I've rewatched 150 episodes of Brookside – here's how the soap captured the nuances of Margaret Thatcher's Britain

The Grant family, some of Brookside's most famous characters. Lime Pictures / STV Player

If you want to understand how Margaret Thatcher shaped Britain, revisiting one particular 1980s soap opera is a great place to start. Brookside, a show set in a Liverpool cul-de-sac, ran for 21 years, airing just under 3,000 episodes between 1982 and 2003.

Brookside was therefore conceived amid the Thatcher administration’s first term, and a notable eight years of its broadcasting output coincided with her tenure.