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Nowhere is this more heartbreakingly felt than in the utterly compelling scene between her and Larry Grayson (Mark Gatiss), who was one of Noele Gordon’s closest friends. Their tender-hearted, soul-searching backstage exchange is a brutally honest outpouring of fear, resignation at their careers coming to an end, and contemplating what little they’ve got left once they can no longer perform.
It’s a beautiful depiction of the fall of Nolly’s empire, as is the first day of Crossroads rehearsals without her, when one of her former co-stars says: ‘Never mention the Scottish play, never whistle backstage, and never sit in Nolly’s chair. These things remain inviolable.’
But the main thing that makes Noele Gordon’s story remarkable is how she responds to this public destruction. Yes, she has wobbles, there are moments when she breaks down, but on the whole? She simply fights on. When Tony asks her what she’ll do now Crossroads is over, she says: ‘Do you think I’d let those bastards stop me? I’ve got plans’. And, most poignantly of all, when Larry Grayson urges her to ‘Start again, show them, all those men, everyone who ever doubted you’, she replies: ‘Oh, watch me’, paraphrasing the real Noele Gordon’s words on the day she was sacked.
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Yes, she endures, against incredible odds, returning to the stage and touring across Asia, but Russell T Davies doesn’t completely canonise her. He makes an excellent, comedic job of memorably displaying her imperfections: when she snaps at an autograph hunter in a restaurant, she makes amends by paying for their meal ‘but not the wine’, and, after arriving at rehearsals in her Rolls, she announces of her colleague: ‘I think Pamela’s going to be late, I drove past her at the bus stop.’
But at the end of the day, Nolly is a Russell T Davies love letter, not only to Noele Gordon – giving her a proper send-off and bringing her rightfully back into the public consciousness – but also to every ‘woman of a certain age’ who is still today being put in her place and ridden roughshod over, who is still called ‘difficult’ when she knows what she wants, ‘bossy’ instead of ‘assertive’. Nolly might be set in the 1980s, but – as the current Act Your Age campaign, which fights against gendered ageism in the TV and film industry, shows – it’s still painfully relevant.
Nolly’s story ends, like her career and her life itself (she died of stomach cancer in 1985, ending a too-little-too-late attempt to bring her back to Crossroads) before her time. At times the series seems rushed, like Davies wanted to pack too much in, and some of the flashbacks highlighting her many achievements feel a bit shoe-horned and sporadic, but it’s still one of his typical masterclasses on not holding back, leaving everything on the page. Including – unlike many screenwriters these days – the big ‘I love you’ moments.
