The first time I cried was when Debbie McGee tweeted: “Just heard the sad news about Caroline Aherne she was wonderful especially as Mrs Merton. My interview will be a treasured memory, RIP.” I cried on the W3 bus, and then laughed, because Debbie McGee had just made me cry, and what a weird, gorgeous legacy is that for one of your heroes to leave behind?
Great, funny people leave these landmines for us, so our grief gets thrown off whack, and we laugh-cry, that bitter-sweet spot rarely touched. Caroline Aherne has made me – us – laugh-cry more than any other writer. She was fearless, by which I mean she did not fear being vulnerable. She was intensely private, because so much of herself seeped through in her work.
McGee had been a guest on the Mrs Merton chat show in 1995, when Mrs Merton – Aherne – asked her the famous question: “What was it that attracted you to millionaire Paul Daniels?” McGee must have heard that joke every day since then, and still loved it. It was impossible not to love Caroline Aherne.
I grew up in awe of her, starring in the early 90s as Sister Mary Immaculate (“Me and the sisters get a discount on Virgin airlines for some reason – subliminal advertising or something?”) on Channel 4’s thrillingly chaotic Remote Control. She was one of the few girls in that gang of gonzo comics, working with Frank Sidebottom and Vic and Bob before launching The Fast Show.
Caroline’s most memorable Fast Show role was Poula Fisch, the “Scorchio”-yelping weathergirl from Chanel 9. But it was her other characters that got under your skin. Paul Whitehouse once said he considered calling it The Sad Show because, beneath the catchphrases, so many of the characters were tragic figures. None more so than Caroline’s Our Janine, the gum-cudding schoolgirl, dreaming big dreams under her pop posters despite teenage motherhood. (She wouldn’t name her baby’s father because “it’s not fair to grass on your headmaster”.)
Caroline was born in London but her parents moved to Manchester when she was two, and the city indelibly informed her voice, much like her peer Victoria Wood. But Caroline’s was the modern Manchester – the Hacienda, Madchester, marrying Peter Hook from New Order.
As Mrs Merton, she made the uncool hip. Celebrities who joined in the joke were elevated – with kindness and faux-naivety, she teased the truth out of her guests and invited them to play. Caroline understood the extraordinary power of female innocence, playing dumb.
Remember the 1997 Brit awards, when Mrs Merton shuffled to the stage and asked if there was anyone in the audience called Charlie? “Charlie, love? Can you make yourself known? They’re all asking for you backstage ...”
Another thing about Caroline’s characters – their disguises were flimsy to the point of nonexistent. Mrs Merton was a wig and glasses – no ageing makeup. Janine was a school-tie and a scrunchie. She was always millimetres from the surface in everything. To me, her rawness was electrifying, seductive in a blokily 90s sea of safe surrealism and catchphrases.
Like her masterpiece, Denise Royle. Most memorable female sitcom characters are spiky with a gooey centre, the old battleaxe with a heart of gold. Denise was the exact opposite, an inside-out hedgehog - a surface of ickle girl sweetness, all hair bobbles, peroxide and that voice, a creaky toddler on the verge of tears – “Can you make us a bacon sandwich? And make the bacon dead, dead crispy?”
Denise was nails. Always the victim, stroppy, outraged, certain and sexually terrifying. Craig Cash’s Dave worshipped her. Her frailty was her weapon, whimpering with a hangover: “I only had about nine.” (Every hangover I have ever had with my best friend, we whimper “I only had about nine …”) On motherhood: “I’m only not smoking in front of Baby David until he’s old enough to get up and walk out of the room, then it’s his choice.”
The Royle Family was instantly quotable because it was already saying what people were saying. We, soaked in telly, eating Club biscuits, remembering old adverts, arguing about thermostat fiddles. My friends and I grew up with the Royles; they reflecting us reflecting them – I don’t know a single parent who didn’t tenderly play their newborn Radiohead’s No Surprises, like Denise and Dave did with Baby David.
It almost didn’t happen, of course. The Royle Family only exists because Caroline refused to make a fifth series of Mrs Merton until the BBC shot her pilot script, written with Craig Cash and Henry Normal. After a tepid response from execs, someone finally decided to make it – but their way, like “proper” telly. With a studio audience, multiple cameras, trad. Think: My Royle Family. According to series two producer Kenton Allen, Caroline was so outraged with the result that she took the only copy of the tape, and buried it in her mum’s back garden. What lady-balls! What self-assurance! What a woman!
Nothing is scarier than a woman with no fucks to give. She spent a whole lifetime battling cancer. She was born with retinoblastoma, cancer of the retina, which left her partially sighted. She fought bladder and lung cancer, but also inner demons. The well-publicised booze battles, the Priory.
You need to have a life to write about life, and Aherne had strip-mined hers so thoroughly, a change was desperately needed. She moved to Australia and wrote about retirees for Dossa and Joe, working in the UK sporadically, carefully, on The World’s Fattest Man and some Royle Family specials.
This year she came out of retirement to front a campaign for Manchester cancer care, and reveal the terrible truth that her cancer was back. But we were so happy to hear that voice – that voice – as the host of Channel 4’s Gogglebox. A divine tribute to her Royles, Googlebox is a “real-life” Royle Family (as though the Royles weren’t real people anyway). Hidden cameras spy on families and friends watching telly, accidentally leaking the truths of themselves as they snark at EastEnders and the Bake Off.
Her joy in the honesty, the dirt and the exquisite awkwardness of the everyday will live on as a tingle in the fingertips of the writers she inspired. Write honest, write thin-skinned, write love. Bury your compromises in your mum’s back garden. We will miss you, Caroline.
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