Helena Bonham Carter stars in Nolly, a homage to the English soap
It’s one of the great mysteries of British television history. Was Nolly Gordon sacked for being a diva, or just too popular? We might finally have the answer.
What’s that showbiz adage? American soaps are all about rich, gorgeous people being miserable and British soaps are all about poor, ugly people being miserable?
Unkind perhaps on the looks front, as hard as it is to imagine the casts of Coronation Street or EastEnders hanging out with our Botoxed and Beautiful friends in the States.
But the English soap really is a marvel. Shows about the most ordinary people in the most ordinary places acting completely bonkers. There are gossipy washer women and hard-boiled old blokes – who often look like your aunts and uncles – having affairs and committing murders and generally getting up to no good.
What glorious nights I had in Glasgow sitting with my Gran and Grandpa watching the late great Barbara Windsor – the owner of EastEnders’ Queen Vic – bellowing “GET OUT OF MY PUB” as she revealed her husband’s dalliance with her best mate.
How terrified I was, only 10 at the time, when I saw those mainstays of Coronation Street – the poor old Platt family – driven into the lake by their evil serial-killing stepdad. Don’t worry, they lived and he died.
Not sure my dad really approved of me staying up watching sex scandals and serial killers, but thank god Gran and Grandpa never minded.
And what acting factories they are. Any of you who have been obsessed this month with Happy Valley’s brilliant Sarah Lancashire – in the performance of the year most probably – should thank the soaps. She found fame in the early 1990s on the Corrie cobblestones.
And this all brings us to Nolly, Binge’s new star-studded homage to the world of the soap starring Helena Bonham Carter in the title role and written by British telly’s reigning bard, Russell T Davies.
Davies has always loved soaps. Yes, he’s the titan who turned tatty old Doctor Who into a 21st-century powerhouse and broke every sexual TV barrier imaginable with Queer as Folk. But even if you watch new Doctor Who or It’s a Sin – Davies’s recent masterpiece about how AIDS obliterated young gay men in ’80s Britain – you will see the influence of Corrie and Emmerdale Farm in the characters and in the language.
All of Davies’s shows showcase his supreme sense of how the British soap combines the ordinary with the fantastical.
And that’s what Nolly, a true story, is all about.
Bonham Carter plays Noele “Nolly” Gordon, the middle-aged, much loved, star of Crossroads – a now long-lost soap that nobody would ever dare compare with Corrie.
It was utter garbage.
The sets wobbled, the scripts were tripe, the acting was awful, and it didn’t have a constituency. It wasn’t about posh people or poor people or rural people. It was a rudderless soap. Except for Gordon. As shown in this TV docudrama, the star of Crossroads had millions of adoring fans and was feted everywhere she went. Imagine Irene from Home and Away or Susan on Neighbours, but on a much, much bigger scale.
But in 1981, Gordon – out of the blue, very suddenly, after 18 years – was sacked by the producers.
It’s one of the great mysteries of British television history. Was Gordon sacked from Crossroads because she was a diva? Was she even sacked because she was too popular and the producers secretly wanted to cancel her show and spend the money on prestige TV?
This show certainly strives to tell that story and tell it well. But is Davies’s homage to this fallen soap star and her rubbish show any better?
It’s all in all a mixed bag.
Bonham Carter can hold any television show or movie together. She is charisma incarnate. But Noele Gordon – both in front and away from the soap cameras – is portrayed here as a very reserved, distant figure.
She’s queenly, but not a diva. She has a lot of camp friends, including the infamous gay comedian Larry Grayson, played very well here by Mark Gatiss, but she’s not flamboyant. She can be cold but she’s not cruel. She’s quite kindly to new actors and people on the street.
And that’s where Bonham Carter falls down slightly. She is a grand actor – she’s Voldemort’s mad and bad lieutenant, or Sweeney Todd’s murderous pie shop owner, or a drunken mess of a Princess Margaret in The Crown. But her attempts here at diffidence come off as a little wooden.
One can’t help wondering if she’s miscast. You wonder if Lancashire – with her Happy Valley steeliness and her Corrie upbringing – may have been a better choice.
Or even that other queen of British prime time Keeley Hawes, who is best known for ice queens in the likes of BBC sensation Bodyguard, but who blew everyone away as a dowdy, cold, anti-gay mother in Davies’s It’s A Sin.
Davies also seems a bit constricted by the real life events he’s writing about. Nolly is three episodes and quite compact, but the show doesn’t move with great ease and can feel clunky.
Odd because his other great true story success – A Very English Scandal, about the dastardly British Liberal Party leader who tried to kill his gay lover – is so swift and dynamic.
But there are things to like in this soap homage. Davies and Bonham Carter capture in a very loving way how soap stars play a big role – bigger than movie stars or rockers – in the hearts of everyday people in Britain. And her moments with Gatiss, consoling the closeted gay comic who knows the world is laughing at him as much as with him, are very good.
Young British star Augustus Prew shines as Bonham Carter’s toy boy and Con O’Neill is magnificent as the put-down producer of Crossroads who’s finally had it with his difficult star.
Nolly, like the soap opera it pays homage to, doesn’t entirely work. But it has enough moments to probably keep you hooked. And when you’re done with Nolly on Binge, go and check out the latest episodes of the other British soaps there.
On Binge right now, there’s Coronation Street, EastEnders, Emmerdale – all those stories about people like your granny and aunty and their old pommy mates getting into all sorts of bother.
EastEnders – the BBC’s soap to end all soaps when I was a kid – is going through something of a revival at the moment after nearly a decade of decline in both quality and ratings back in Blighty.
Kellie Bright, who deserves a big-time TV career when she finally leaves, is holding the soap together as the alcoholic, pink dressed successor to Windsor’s Queen Vic landlady.
Bright’s husband, an EastEnders icon and Cockney actor Danny Dyer, has drowned at sea, her arch nemesis (the soap’s long time villain, the glorious Charlie Brooks) is in prison, and the booze is calling her name. God, Bright is electric to watch.
Corrie has been in better patches. The iconic ITV soap hasn’t been the same since its young beautiful ingenue star, Millie Gibson, fled the Street late last year after screwing up a hit on the local mechanic who murdered her evil dad nearly a decade earlier (yes, yes, soaps are silly).
Luckily, you can still tune in now and see stars who have been on the soap since the ’60s and ’70s, like TV icons William Roache and Barbara Knox. And you’ll see Gibson again soon in Davies’s second stint at Doctor Who, playing the companion to Sex Education star Ncuti Gatwa’s time lord.
And god, Emmerdale is flying. It was for so long seen as the poor cousin to the big two soaps. But this show about people in a picturesque Yorkshire village is just sensational.
Lucy Pargeter is the standout as the Woolpack landlady – yes, all these soaps revolve around pubs – and in the past month, her tendency to have flings with men other than her husband is getting her into serious trouble.
Claire King is also just so watchable as Emmerdale’s evil local millionaire, in a performance of such malevolence that it would put The Simpsons’ Mr Burns to shame.
Long may those soaps reign. Long may they gossip in the local pub, snog each other, kill each other. They’re all part of the great British dramatic tradition – just as much as prestige BBC telly or the top West End theatre – and as viewers we’re lucky to have them.
Nolly, Binge.
Eastenders, Binge.
Coronation Street, Binge.
Emmerdale, Binge.
