ITV
Bringing a TV legend to life
Helena Bonham Carter as Noele Gordon in Nolly
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TVX drama Nolly is Russell T Davies’s love letter to a soap that became a national institution. Crossroads, which originally ran from 1964 to 1988, was ridiculed for its cheap production values and slightly wooden acting yet was adored by up to 15 million loyal viewers – and it almost gave Davies his first writing job. He was unemployed when he applied to work on the drama and was invited to Birmingham to be shown around his first TV set. Davies was asked to write a trial script. Just five days after he submitted it, Crossroads, set in a Midlands motel, was axed. “This is writing as an act of revenge!” Davies joked to a packed RTS Midlands premiere. Actually, he doesn’t hold a grudge and Nolly is a wonderfully affectionate and funny celebration of the drama, both on- and off-screen, that has fascinated him for 40 years. He wanted to solve the mystery of why Noele Gordon, played in Nolly by Helena Bonham Carter, was suddenly
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Russell T Davies tells the RTS how he set out to rescue the reputation of one of the giants of British TV, Noele Gordon, with his tribute Nolly and brutally sacked in 1981 with no explanation, and how such a famous woman came to be so forgotten. Gordon was the holder of many television firsts. She was the first woman to be seen on colour TV sets, the host of the first popular ITV chat show (Tea with Noele Gordon), the first woman to interview a British Prime Minister (Harold Macmillan) and the first woman to host the Royal Variety Performance. More than 10,000 fans turned up to watch her marry and become Mrs Meg Mortimer (the character she played in Crossroads was originally called Meg
Richardson) at Birmingham Cathedral, an occasion that is celebrated in the opening scenes of Nolly. But now the Queen of the Midlands, who died in 1985, has been consigned to history. “Nobody under 40 remembers her,” Davies told the rapt Birmingham audience. “When I was pitching to ITV, someone said ‘Who’s she?’. She just vanished. “Our producer, Nicola Shindler, said something interesting. I said, ‘But there are names that live on, like Diana Dors’, and she replied, ‘If they’re not a sex symbol, they don’t’. It shows how much men are in control of the legacy. “I wanted to give Noele the send-off she deserved, because the way she was treated was disgraceful.” Viewers will find out in the third and final episode why Gordon was sacked, because Davies has discovered the truth. “It was told to me by someone on a Zoom [call],” revealed Davies. “I was sitting there thinking: ‘Oh, my God, this is a goldmine.’ Those words were true,