A night to remember 1999

As the celebrations get underway at the Millennium Club, no one realises quite how unforgettable the evening will become until Lindsey receives a chilling phone call which will have tragic repercussions throughout the Close.

"Enjoy the party, it should go down a bomb!" says Callum Finnegan to Lindsey. 

And so begins one of the most exciting and dramatic storylines in Brookside's 17-year history.

Months of planning went into the 27 August episode, which sees the opening of the club end in tragedy, with professional stunt arrangers and effects specialists brought in to coordinate the dramatic sequences.



The extra efforts meant the team worked long days and weekends. Chief among them was Claire Sweeney, who is in the thick of the action as Lindsey Phelan.

"I spent about three days buried under rubble," recalls the actress. "It was quite uncomfortable and some of the special effects were a bit scary. There was one point during a scene when an effect that I wasn't expecting went off, so a lot of the shocked reactions you'll see from me on screen are real!"

Claire also had to undergo an extensive make-up routine to transfer her into the battered and bruised Lindsey we'll see during the dramas. "It took a bit of time as they had to put all these scabs and bruises on me, cover me in fake blood and finally sprinkle over brown flour to look like muck," she explains.

With most of the scenes being filmed out of sequence, Claire was in the confusing position of being bruised and buried under rubble one day and glammed up for the party at the club the next. "They had to give me two dresses," she explains. "One clean one for the party and a filthy one for the aftermath scenes."

However, Claire certainly thinks all the effort that went into the production will create a cracking episode.

"I haven't seen any of it yet, so I'm really looking forward to watching it all when it goes out," she says. "I loved all the action stuff. Getting dirty with all that muck and grime wasn't very nice, but it was well worth it for a storyline as brilliant as this."