Fragile star who made everyone happy – except herself
Mrs Merton creator Caroline Aherne had a higher IQ than Stephen Hawking. But she couldn’t cope with the fame her genius brought
THOSE who inquired after the health of Caroline Aherne, who has died of cancer at the age of only 52, were told: ‘She’s in good spirits, she’s not bad.’ The actress and writer, beloved for creating BBC sitcom The Royle Family and gossiping granny Mrs Merton, was determined to slip away without making a fuss.
Some close pals said yesterday she was fully aware that, having previously survived retina and bladder cancer, she was not going to come through lung and throat cancer this time.
‘It was the news that we were dreading,’ said one, adding that he had been expecting it for a while.
Comedy producer Andy Harries, a long-time friend, called her ‘a real candle in the wind’, and said: ‘Caroline lived with cancer all her life and sensed that she would not have a long life.’
Two years ago, she bravely broke her selfimposed seclusion to announce her illness in an attempt to raise funds for Macmillan Cancer Support.
Then she returned to her modest red-brick home in Timperley, south Manchester, near her mum Maureen and brother Patrick, where she lived so quietly that neighbours were at times convinced she had moved out.
In her final years, Caroline, described as ‘enchanting and extraordinarily kind’, was spotted sometimes on nights out at the Frog and Bucket comedy club in Manchester, and at a modest local Italian restaurant with her family.
She was clearly unwell: frail and slim, but heavily made up, because she always took a pride in her appearance.
She kept on doing voiceovers for the Channel 4’s incredibly successful show Gogglebox until around a month ago, when she was too ill and her closest friend and comedy writing partner Craig Cash took over.
And she kicked about ideas for a sitcom for the BBC, as always with Cash.
However, she was semiretired for the final decade of her life, having quit television in 2001 because she no longer wanted to be famous.
There were some minor performing roles — she provided a voice for animated CBBC series Strange Hill High, and also appeared as a barmaid in a comedy with Steve Coogan in 2008.
A year later she wrote a drama for actor Timothy Spall, and there was a Royle Family Christmas special in 2012.
Projects such as the Royle Family specials were only undertaken when she wanted to do them, and at her own pace.
In truth she was very fragile — as attested by the ECT ther- apy she underwent for depression in 2005 (in which small electric currents are passed through the brain), and multiple stays in The Priory clinic.
This vulnerability was shown from almost the earliest days of her fame when she lived through wilder ups and more terrifying downs than even her bunch of hard-living contemporaries, such as Coogan and actor Jon Thompson, who long struggled with a drink problem.
She walked away from the limelight partly because of a desire to enjoy romantic happiness and even build a family.
‘I probably wouldn’t be doing this if I had someone,’ she reflected at the time.
Craig Cash joked: ‘She comes up with all this stuff about her career coming first, but Caroline’s actually gagging for a bloke.’
Sadly, she never came close to fulfilling that dream.
Friend Ricky Tomlinson, her father Jim in The Royle Family, recalled her sobbing real tears when they filmed the scenes in which her character Denise Royle went into labour in 1999.
‘I think it was so special to her because she didn’t have children,’ reflected Tomlinson this weekend.
Born on Christmas Eve 1963 in Ealing, West London, Caroline was the daughter of Bert, an alcoholic Irish railway labourer. The family moved north when she was two, and she was raised on a council estate in Wythenshawe, one of the toughest areas of Manchester.
She was born with retinoblastoma, a rare cancer of the retina, as was her older brother Patrick. She was partially sighted in one eye as a result.
As a youngster she was a great mimic, naturally funny, and shone at the Hollies Convent School, where she achieved nine A grades in her O-levels. Her IQ was measured at a stratospheric 176 (higher than scientist Stephen Hawking).
She studied drama at Liverpool Polytechnic, and then was a secretary at BBC Manchester. Her desire to be a researcher failed because she was ‘too giddy’ in the job interviews.
It was an anarchic stint on KFM, a pirate radio station in Stockport, which got her noticed. She appeared as Sister Mary Immaculate, whose stated ambition was to ‘kiss the Pope’s ring’, and as Country and Western singer Mitzi Goldberg, as well as the agony aunt Mrs Merton.
In 1992, she first appeared as Mrs Merton on a shoestring budget, six- episode TV show filmed for Yorkshire TV.
There was a pilot for Granada, where she interviewed BBC DJs Andy and Liz Kershaw with that deadly faux innocence. ‘Well, you’re brother and sister and both Radio One disc jockeys, which is remarkable because neither of you has got a very nice voice,’ she said.
In the end, the BBC which commissioned the show in 1994.
Her loaded questions were gems. She asked: ‘Were you breast-fed, Carol Thatcher?’ ‘Does your wife like Supermarket Sweep, Dale Winton?’; ‘George Best, was it playing all that football that made you so thirsty?’ And, of course, she asked Debbie McGee what had first attracted her to millionaire magician Paul Daniels.
Her reward was a series of Bafta triumphs.
This was a golden period for her because she also featured in The Fast Show, as Euroweather-girl Paula Fisch, slapping suns onto a map and brightly observing: ‘Scorchio!’
She became one of the highest-paid figures on television, with money also rolling in from endorsements for household brands such as British Gas and PG Tips.
She was a fixture at every comedy awards, and often heckled the winners. Craig Cash said they would come down to London on the train. ‘We’d get on at Manchester and be p****d by Macclesfield.’
She married pop group New Order’s bassist Peter Hook in 1994 — the same year as her world began to spin out of control with the death of her father, on whom she based the character of Jim Royle.
Her marriage had disintegrated by 1996, and Hook and Aherne’s new love — TV researcher Matt Bowers — got into a public brawl at a celebrity party. Bowers died of cancer shortly after they split up.
This dark period reached a nadir when she attempted suicide in 1998, washing down pills with champagne, after writing a farewell note to her late father.
‘I couldn’t believe I had taken an overdose,’ she said later. ‘I must have been so drunk, it was a total blackout. They told me it wasn’t premeditated because I hadn’t gone out and bought tablets. I’d taken what was in my medicine drawer. Oh, the shame of it and the worry I’d caused.’
She said she had drunk three bottles of champagne — she had been drinking heavily since splitting from Peter Hook.
The immediate trigger for the suicide attempt, though, was breaking up with her then boyfriend, the actor Alexis Denisof. She had moved to London to be with him.
Next came comedian David Walliams, whom she dated for a year in 1999 after meeting him at the celebrity hangout the Groucho Club.
He observed: ‘Caroline sober, the real Caroline, is the sweetest, kindest, gentlest, most loving person you could ever meet. However, when she drank, the alcohol poisoned her mind.’
He said in his autobiography Camp David: ‘Of course I was aware of her troubled life, and like most men who were attracted to Caroline thought I could save her.’
The picture he paints is of an impossible romance full of dramas. He bought her a hat, she lost it. She got drunk at dinner and argued with him. She wrote him a letter late at night ‘full of contradictions’.
His diary records that in the middle of the night his phone rang and ‘a strange woman with the voice of Caroline Aherne started saying completely out of character things to me. ‘You’ve got no love in your heart — you’re incapable of it.’
After he put the phone down, she rang again. ‘Come on David. Pick up the phone, let’s fight.’
They dated for ‘ a year or more’ and broke up often. Walliams thought that if he loved her enough, he would be able to save her from her demons. Sadly, it wasn’t to be.
Since the news of her death, Walliams has described her on Twitter as ‘a true comedy genius’ and ‘one of the all-time greats’.
During the time of dating Walliams, when The Royle Family debuted, she suffered three debilitating bouts of depression, and despite the critical acclaim for the show, which changed the face of comedy, she wrote only three series.
In 2001, at the peak of her success, she announced she was quitting showbusiness. She told Hello! magazine her difficult personal life, on top of the pressure of fame, was to blame.
‘Getting used to being famous alone would have been enough, but it was like a domino effect. I couldn’t cope and I wanted to numb it all with drink.’
In a bid to start again, she moved to Australia and wrote a TV series, Dossa And Joe, broadcast Down Under.
While there, she fell in love with businessman Brett Whitford, but he refused to move to England with her in 2002.
And, after a disastrous romantic break at the Ritz in Paris, during which he slept on the bathroom floor, he decided that she was too volatile. When
She so wanted lasting love and a family ‘I wanted to numb it all with drink’
he said he was leaving, she threw a glass of champagne and her engagement ring at him.
After their break-up, she spent two lengthy spells in The Priory rehab — including Christmas and New Year of 2002. Soon after, she moved back up to Manchester to be near her family.
In 2005, she had further therapy for depression, and her brother also reported her missing after she left home in an ‘emotional’ state having been drinking. But in the years that followed she was able to build herself up enough quietly, and out of the spotlight, to be able to start working again.
The cast of The Royle Family Christmas Special reported that she was ‘relaxed’ and happy while making the show in 2012.
And at least she had no money concerns: she sold flats she owned in Soho, and Maida Vale, North-West London, probably for a profit of £1 million or more, and lived an unstarry life in the Manchester home she bought in 2006 for £370,000.
Latest accounts filed by her company Mitzi Entertainment Limited reveal that the firm made a loss of £31,000 in the year to 2012, but it still has total assets of £44,000.
One of her recent holidays was a cheap and cheerful hop to Benidorm with her mother.
Of the old hard- partying Manchester comedy crowd, she saw almost no one, except Craig Cash. Former Fast Show colleague Charlie Higson remarked recently that he hadn’t seen her in a decade.
Caroline battled over the course of her lifetime with cancer. ‘My brother and I were born with cancer of the eyes, the retina. My mum told us only special people get cancer. I must be very special because I have had it in my lungs and bladder as well,’ she said in 2014 at a Press conference for the Macmillan charity.
She added: ‘The other thing that gets you through, I’ve found — so many funny things happen when you’re in [hospital] and, looking back, you do have a right laugh with the nurses. Although I was on morphine, so maybe it was just me laughing. But that’s a way I think you can cope with it. If you can separate yourself from it, a sense of humour really, really helps.’
Andy Harries, a producer for The Royle Family, said: ‘She had extraordinary comedy instincts. I am desperately sad that her brilliant career was really so brief — just ten dazzling years — but what a legacy in the creation of Mrs Merton and the game- changing sitcom The Royle Family.
‘She enjoyed her meteoric success for a short while, but ultimately the pressures of fame and her openness to all who came to celebrate her led to unhappiness in her relationships, and darker times.
‘But she never complained about her choices or felt that life had dealt her a bad hand . . . she remained a wonderful courageous and inspiring lady to the end.’
We are of course familiar with brilliant comics who are struck down by depression, from Tony Hancock onwards. But it seems especially cruel that such a blazing but fragile talent as Caroline Aherne should be snuffed out by an illness that has blighted her life quite literally since the day she was born.