In an era of rapid technological advance it is easy to overlook the speed with which family life has undergone important alterations. Back in the good old days, the happy and uncomplicated stable nuclear family seen on the American television series Father Knows Best resonated with most viewers. However, by 1982, when Channel 4 was launched, people were all too aware that family life was more complicated. And in the past quarter of a century those traditional ideals often seem to contradict lived experience.

Today the cornflake-packet family – white, middle class, mum and dad, two smiling children – has acquired a minority status in contemporary culture. This is not surprising since marriage has become an option, a lifestyle choice rather than an obligation of adulthood, an option that competes with ‘living together’, ‘living apart’ and ‘living alone’. Look at your neighbours – some live in single households, others are cohabiting. Around a quarter of children in Great Britain live in lone-parent families. Marriage is no longer a precondition for having children. Births outside marriage have almost quadrupuled since the Seventies to around forty-three per cent today. And in many parts of the country they exceed fifty per cent. Consequently a home can mean anything from a solo adult household to a single-parent family to a same-sex couple.

All this is paralleled by a growing awareness of the tension and instability that often dominates at home. Divorce is increasingly common and the Office of National Statistics says an average marriage now lasts 11.6 years. By the time Brookside hit the screen it was difficult to pretend that family life was unproblematic. The pivotal Grant family spoke to widely recognised social trends. Bobby and Sheila’s turbulent marriage captured many of the issues familiar to viewers. However, Brookside did more than provide a dramatic expression to stereotypical marital frustrations. It captured the zeitgeist of the early Eighties, when discussions about the so-called ‘dark side’ of family life acquired an unprecedented public prominence. In the early Thatcher years the public imagination had to engage with issues such as domestic violence and child abuse. Brookside covered these trends.