Metropolitan Life: Life, but not as we know it

ave you heard, there's this great new restaurant called SE1 down by the Thames? It's a bustling place full of bright young professional types and it has a wonderful river vista. It does a tasty steak and oyster pie which you can wash down with a more-than-acceptable bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon or perhaps a cockle-warming guest beer such as Old Nick or Speckled Hen. The only trouble is, the restaurant doesn't exist outside the confines of Carlton Television's new soap - sorry, not allowed to call it that - long-running serial (or LRS), London Bridge.

London SE1 has been mocked up in an old gin warehouse squeezed in between the District Line, Tesco's and a dirty stretch of the River Lea, in East London - "no one in their right mind would actually set up a restaurant out here," laughs the producer, Matthew Bird. Like Coronation Street, EastEnders' Albert Square and Brookside Close, you can visit it only by appointment with a television company, if at all.

The River Thames - in reality, several miles away as the car crawls - is conjured up by clever cutaways (filmed on the odd day-trip from the studio) and a meticulously painted studio backcloth of yuppie developments on the opposite riverbank. The production offices have doubled as a police interview room and a classroom for cabbies learning The Knowledge. An austere brick gatehouse by the warehouse stands in for the exterior of Jamaica Road Police Station, where, set legend has it, people have wandered in off the street asking for directions.

The ingenuity is admirable, but do LRSs like London Bridge capture the essence of a place? Can a mere television drama convey the weft and warp, the very texture of a city? As with most LRSs, three-quarters of London Bridge is shot within the confines of its warehouse studio, several Tube stops away from the real thing. You get the odd away-day on an LRS - EastEnders has been to Scotland and Spain - but very little shooting takes place in the areas depicted.

Why have the LRSs forsaken those mean streets for the cosy limits of a box-set? Why aren't the programme-makers out there battling with the elements - criminal and climatic - to capture life as it is in the naked city?

Well, for a start it is too flipping dangerous. In one alleged incident, an LRS crew had to run for cover as some enterprising local youths welcomed them to their hard-as-nails estate by hurling a fridge-freezer at them off the top of a building. It's hardly surprising, then, that LRSs have retreated into the safety of their studio-bunkers.

There is also the risk of bumping into rivals on the street. Mal Young, producer of Brookside, reflects that "Liverpool's become such a media city, you've got to be careful not to pan your camera and shoot another film crew in the background."

So is the Liverpool of Brookside, for instance, anything like its real- life model? Not according to Matt Wall, born and bred in the city. "Brookside bears about as much relation to reality as Euripides's Medea did to the downtown Athens of the classical era - none," he opines. "It's total fantasy, it's not meant to be gritty urban realism. There are religious maniacs, Down's Syndrome children, infanticide, patricide, child abuse, lesbianism, domestic violence and heroin addiction within the space of five houses. Isolated events are thrown into the maelstrom of the Close. It's the Bermuda Triangle of Liverpool. It's like a dustbin where all the bad things are dumped and which leaves the rest of the city clean. It makes for great drama, but it's not realistic."

Mal Young, a Liverpudlian himself, contends that drama is perforce different from reality. "You'd have to have 300 houses in the Close and devote just 30 seconds to each to really reflect a city. For example, there isn't a massive Asian community in Liverpool, compared to, say, Leeds or Bradford, so we don't have any in Brookside. But there is a large black community here, so we reflect that. "You want to choose stories that have universal appeal," he goes on. "You can't get too parochial. If London Bridge reflects only London issues, they'll risk viewers switching off. For example, we kept away from the binmen strike last year because that was particular to Liverpool. We'd rather do issues like drugs or domestic violence because those things are happening across the country. Then, of course, you get taxi-drivers saying to you: 'We're not all like that, we're not all drug dealers, you know.' But we have to reflect national issues. You don't want to misrepresent the city, but as Phil Redmond said when we started, we've got to mirror society, warts and all."

Rather fewer warts have been displayed on Coronation Street over the years. Indeed, the programme has been criticised for its failure to tackle with any substance issues such as race and homosexuality. (EastEnders, too, has struggled to depict the two great wars of the area - those of class and race. How many convincing yuppies have you see in Albert Square lately?) For many viewers, however, it's the very mundanity of Coronation Street that makes it true to life. "Coronation Street is very authentic," observes Anne Jones from Salford, "with its corner shops, its pub and the hairdresser's on the corner. My mum still lives in a terrace and it's just like that. Everybody knows everybody else's business. It's not like EastEnders with its moral issues and its heaviness; it's day-to-day, ordinary stuff. It doesn't depress you, and it's funny."

Coronation Street takes great care to transcend its studio setting, meticulously dressing its sets. According to its executive producer Carolyn Reynolds, in the street itself - a backlot at Granada Studios - the designers artfully place everything from milk bottles to litter. "But by the time the Granada Studio tour has visited, we don't need to add that much."

Anne Jones's quibble with Coronation Street is the absence of vandalism - very much part of Salford life. "They don't have the hooligan element in Coronation Street. My mum and her neighbours are obsessed with being robbed and having their windows smashed," she says. "It's true to life, but as it was when I was a child. The characters are all real - I could easily find you a Vera Duckworth - but it leaves out the nastier aspects of life. If EastEnders wallows in things a bit, then Coronation Street glosses over them. Perhaps they thought it was a winning formula and decided not to change it."

Reynolds maintains that drama is inevitably a selective view of reality. "People say, 'it's got to be really realistic', but if you take that too far, you'd have bars up in the corner shop. People don't want to see reality reflected to that extent. You have to strike a fine balance. Coronation Street is what people want it to be. Roy Hattersley wrote that Coronation Street is reality in terms of characters rather than in terms of issues. The issues come from the characters."

All soaps claim that their writers have their fingers on the pulse of the city they are depicting. "Our writers research down in the East End," says Corinne Hollingsworth, executive producer of EastEnders. "Like journalists on a story, they go to the place they're writing about and imbibe the atmosphere."

Reynolds concurs. "It's important that the people creating the image stay close to its roots. The cliched approach for Coronation Street would be to say, 'northern back streets can't afford satellite dishes'. But if you look at a real terrace, it will have at least three dishes. We have to reflect that.

"Similarly, we're looking for a cleaner at the moment on the programme. The cliche would be to go for an 'Eee-by-gum' character. But we thought, 'let's go against that'. There are a lot of people out there who are very proud of their cleaning jobs and who don't go 'Eee up, chuck'. We're mindful of the dangers of becoming too middle class and too grey. That might be part of John Major's overall view of a classless society, but there's a way of life among groups in the North that is peculiar to them. For instance, a lot of people here still refer to 'dinner' and 'tea'. It's not being cliched if you refer to that in the script. In fact, the danger is that you change it to 'lunch' and 'dinner' because there's a middle- class thread going through writer, actor and director. It's a question of not falling into cliches, so that viewers feel they're not in a studio but actually in someone's living-room."

"People are quite sophisticated these days," says Corinne Hollingsworth. "They notice low production values, when the acting is wooden, the set seems to move and the bannisters shake when someone comes downstairs. There are so many fly-on-the- wall documentaries around these days that you have to work extra hard to transcend the artificiality of the studio." The set designers have become so skilful now that, ironically, a studio can look more "realistic" than the actual location. "If you go out on location," Hollingsworth asserts, "you have to compromise. The builder of a real house wasn't inside the writer's mind. If you build a set, though, you can make it exactly as you want it."

But whether sited in the North or the South, drama does not live by settings alone. "The most important thing is the quality of the story," Hollingsworth says. "People don't mind if three-quarters of Coronation Street is recorded in a studio. All they think is, 'these are great characters, they make me laugh and cry'. And EastEnders is more about a feeling than a specific locale. Yes, it's called EastEnders, but it has a wider resonance. I hope it's about the human condition, applicable to people wherever they live. Birth, marriage, adultery and death happen everywhere - not just inner London. What is it they say? There are only three stories in the whole of fiction."

Young agrees. "All drama producers are chasing this sense of reality, but it's the characters that must come first. You can have great backdrops, but if you haven't got the characters to put in front of them, then it's just bland. Eldorado looked fabulous, it had great sets, but no one cared about the characters."

And look what happened to the Costa del Soap.

8 'London Bridge' starts on Carlton at 10.40pm on Thursday.