Indeed this is why he makes soap operas: I always wanted to do contemporary drama that while it would entertain would raise

Indeed, this is why he makes soap operas: "I always wanted to do contemporary drama that, while it would entertain, would raise people's awareness of contemporary issues."He may sound like a polytechnic lecturer, but Redmond invented a new brand of soap, perhaps now the most powerful on the television market. Where, before, soap operas quietly pursued questions of personal morality and politics through personal relationships, Brookside - which predated the similarly ambitious EastEnders - screamed out, sometimes literally, the universal issues. The despair of unemployment, the state of the NHS, getting used to a gay son, even the lure of cults: all of these have been delivered to us from Redmond's lectern.He has a shrewd populist eye, too, and seems to know, more often than not, precisely when to reach for an issue to fit both the drama of Brookside and the concerns of the world outside. Mandy and Beth buried their tormentor's body under their patio where it lay while police made eerily parallel discoveries in Frederick West's garden.And lurid as this sounds in outline, Redmond is sensitive to the gap between what some viewers recognise as everyday life and what they will welcome on their televisions. In the early Eighties he tempered Grange Hill by refusing to feature glue-sniffing, for fear of "copy-cat experimentation" among its school-age audience. Meanwhile he resisted the efforts of pressure groups to foist their particular issues on Brookside, preventing it becoming "nothing more than a documentary with a Scouse accent".Some of this sense of responsibility comes from a sense of importance.

Besides running and owning Mersey Television, with its 200 employees and turnover of pounds 12m, Redmond is a script consultant on Emmerdale Farm, and an honorary professor of media studies at Liverpool John Moores University (formerly Liverpool poly) - which runs a television production course in cosy partnership with Mersey Television. He earns over pounds 500,000 a year, and says he is worth "considerably more" than the director of a privatised utility. He gives formal lectures and indiscreet quotes on the state of the industry. He no longer writes Brookside, but makes six-monthly interventions as executive producer at strategy conferences with the 12 people who do.Above all, Redmond sees himself as an ambassador for Liverpool.

He resolutely refuses to base his production anywhere else, employs locals and, via the clean, green suburban vistas of Brookside, tries to change unflattering notions about his city. "We actually did have a director who scattered rubbish in a park 'to make it look like Liverpool'," he says. "We said, 'This is Liverpool', and told him to reshoot."REDMOND was "born and bred Scouse" on a council estate in the garden suburb of Huyton in 1949. He went to Catholic schools, passed his eleven- plus - and was sent to one of the first comprehensive schools as a guinea pig, an influence that would lead to Grange Hill.But he didn't know he could write; he studied sociology at university and started work as a quantity surveyor. He says it taught him about budgets, but after two years he was sick of counting bags of cement, and resigned "to see if I could write".

For a year he rushed up and down the motorway to London to press his services on television executives. In 1973 he talked and wrote his way into LWT's sitcom Doctor In Charge, then secured an introduction to the BBC's head of children's drama, Anna Home.Redmond told her he wanted to write a realistic series about a comprehensive, not about Billy Bunter. "He struck me as somebody who had a fresh new attitude," says Home Grange Hill started in 1978 It went down well. Another series was commissioned - and this time Redmond decided to write about what a school in London was really like. Shoplifting, hair-pulling in prefab corridors, teachers smoking fags and complaining in the staff room: people were horrified, called Redmond a Marxist, said he would ruin his young viewers.His young viewers loved it, ratings shot up, and Grange Hill began its generation-influencing run. Crucially and innovatively it didn't patronise children, but took their point of view in theme and technique (it was shot from special low angles). After three years Redmond was ready to move on - colleagues say he can't stop pitching ideas - and Brookside came into creative focus.Where Grange Hill was very Seventies municipal, with its state school and its state funding, Brookside was more Eighties entrepreneurial.