Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1995 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast away this week is a television producer born and brought up in Liverpool. He's always stayed close to him. Mr. wrote and produced two of British television's most enduring and influential series,

Grange Hill and Brookside.

As a result, he's risen from a poor working class background

to become one of the country's highest paid television executives.

But his programs still reflect the man,

independent and radical, but always anxious to entertain.

He is Phil Redmond.

What was the driving force behind your inventions, Phil?

Was it the desire to put across a message, to entertain or simply to make money?

I suppose the crash answer is to make money and behind that is the avenue out of the traditional working class

background, the council estate, the comprehensive school. Where'd you go after that? And the traditional route

out were always entertainment or sport or through education. I was a social

experiment really, a guinea pig in the educational system in the late 50s early 60s when

comprehensive schools were first thought about.

What you were the first child as it were, one of the first generation to go.

I was one of the first 2% to enter the comprehensive system and instead of going off to the

Jesuits to have education beaten into me I went off to explore the brave new

world of mixed ability teaching and things like that.

And I was at a comprehensive school that I had at its height 2,000 boys all under one roof,

which was an everyday was a kind of more of a lesson in survival.

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