Nolly: Who was Noele Gordon?

2 Feb 2023

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Nolly spoilers follow.

It's a Sin creator Russell T Davies' latest series is the three-part ITVX drama Nolly, which casts a wry look at the later years of actress Noele Gordon, best known for her long-running role in the soap Crossroads in the '60s and '70s.

Helena Bonham Carter stars as Noele – known to her friends as Nolly – and the drama joins her at the height of her success in Crossroads and follows Nolly's story as she is unceremoniously sacked from the show in 1981.

Noele died of cancer in 1985, just before she was due to return to the soap. The series focuses on her last few years and makes brief references to her life before she became one of the most popular actresses on TV.

But it would take another three episodes (at least) to tell the full story of the trailblazing actress who would always be remembered as Meg Mortimer, the owner of the Crossroads Motel. Here are just some of the things you need to know about Nolly…

Who was Noele Gordon?

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Related: Augustus Prew on Tony Adams and the queer appeal of Nolly

Born in East Ham in 1919, Joan Noel Gordon had an incredibly varied TV career before Crossroads made her a household name. Initially a theatre actress, her first TV appearance was in the live BBC drama Ah Wilderness! in 1937, the same year that she changed her name to Noele Gordon.

She made history in 1938 – for the first time, but not the last – when she took part in TV pioneer John Logie Baird's colour television experiments, becoming the first woman to be transmitted in colour from a camera to television sets.

Noele went on to play an important role behind the scenes in television – in 1954, she studied TV production at New York University for a year and then returned to the UK to work for TV mogul Lew Grade, whose company ATV was given a licence to produce weekday shows for the Midlands and weekend shows for London. She became a producer, and also launched ITV's first-ever chat show – Tea With Noele Gordon.

english actress noele gordon 1919 1985, uk, 22nd august 1974 photo by m mckeownexpresshulton archivegetty images

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This led to her producing and appearing in other shows, including A New Angle on Noele Gordon (a series about fishing), variety series Lunchbox ("in which Noele invites viewers to see which guests are sharing her lunch box today") and Noele Gordon Takes To the Air, in which she learned to fly a plane. (You can check out how she did here).

It was during this time that she had another 'first' – becoming the first woman to interview a British prime minister on TV when she spoke with Harold MacMillan in 1958.

"She was fantastically multi-faceted," actress Helena Bonham-Carter said in an interview for the launch of Nolly. "She wasn't easy, she didn't suffer fools. I read her autobiography, which is a hilarious read!

"I spoke to all her friends, who were incredibly generous, and that was very telling, because they really loved her. They said she was somebody who had formidable opinions, was a formidable character, but also had a huge heart. She was a dedicated professional – and she ran the ship!"

Crossroads: The legendary soap

paul henry, noele gordon, susan hanson, crossroads

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In 1964, ATV decided to produce a daytime soap similar to US series like As the World Turns and Guiding Light, and make it a vehicle for their star, Noele Gordon. She played Meg Richardson, a widow who turned her large house into the Crossroads Motel and ran it with her children, Jill and Sandy.

There was also a staff that included memorable characters Amy Turtle (the kitchen assistant who is suspected of being a Russian spy in one episode), receptionist Miss Diane, chef Shughie McFee, handyman Benny (known and loved for the woolly hat he always wore), and womanising manager Adam Chance.

While Crossroads featured some storylines that were ground-breaking at the time – a false accusation of rape, an interracial romance, IVF, and the introduction of a character with Down's syndrome – the series is now mainly remembered for the cheap sets and slightly questionable acting.

"The acting was dire, the wobbly sets laughable, the scripts humdrum," wrote The Guardian critic Stuart Jeffries in 2009 (when the entire run of the show was released on DVD – all 6,250 minutes of it).

"Yet it is an astonishing time capsule," he went on to say, "allowing you to bask in the unbelievable truth that Crossroads was once zeitgeisty, an unmissable teatime treat for 15 million Britons".

Even the cast agreed that the series wasn't the slickest of productions. In an interview with the Daily Express in 2014, Tony Adams, who played Adam Chance, said: "It was the show critics loved to hate. One claimed it was as exciting as watching paint dry while others joked about continuity slip-ups, the acting and wobbly sets.

"What they didn't consider was that in the early days there were no editing facilities. Each episode was shot as live, with everyone working through to the commercial break without stopping. If anyone forgot their lines it was hard luck – mistakes were left in."

noele gordon, zeph gladstone, crossroads

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Noele played the role of matriarch Meg until she was sacked in 1981, as depicted in Russell T Davies's Nolly. While researching the series, Davies attempted to find out the real reason behind her dismissal, as there had been conflicting stories – many people believed it was a combination of Noele being difficult to work with, and her strained relationship with ATV’s head of programming Charles Denton.

"It was a strange, noisy, public sacking, humiliating for character and star," Davies wrote in The Guardian last month. "It fascinated me so much that, 42 years on, I've written a drama about those events."

In an interview in 2007, Jane Rossington, who played Meg's daughter Jane, said: "I think it was political, the powers that be wanted to get rid of Crossroads and they thought that if they killed Nolly off… However, she had also upset a lot of people, in fairness, she did rub people up the wrong way, Charles Denton and people like that.

"I think they thought, 'We'll be stuck with this programme forever if we don't manage to get rid of it, and if we kill Nolly off it will die a death.' Of course, it didn't actually, so I'm sure that's why and I just think it was totally unnecessary."

Helena Bonham Carter believes Noele's sacking by the ATV men in suits still resonates today.

"There's still chronic ageism, isn't there?” she said. "Just because we haven't got bouncy collagen cheeks it doesn't mean we're any less valid. At 61, she was in her prime. And sacked. Nolly is also a bit of a #MeToo story, but without the sex. It's men in offices in suits deciding on what women should be doing, what they should be like, as Nolly says in the show."

Nolly: The true story

ITVX

In an interview for the series launch, Russell T Davies revealed the depth of his research when writing Nolly.

"I had the most fun I've ever had, because I got to speak to the entire cast. I spent endless mornings talking to Benny, talking to Miss Diane, talking to Adam Chance," he said.

"I spoke to floor managers, I spoke to production managers. There's a very great woman called Dorothy Hobson, who wrote a book about what happened on Crossroads, who happened to be around ATV as a researcher.

"By chance, she was in the studios in the weeks that Noele was sacked, which was an astonishing place to be. So she was a great source of information."

"I can promise you when you watch it, everything's true," he also confirmed in an interview with Radio Times. "It's quite an extraordinary story, and quite an eccentric story. It's very mad in places. A whole generation will remember Benny and Miss Diane of the Crossroads reception, so there's a lovely sign of recognition, but that's not what it's about."

"It's also genuinely about the hard work of making a soap opera. This still goes on today. Those actors work so phenomenally hard and never get appreciated for it, so I hope it's waving a flag for all of them."

Nolly is now available to stream on ITVX.

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