Death my a***! Her work will live for ever

WITH one question she entered the national consciousness. ‘So,’ she said to Debbie McGee, ‘what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?’ Caroline Aherne was dressed as a mildmannered pensioner, Mrs Merton. Yet from such soft exterior came an inquisition as piercing as anything Jeremy Paxman could have mustered, distilled into a deft joke in that moment in 1995. That Mrs Merton could have been your granny was part of the appeal, part of the camouflage that concealed her sharp, brilliant mind. The spoof chat show reinforced the quietly charismatic Merton as a comedy star, just months after getting her break in The Fast Show. Like everyone on that programme, she had her catchphrase – as the ‘Chanel 9’ weather presenter Poula Fisch, she would trill ‘Scorchio’ about the Mediterranean heat ahead, a word itself now scorched into the minds of millions. But her other characters stood out for having more depth: the smug and chatty northerner Renée, cowing her husband Roy into silence, or the dim-but-upbeat teenage mum Janine. These felt like genuine people amid the carnival of caricatures. That was the essence of her unique wit. She had the ability to capture normal life, instinctively finding the funny in everyday conversation, creating characters both warm and credible. Never was that better realised than in The Royle Family, written with co-star Craig Cash. It tore up the rules of sitcom. Out went contrived plots and in came what felt like a real family doing what real families do: lazing around, vacuously watching TV. The action unfolded in real time, and rarely moved from the confines of that front room. Yet her brilliance with language generated so many laughs from domestic mundanity. And tears, too, if she wanted. No wonder that when, years later, Channel 4 needed a narrator for Gogglebox – so heavily influenced by The Royle Family premise – it was to Aherne they turned. Just three months after Victoria Wood’s death, cancer has robbed us of another comedy great too soon; a tragedy far from the laughs they both brought. But as Jim Royle would say: ‘Death my arse!’ The work Aherne leaves is immortal.