The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 59

t' Monday March 11999 The Guardian Hard-hitting soap Beth Jordache (Anna Friel) stands trial for the murder of her dad (below It should have been a dream job. It turned into a nightmare. Joanna Prior tells Haiwia ICean about her tussle with the Sunday Telegraph based and not centre on any one social group like the middle class, because it has to reflect the intended audience. Remember the fate of both Eldorado and Albion Market? However, this was "spun" to come out as, you guessed it "middle classes are boring says soap The organ of Middle England had sounded, and knees started to jerk up and down this green and pleasant land. Even Sir John Mortimer, no less, was wheeled out to explain how I was suffering from inverted snobbery and how much culture I had rubbished at a stroke.

From Shakespeare through to his own soon-to-be-published novel, I was reminded how much the middle classes had contributed to our cultural heritage. Suddenly I realised what it must be like to chair a motorway public inquiry. I have also had to write to every national and weekly newspaper, including this one, making this point before it becomes part of television's mythology. But just in case I did not say the middle class was boring. Okay? (Well I suppose some of them are just a bit sometimes but not often honest.) So, hopefully, having cleared that hi i I -I' rT'-i A A fit' vftH''V -fa 's i I I Wl sons' eating habits a close second.

Critic after critic would spend more time worrying about why the Simpsons only ever ate pasta, and only ever with a fork, rather than pondering the content of the programme. It was obvious that something had to change. We had lost the plot. Although I can track the wake-up call to an exact episode, it was not something that was totally out of the blue. Every five years or so I step back from the show, and gauge if it is still as relevant as it was.

In 1982 we came out of a post-socialist class-conscious society and started on the journey to the enterprise culture. By 1987 we were in the one-way system of Thatcherism, yuppie kingdoms and enterprise culture and by 1992 we had reached the end of that road and, like John Major, we were looking to rid ourselves of class divisions but no one seemed to have the next page of the road atlas. Now, in 1999, we seem to have not just a new road atlas, but a newbible. We are told that we are either classless or that we are all middle class. Margaret Thatcher said there is no such thing as society, only a collection of individuals and groups.

The truth is somewhere in between. We actually all like belonging to our various groups and allegiances. It gives us a sense of belonging and identity. We are not numbers or statistics. This was patently obvious during the "boring middle class" debate.

The key to all this is social mobility and exclusion. Britain has always had a fascination with class because it has always been possible to change one's social standing, especially for children through education and inherited wealth. What is probably different today is the way people slip in and out of different groups with different social backgrounds. A builder is now as likely to play golf as a banker; an accountant is as likely to karaoke as an actor. As a result, Brookside must reflect this mosaic of contemporary life and throughout 1998 I have been gradually changing the shape and content of the programme ready to reposition it to reflect Britain's step into the next millennium.

Where will that road take us? Nobody really knows but the signposts are there. Increased disposable income creating a demand for better lifestyles. More single young people buying their own homes. Digital technology having a greater impact on traditional employment structure. Aspirations are increasing, yet there are also concerns.

The anxieties over education, health and an ageing population. The latter is interesting because it will bring with it a shift in economic, and therefore political, influence. After all, even Tony Blair will be a fiftysoniethingin a fewyears. So Brookside must reflect these changes and the issues behind them. How will we do this? Just as we have done in the past.

Partly by recruitment and partly by genetic modification. We injected new talent and lost the Sheila and Bobby socialistyears by cross-fer-tilisingSheila with Billy, and introducing the Brookside Parade street of shops as a symbol of enterprise culture. Time now for another mutation and another fresh intake of talent and ideas and especially really interesting ones about terribly interesting people leading terribly interesting lives but occasionally raping, killing and betraying each other? Phil Redmond is the executive producer of Brookside right); Beth in the controversial i( lesbian kiss (below left); and shopkeeper Ron Dixon (Vince Earl) goes into rescue mode (far left) still, it seems, is to use the two old I favourites of threatening an animal or the middle class. Believe it or not, of i all the issues Brookside has looked at over the past 16 years, these two have resulted in the highest level of vitriol being poured through my mailbox. The first, I will now admit pub-j licly, was a deliberate injection of i shock therapy to a storyline chroni- cling Barry Grants descent into seri ous crime.

It was designed to remind the viewers that although Barry was a lovable rogue and the gangsters he 9 was involved with at the time were an entertaining bunch, he was still about to sell his soul to the devil. To illustrate this, I suggested that Barry be forced to kidnap an amusement arcade owner's dog with the threat that if the protection money wasn't paid, the dog would be toast. An episode ended with Barry looking at the big-eyed mongrel and explaining that it was either his head in a bed or Barry's. It was a Friday night hook and, as expected, the complaints from dog-obsessed Britain started to come in, and in, and in, and in. The level of complaint far exceeded that following the rape of Sheila Grant and went on even past the transmission or trie following Tuesday's episode in which, i of course, we showed that even hard-I hearted Barry couldn't bring himself 1 to harm a dog.

Bear in mind the Sheila Grant storyline that included her actual rape, whereas in this one we only threatened Rover then consider how one lady was so distressed she I spent an hour each day the tollowing i week talking to our head of publicity. In the end, his patience snapped and I he asked her if she had ever seen The Godfather. "Oh yes," she replied. "It's my favourite turn, ne rts. men reminded her of the horse 's-head-in-; the-bed scene, whereupon she replied that that was completely dif-! ferent.

That was a horse. This is a I doe! It is insights like this that make I television so interesting. I' At least I had set that particular saga in motion, however, so imagine i my surprise when I suddenly found if myself under a deluge of even greater vitriol and a media circus not seen since I handed down a guilty verdict on Mandy and Beth Jordache for a remark I never actually made. I was accused and abused for allegedly say- i ing that "the middle class are 'j This tale actually started in the 'summer of 1998, when a rumour jl'Went round that Brookside was ijunder threat of being dropped by fchannel 4. This was rather strange, I fas we had not long agreed a three- I I year deal, but I still had to do the 1 media rounds to explain that the ijchanges at Brookside were part of a I long-term review to bring the pro-1j gramme up to date.

By the time the spin kicked in, I was reported to be (taking Brookside as in iTony Blair's "we are all middle class Liverpool was suddenly going 'to rival Tunbridge Wells as the bas tion of middle-class values. Trying to correct this false, although interesting, impression brought me into contact with the dreaded Daily Mail. I said that to make a soap work it has to be broadly posal, which he liked, and she was invited to Canary Wharf. Within 24 hours she had been offered the job. "I don't think it was vanity that made me accept it.

He made me believe I could do it. I just thought I'd be mad to say no." This was a view not shared by some at the Sunday Telegraph. "Generally the feeling is that she was really naive to think she could do the job without any experience," says one. But there is some sympathy on Fleet Street for Prior. "When you work your way up from being a junior, you've seen the pressure that senior staff are under.

You know what is going to land on you; that you will have to work weekends, from home and until late you're ready for it," says a section editor at a rival broadsheet. "When people are recruited by the editor, the editor is so far removed from the day-to-day running of sections that the recruit isn't prepared." Certainly that reflects Prior's experience. "I felt I was doing the job blindfold, because it was a new culture for me and I didn't know how to behave. I was feeling my way into the job and no one was helping me." Relentless deadlines, the pressure for exclusives and the competitive atmosphere crushed her. "It is the most cut-throat, uncaring and tough environment I can imagine.

Teamwork is not something they are into." ''Cil 'le no lnSer intimi-; dated by hacks. "Journal- ists like the mystique, to '4lT give the impression that when they are being rude on the phone it's because there is something very important happening." She is not fooled. More practically she understands press deadlines. "We expect far too much of journalists we expect thein to read our books," she says. Now she knows that pressure of work means that they will not read anything on spec.

She knows that pitches should be made in the morning when journalists are able to listen, and not panicking about the day's stories. Her experience has made her more aware of editors' priorities. "One revelation was how uninterested they are in their readers. They care about numbers, they care about circulation." When she was sacked, it was clear she would soon be snapped up by a publisher. And she was.

Helen Fraser, managing director at Penguin General, with whom Prior had worked at Reed, approached her. "Coming back, you do feel that this is a very civilised industry." A longer version of this article appears In the current issue of the Bookseller pSJJpN anyone's standards lfalj; Joanna Prior's fall to earth felTJH was spectacular. From book publishing golden girl she was a director at Fourth Estate at 26 she found herself the sacked section editor of a national newspaper in six months flat. There had been surprise when she moved from books to journalism at the Sunday Telegraph magazine in January 1998. But there was no sense of schadenfreude when the axe fell the following June.

Seven months on, in her office at Penguin where she is now publicity director, she can afford to be philosophical. "Oh, I think it is good for everyone to get fired. I don't think it need do anyone any long-term harm. Certainly getting fired from a daily newspaper is a daily occurrence." She is clearly relieved to be back on home turf away from Canary Wharf. She looks happy and relaxed a long way from the tense figure who, a year ago, appeared with other journalists at a Publishers Publicity Circle forum.

Then, according to one observer, Prior, visibly shaking, had told those present: "The only thing I think about at work is going back through the Limehouse Link to be with my daughter." But success at Fourth Estate had made her restless. "There was a part of me that thought: 'Is this it, Sure, the work was interesting; sure, the company was growing. But there was a part of me that felt ready for change." In this spirit of "slight she took a call from Dominic Lawson, editor of the Sunday Telegraph. Out of the blue, a man she had never met asked if she wanted to edit his paper's magazine. Her first instinct was to refuse, but Lawson "flattered me into thinking I should Over the weekend she put together a pro- if am EgfBsgyyff.fe- ti Lawson rang out of 1 bluo reflect Britain's up, how did this particular media circus get started? It was at the end of 1997.

I remember watching Ron Dixon and Bing Crosby arguing about Ron putting petrol in the tank of his car in a sequence that went on for about seven minutes. Although I have been called master of the mundane, even I had to admit that this particular event was not one of the greatest dramatic moments of our time. I looked across the show and realised that Brookside was turning into the Ron and Bing show, with the Simp.