Keeping it brief
Whenever I remember episodes of Grange Hill I feel an instinctive embarrassment, and if I ever recall one of their ‘campaigns' – like Sammo's battle against drugs – I cringe so much I assume the shape of a curly-toed slipper.
For me, message or issues don't sit with fiction, which is fundamentally about the power of stories and the imagination. So I was taken aback at the success of Brief Encounters – it kept the 80 or so S6 pupils at Banchory Academy silent throughout, a fact probably due also to a sensible length of some 25 minutes.
The one-act dialoge saw TV presenter Ann Broad interview father and son Graeme and Philip McDonald on the subject of the depression that had crippled Phil's life since the death of his mother.
The issue was depression, and mental health in general, and the twist was that Broad, with her aggressive attitude towards the MacDonalds' problem, was herself in the first stages of depression. Her own problem with alcohol, we are informed, is one of the first signs of her mental illness.
The issues involved in mental health were covered – such as bereavement, parental expectations, alcohol abuse, employment problems – and at the same time Norma Milne painted a fine portrait of odious TV presenter Ann Broad.
Alistair Harvey and Andy Davidson-Lee were the comparatively low-key father and son, and Vanessa Chew was the producer, Jane, pulling the strings of the show.
Brief Encounters certainly held the pupils' interest, although I felt that the MacDonalds' reactions were too bowed to the services of explicating the mental health message.
Surely, when faced with an ill-mannered, sarcastic and hostile interviewer like Broad, the interviewees would have not been so free with their responses. But then, who can account for the reactions of individuals?
The workshop section after the dialogue threw up some questions from the pupils, although I had one significant reservation about the entire production: the use of its information.
At one stage there was introduced the statistic that 25% of the population suffers from depression at one time or another and it was put to the 80 pupils present that that meant twenty of their numbers could well be depressed.
But it was not explained that the statistic, being a statistic, was not necessarily true. It was certainly not a fact, as the truth, or factual status, of statistics is debatable.
Since Brief Encounters took on a fictional format, there was no onus to explain that statistics are not facts, and its emotional impact was given a free rein.
That aside, there would be few more workable ways of presenting mental health issues that Live Wire's production of Brief Encounters, as it has to be said that the strongest motive of the dialogue was a good, if shaded one: a mix of education and entertainment.
Deeside Piper, 15 th October 1999