that he prefers it when her grandmother hates his guts.
By now, Jimmy and Bev are enjoying a serious snog over the table. They rise, still hanging onto each other, Bev begging Jimmy to come upstairs. Jimmy refuses and they snog some more, sounding all the more like someone stalking in wellis through sticky mud, with all the yucky suctioning sounds they’re making.
Again, Bev begs Jimmy to come upstairs, but Jimmy refuses and leads her to the pool table. He pushes her onto his back and we see a shot of Jimmy unzipping his fly. The mind boggles! He mounts Bev, who giggles about ‘how cool’ this act is. (It’s not, believe me, it’s damned embarrassing). We next see a shot of Jimmy atop Bev, both fully clothed and rocking up and down on top of her. Her left hand is squeezing his left buttock and they are making obscenely embarrassing huffing and sucking noises. The camera pans down to Bev’s fully-skirted legs, held tightly together (smart girl) and one of her shoes falls off.
How gross!
Jan McVerry wrote this. She should know better.
Summary © 2002 Marion Watts
Brookside and all related materials are © Mersey Television 1982-2002