09 December 2023 , 08:14
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Craig Cash can’t hold back the tears as he remembers the extraordinary talent of his close friend and comedy sidekick Caroline Aherne.
In a new BBC film airing on Christmas Day to celebrate the Mrs Merton and Royle Family star’s life, Cash weeps as he admits he was “in denial” over her cancer, even when she’d been told she had just two months to live. He also lays bare the details of the night she rang him - at the height of her fame - to say she was ending it all and had taken an overdose.
On her terminal cancer diagnosis, he recalls sadly: “I just kept saying no, just kept repeating no. But there’s a lot to be said for denial. And she was like ‘we had some laughs though didn’t we Cashy?”
Craig, 63, also chokes up as he remembers how determined she was to bring The Royle Family to the small screen, despite resistance from BBC bosses over it not having traditional ‘gags’ or a live studio audience.
“There was a lot of doubt about it and we felt down,” Craig says. “But Caroline would be very resolute. ‘Nobody’s changing this’. She’d be like ‘telly’s full of people with more confidence than talent’. She gave me confidence. She had this fascination with ordinary people, she’d say all the comedy you want in the world is in the supermarket if you listen.”
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Craig Cash couldn’t hold back the tears as he remembered his close friend and comedy sidekick Caroline Aherne (BBC)Craig said he and Caroline, who loved to play practical jokes and cause mischief, hit it off as soon as they met on a Manchester pirate radio station. “We just laughed and laughed all day.”
She said of that moment: “On the day I met him I went home and wrote in my diary, ‘I’ve just met the funniest man in the world’.”
One of Craig’s happiest memories was after they left KFM and Caroline entered a stand-up competition, using material they had written together, and she won. At the time they were so hard-up they were selling belongings at car boot sales to make ends meet.
“I entered a stand-up competition and won £200. Craig had helped me write it and we were throwing the money in the air. It was absolutely brilliant,” she said afterwards. “And then we spent the whole lot on drink.”
BBC One's The Royle Family was launched in 1998 (PA)Craig says now: “We were so giddy and so excited. No money since then has ever felt as good.”
Having left Liverpool Poly with a drama degree, she took a job at the BBC as a secretary to pay off her debts and set about establishing herself on the comedy scene. It didn’t take long. Her career blossomed throughout the 90s alongside the likes of Steve Coogan, John Thomson and Henry Normal, and on the back of the radio show, she landed a pilot for Mrs Merton.
Producer Kenton Allen says she got away with asking the most outrageous questions of guests including Debbie McGee, Chris Eubank and Carol Thatcher because she was a 23-year-old pretending to be a little old lady in a twinset and pearls. “She was kind of demolishing them but she did it with such delightful playfulness that everyone who came on the show, pretty much, didn’t take offence.”
But Craig also remembers the dark times, after Mrs Merton took off and Caroline moved to London where they became regular fixtures at The Groucho Club. In the Arena film, which features scores of previously unseen family photographs, Craig says she’d "suffered with depression for a long time”.
Caroline starred as dippy Denise in the hit BBC show (BBC)It came to a head in 1998, when he was in Manchester and she was in London and the phone rang. “It was the middle of the night… she was saying goodbye really,” he says, with a sob.
“She just said ‘I love ya’ and ‘I’m sorry, I’m going, I’ve taken an overdose’. I said ‘make yourself sick, make yourself sick, make yourself sick’. I had to ring her Mum and tell her, her Mum rang an ambulance and luckily they came and broke her door down and got her in time.”
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She had written farewell notes to family members but the next day said she had no memory of any of it. “I was so drunk I had no idea and I was devastated that I could have done that,” she told Michael Parkinson later.
Her bi-polar diagnosis would follow, but this low marked the first of several stays in The Priory, where they initially couldn’t decide if she was depressed or alcoholic. Her close friends agree she had a “sadness” about her. One potential reason for this is that she had decided to not have children, because there was a high chance they’d inherit the hereditary eye cancer both she and her elder brother Patrick were born with.
She married once, to New Order bassist Peter Hook in 1994, but it was short-lived and volatile, lasting just three years. Other boyfriends, including David Walliams, came and went but the relationships never lasted.
Caroline’s IQ was measured at school to be a staggering 176 - higher than Stephen Hawkins’ - and she got nine A grades in her O levels.
Cash said he was “in denial” over Caroline's cancer diagnosis (BBC)Coogan credits some of her success as being down to her working class upbringing on a council estate in Wythenshawe. “She understood that her background gave her a little superpower that being from more privileged backgrounds, you did not have,” he explains.
“Craig and Caroline came as a pair. God they were funny, they really were. I remember crying laughing,” he says fondly. “If I wanted to go out that evening I’d look in my black book and see Caroline’s name and think ‘if I go out with her, I know that I’ll be laughing like a drain’.
But he also saw her struggle with the pressures of becoming a household name. “Some of her unhappiness came to the surface when fame came along. She didn’t quite know how to process it. Unless you have a thick skin it can throw you off course and unsettle you.”
Craig described Caroline as "a very bright light that didn’t shine long enough" (BBC)In 1998 she made a fourth series of Mrs Merton and also launched The Royle Family, which she co-wrote and starred in as dippy Denise, to great acclaim. She should have been at her happiest.
But these successes coincided with the death from cancer of her former boyfriend Matt Bowers and with the breakdown of her other relationship. Caroline was deeply unhappy and drinking hard to numb it. “I just couldn’t rid myself of this thing inside me that just made me want to cry all the time,” she explained later. “I was just so low. God love all my friends and my family for trying to help me but it just wouldn’t go.”
Caroline Aherne: Queen of Comedy airs on BBC at 10.25pm on Christmas Day (BBC)The breakthrough to finding lasting contentment came when she decided to turn her back on fame, moving back to Manchester to live a quiet life near her family and friends. “I’m not very good at being a celebrity,” she once reasoned. “I find all that very hard to deal with. Craig always says I’m like the female Gazza.”
Despite losing confidence, she was bolstered by her fellow Royle Family writers to get involved with a special which aired in 2006. Together, they penned a bittersweet script, in which Nana - played by Liz Smith - died. It would win them a Bafta. “It was the show that helped her step towards happiness again really,” Craig says. “It kind of ignited something in her.”
Steve Coogan credits some of Caroline's success as being down to her working-class upbringing (BBC)Andy Harries said it was their best work, inspired by Caroline’s personal experience of having recently lost her real grandmother. “This was the masterpiece. I really felt that. She wrote herself totally into that.”
Many more Royle Family specials would follow, until the last one aired at Christmas in 2012. Another was planned, but then came the “incredibly cruel” news that Caroline was fighting bladder cancer. “She thought she’d won then, sledgehammer, it came back and developed into lung cancer,” Craig says, remembering how she’d ask him to “do a funny walk” from her hospital bed.
Her Royle Family ‘dad’ Ricky Tomlinson says Caroline was a comedy genius. “She was amazing. Very, very clever. Very, very, talented.
“She was tremendous. She could’ve told me to climb Mount Everest and I’d have done it.”
Caroline died in 2016, aged 52 (BBC)Her screen mum Sue Johnston agrees: “The script was brilliant, just blissful. It was so well written that it was a joy, it just sort of came instinctively. You don’t get many Carolines to the dozen do you? There was just one. She will be numero uno I think, as far as what she brought to my life.”
When she died in 2016, aged 52, her coffin was carried in to the Oasis theme tune Half a World Away. Ricky says that almost the entire crew came to see her off, along with all her cherished friends from both Wythenshawe and the world of comedy. “She was loved. You can’t get better than that,” he reasons.
Craig, who still looks heartbroken seven years on, describes his old pal as “a very bright light that didn’t shine long enough”.
He adds: “She’d be quite bemused and amused that we’re all yapping about her. She’d say ‘Cashy, you never said anything nice about me when I was alive, did you?’
'Caroline Aherne: Queen of Comedy' airs on BBC2 on Christmas Day at 10.25pm