FOR the past month, it has been my proud boast to all and sundry that I managed to spend virtually a whole day in Liverpool's Brookside Close without mutating into any of the following: an unwitting drugs mule; a heroin dealer; a surrogate mother; a hostage in a siege; the victim of a gas and/or bomb explosion; a cheeky Scouse window cleaner wrongly accused of child sex-abuse; a suicidal manic depressive teacher who forged his job references.

Likewise, my brief sojourn in Merseyside's most famous private housing development remained unsullied by any cruel last-minute contretemps in which I was jilted at the altar on my wedding day. And as I didn't kill anybody, I couldn't possibly have buried their corpse under the patio behind the house at No 10.

Nor did my stay in Brookside Close result in me becoming a glamorous lesbian, although in the interests of accuracy, I must confess in real life to having long been prey to the impulses which afflict a glamorous lesbian who's always been trapped inside the body of an unglamorous man. While my visit was devoid of incident, all these dramas - and many more besides - have certainly afflicted the Close's long-term residents during the 18-year lifespan of British TV's most downbeat, issue-driven soap opera.

Typically, Brookside will this week undergo its reaching of the age of majority with a week-long five-night murder suspects' special. For last week someone slew inconstant upper-crust sex-pot Susannah on the night before her wedding to long-suffering Mick Johnson, whom she was wickedly two-timing.

So whodunnit? Could it be the noble Mick, whose life has been unfairly blighted by one hellish happening after another? Could it be Susannah's smoothiechops secret lover, Dr Darren? Might it be Susannah's jealous ex-hubby, Max Farnham? Or Jacqui Dixon, the regretful birth-mother of Susannah's surrogate son?

Or perhaps the culprit is avenging blonde teenage minx Emily Shadwick. She's never forgiven Susannah for her involvement in her father's sudden highly explosive death (bomb, not gas). Or maybe - just maybe - it wasn't so much that Susannah was pushed, rather that she simply fell . . .

Of course, there's a bigger underlying question, too: why was I especially shipped into Brookside Close last month along with 30-odd other telly journos from all over Britain, at no small expense to Channel 4 and the soap's makers, Mersey Television? Jings, as you can see from the top of this column, C4 even pushed the boat out so far as to pay for a photographer to snap individual portraits of us scribblers all sitting atop the close's famous street sign.* Could it be that Brookside needs vital reinforcement in the soap wars?

For while Coronation Street goes from strength to strength at the top of the ratings, narrowly trailed by the whining Dickensian orphan that is EastEnders, Emmerdale has just begun broadcasting five episodes a week. Corry does earthy comedy like no other soap; EastEnders has monopolised inner-city greyness. Barring visits from doomed jet-liners, Emmerdale offers cosy rural with a contemporary twist.

Meanwhile, despite the wholesale importation of a host of Hollyoaks-style female nubiles from the teen serial drama that is Mersey Television's successful young Brooky sibling, Brookside continues to plough its grim established furrow of adult social awareness.

Over the years, it's made us look at rape, drug addiction, same-sex love, and incest - albeit incest between two attractive and consenting adults, rather than the nastier, less photogenic non-fictional kind which social workers routinely deal with. More recently, in the storyline which presaged window cleaner Sinbad's Brookside exit, there's been child abuse.

Currently, too, there's Jimmy Corkhill's depressive mental illness, which recently worsened when poor Jimmy threatened to throw himself off the roof of the school where he fraudulently works. In fact, it's the roof of the redundant college wherein Mersey TV has its HQ, and where it also films Hollyoaks.

Brooky's cheesy Bev's Bar is there, too, which is where Brooky founder Phil Redmond briefly addressed the assembled media throng. ''There's no such thing as the last taboo,'' he said, proudly trumpeting Brooky's record.

''Taboos change as societies change. I once said voting Tory was a taboo. Now it might be petrol going up to #4 a gallon. When we drift into things that people call social issues, we do so because people are interested.''

Executive producer Paul Marquess was on hand, too, to assure us that stories are what count, and that Brookside is a writers' show. There are 16 regulars, and they all have a brief to be fresh and original, relatively free from interference.

Marquess was also quick to deny that Brookside is in the same mass-market business as the other three big soaps. ''We're here to do the difficult stuff that puts people off, the issues like child abuse, and we're keen to build on that distinctiveness,'' Marquess said.

Elsewhere, in interviews inside the Close's extraordinarily ordinary houses, I learnt that: a) veteran actor Ken Cope - now Ray Hilton; formerly the original pre-Reeves and Mortimer Hopkirk (deceased) - once recorded a single called Hands Off, Stop Mucking About; and b) that Neil Davies - new boy Robbie - could have had a professional football career with Lincoln City until he was badly injured.

As for Brooky's own health, it would surely be improved by better fortune and good humour for Mick Johnson. After all, earlier this year Mick's alter ego, Louis Emerick, holidaying in Glasgow, volunteered for what, for us regulars, is often the ultimate in woe: he visited Firhill one Saturday afternoon to watch Partick Thistle. Now there's a difficult social issue.

*Apologies. I know. A grinning haddock. Or Ron Dixon's incontinent idiot half-brother.