Nolly review: Helena Bonham Carter stars in Russell T Davies’ love letter to a forgotten television icon

Helena Bonham Carter stars in Nolly, Russell T Davies’ new ITV drama that charts the life of Crossroads star Noele Gordon
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There’s this bit in Russell T Davies’ book The Writer’s Tale – a collection of emails back and forth between Davies and journalist Ben Cook, breaking down the production of David Tennant’s last years on Doctor Who – where he describes a particularly fraught night filming Torchwood. “I caused havoc on Torchwood last night,” Davies writes, explaining that he realised last minute that a plotline intended for one character would better suit another. “Seven scripts are now being rewritten, including scenes that are actually being filmed today! Lines handed to the cast on the spot. Someone said, ‘We can’t do it. It’s too late.’ I said, ‘I’d make you do this at your mother’s deathbed on Christmas Day if it makes the show better.’ And it does.”

Nolly has a similar scene: Noele Gordon (Helena Bonham Carter) and Poppy (Bethany Antonia), a young actor new to the cast, are rehearsing a new episode of Crossroads. Gordon – star of the show for decades, the most popular with the audience – is demanding and uncompromising, rewriting dialogue on the spot, dismissive of directors and producers alike. “I am making this show better if I have to haul it out of the grave, line by line,” she says – and she’s right. Gordon isn’t just exacting, she’s precise, and there’s clear and demonstrable expertise behind what she’s saying. She’s right about the blocking and staging of each scene, right about the characters, right about the dialogue.

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From there, that first episode moves like lightning. Readthroughs become rehearsals become filming – not live but as good as, because it’s too expensive to restage long sequences or edit scenes extensively, so everything has to be right first time – and then it’s time for transmission, Crossroads flickering into life three nights a week in the corner of 15 million living rooms. It’s cheaply made, barely even stretching to a shoestring budget, and anything that could go wrong does. There’s a palpable energy to it all (the first of several moments that demonstrates how good Blair Mowat’s score is) and Davies writes it like the most exciting thing in the world: frantic and intense but a clear and genuine thrill too.

In amongst it, Gordon is poised and controlled, completely at ease and entirely in her element. Over its three hours, you get some background and biography – she was the first woman on colour television, she was a producer and a presenter as well as an actor, she was the first woman to interview a sitting Prime Minister – but first and foremost you see she’s an expert on Crossroads and how it works. There’s no part of that show that she doesn’t know inside out and back to front, right up until the moment she’s fired without warning.

Bethany Antonia as Poppy, Helena Bonham Carter as Noele Gordon, and Antonia Bernath as Jane in Nolly, filming a new episode of Crossroads (Credit: ITV)Bethany Antonia as Poppy, Helena Bonham Carter as Noele Gordon, and Antonia Bernath as Jane in Nolly, filming a new episode of Crossroads (Credit: ITV)
Bethany Antonia as Poppy, Helena Bonham Carter as Noele Gordon, and Antonia Bernath as Jane in Nolly, filming a new episode of Crossroads (Credit: ITV)

On one level, Nolly is asking why Gordon was fired; on another, it’s obvious what’s going to happen and why from the look on producer Jack Barton’s (Con O’Neill) face when she first interrupts him in rehearsals. As it goes on, Nolly becomes less a question of straightforward hows and whys, and more of an interrogation of the ruthless machine that powered these soaps – Gordon was fired just months after the death of Roger Tonge, who had played her son since the series began – at a point when they were bigger and more powerful than ever. Barton, at one point, muses on “the shot heard round the world”, referencing the death of JR Ewing on Dallas; press speculation about what might happen to Gordon’s character Meg Mortimer pushed Crossroads’ ratings to record heights. It still wasn’t enough.

Helena Bonham Carter is fantastic as Gordon, always most impressive in those quiet vulnerable moments – like when she expresses fears and doubts to entertainer Larry Grayson (Mark Gatiss), coming to the end of his own time as host of The Generation Game, or when she opens up to Crossroads co-star Tony Adams (a charismatic Augustus Prew, who gives his best performance at exactly 43:30 in the final episode). Nolly takes on a melancholy air at times, but underneath it there’s something more positive too; it feels restorative, in a way, an attempt to push back against the way Gordon has been painted in the years since Crossroads faded from memory.

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There are scenes, dotted throughout Nolly, where someone (inevitably a man) will speak dismissively about soaps in general or Crossroads in particular. “It is never just a programme,” Gordon tells one, describing the importance of television in people’s lives – and another, more straightforwardly, she calls a f***ing idiot. It’d be wrong to say that Nolly is defending the genre, though, because there’s nothing defensive about it; Nolly believes that completely, not just treating the soaps with respect but holding them up as vital and alive.

At the press launch for Nolly, someone asked Davies what he’d say to a hypothetical viewer who might defend Gordon’s sacking – someone who might say that, as talented as she clearly was, and as right as she often was, maybe that’s not always the most important thing? (“I’d tell them to f*** off,” he replied, obviously.) Ultimately Nolly feels like a series that’s as personal as anything Davies has written before, not just a tribute to a forgotten icon but a love letter to watching and making and living television too.

Nolly is available to stream on ITVX now, with a traditional broadcast on ITV1 planned for later in the year; I watched all three episodes of Nolly before writing this review. You can read more about Noele Gordon here, and listen to us discuss Nolly on Screen Babble here.

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