Caroline Aherne made comedy from unfinished sentences, small unkindnesses and the effort of avoiding housework. We rate her highest in The Royle Family, where her patience lets us recognise people before we judge them.
Fi1m perspective
In The Royle Family (1998), Denise lies across Dave with a cigarette and passes every available job to her brother. Aherne makes the laziness funny by seeming entirely comfortable with it. There is no need for Denise to advertise how selfish she is; someone else can do the work of noticing. As an actor and writer, Aherne is especially good at letting people reveal themselves while they think they are doing nothing worth watching.
The shorter sketches of The Fast Show (1994) give her less time, but the interest in how people speak is already there. Alongside Mark Williams and John Thomson, she helps make an incomplete phrase or an uncertain delivery enough to sustain a sketch. We do not always need another repetition of a familiar catchphrase: recognition sometimes substitutes for a joke. The acting is usually more observant than that, keeping a recognisable person beneath the exaggeration.
With The Mrs Merton Show (1995), Aherne's apparently innocent questions expose celebrity pretensions. The Royle Family, created with Craig Cash and Henry Normal, makes the decisive change of pace: conversations are allowed to last as long as they would at home. Jim asks who telephoned, Barbara answers, he says something unkind, and that can be the scene. We laughed at Jim and then felt slightly ashamed, because the writing makes his casual nastiness so familiar.
The restraint extends to the filming, with Mark Mylod, Steve Bendelack and Aherne directing across the three series. The camera stays low, near the television's position, while the screen itself remains unseen; we hear what the family are watching and study their faces instead. There is no laughter track or music beneath the scenes to organise our response. Cash's scarcely speaking Dave is particularly well served by that patience: his face tells us what he thinks of Jim's stories.
Writing and directing Dossa and Joe (2002), about a long marriage after retirement, kept her attention on domestic life. She later narrated Gogglebox (2013–2016). For the fullest sense of what she could do, though, start with The Royle Family. Do not go in expecting anyone to hurry to the next joke.
Biography
Caroline Aherne was an English actress, comedian, writer and director. Born in Ealing, London, on 24 December 1963, she grew up in Wythenshawe, Manchester, and studied at Liverpool Polytechnic. She began performing on the Manchester comedy circuit in the 1980s.
Aherne appeared in various roles in the sketch series The Fast Show (1994). She created, wrote and directed the sitcom The Royle Family (1998), in which she played Denise Royle. She also performed as the chat-show host Mrs Merton. She won BAFTA awards for her work on The Mrs Merton Show and The Royle Family. Aherne narrated the series Gogglebox from 2013 until 2016. She died on 2 July 2016.
