Book review by Jay Richardson

Nearly a decade after her death at just 52, Caroline Aherne’s outsize talent receives glowing tribute in this unapologetic hagiography from BBC radio presenter and poet David Scott.

Scrupulous in his efforts not to rake over Aherne’s troubled personal life and echo the press hounding she suffered after coming to prominence, he focuses strictly on The Royle Family creator’s work. Inevitably though, a fair bit of darkness – not least a 1998 suicide attempt when she was close to the peak of her acclaim – seeps in.

The author also indulges in some amateur psychologising about the effects of her lifelong battles with cancer and her eyesight and the strict Catholic schooling that fed into her early live character Sister Mary Immaculate, while identifying her instinctive rebellious streak.

Unquestionably, Aherne and her regular collaborator Craig Cash had their battles with a sceptical BBC concerning Mrs Merton and The Royle Family, even after the former’s success. But in retrospect, the best moments of those classic shows – and there were many, as Scott recalls in fond but pithy prose that captures their exceptional cheek, empathy and heart – seem less like she was kicking against entrenched systems and more as if she was an artist who simply knew what she was trying to capture and delivered it come what may.

Acknowledging himself as a ’fanboy’ for the Royles, Scott argues that no show has come closer to encompassing his experience of working-class, Mancunian life, quoting the cast on the warm, familial atmosphere that Aherne and Cash fostered on set. 

Reading his close analysis of The Queen Of Sheba special, focused on the passing of Liz Smith’s character, one is struck anew with just how suffused with love and tenderness that extended episode is, although never at the expense of its sharply observed humour.

Elsewhere though, especially in the early chapters of Aherne’s childhood, when she read voraciously and registered an IQ of 176, and through into the North-West’s flourishing comedy scene, Scott  allows his rose-tinted, folksy nostalgia for everything Manchester of that era to colour the narrative, slightly alienating any admirer who grew up outside of that time and place.

With Oasis, Manchester United and the city itself resurgent, not to mention Andy Burnham marching south to overthrow Keir Starmer, the temptation to repeatedly make this case for Manc exceptionalism is perhaps forgivable. But it grates even so, even if using Noel Gallagher’s Half The World Away for The Royle Family’s theme tune makes such links explicit.

Any further exploration of the similarities between a comedy scene that birthed Steve Coogan, John Thomson, Henry Normal, Dave Gorman, Chris Addison and Lucy Porter and its music heritage is made impossible by Scott’s refusal to mention Aherne’s ex-husband, New Order bassist Peter Hook. 

But where Scott gives a fuller picture is in conveying the strength of the local media scene at that time, trusting promising acts like Aherne and Coogan with their first broadcast exposure. Granada and BBC radio in the north were likelier to take a punt than London commissioners or taste-shapers at the Edinburgh Fringe, where the under-prepared Aherne and her future Fast Show colleagues Thomson and Simon Day endured a wretched run.

Gushing if knowingly pseudy comparisons to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky don’t help Scott in making claims to greatness, with no reason offered for the name drops beyond their elevated literary status. 

More straightforward and instructive are his assessment likening Aherne’s struggles, absorption and revenge upon the Catholic Church with Dave Allen’s; his description of her clarity of vision and single-minded intelligence operating in a (predominantly) male world with Victoria Wood; his acknowledgement of her authentic working-class roots when set against the cosplaying, ’punching down’ of Catherine Tate and Little Britain; and his account of how Mrs Merton could not sustain the same longevity of Coogan’s Alan Partridge, with reminders of just how badly the sitcom spin-off Mrs Merton and Malcolm bombed, evidence that she was often guilty of spreading herself too thin.

If her Bafta-winning triumphs with Cash and untimely death mean that Aherne is now The Fast Show cast member least associated with the series, this book nevertheless does an excellent job of reminding you of the strength of her contributions, the balance of pathos with hilarity in her chatty, judgmental Checkout Girl, the motormouth Renée and schoolgirl single mum Janine, as memorable as any of the show’s most beloved sketches.

Intriguing, too, are the striking creative differences that originally birthed Mrs Merton in the zanier world of Frank Sidebottom. And the backstory behind the probing pensioner’s most famous interviews with the likes of Debbie McGee and Bernard Manning. Preparing for these meetings of minds and the puncturing of celebrity self-importance took a huge toll on her. But as Normal noted, her performances were something else again. ’Caroline always exceeded everything we had written or planned,’ he’s quoted as saying.

Still, it’s with Scott’s account of The Royle Family and how it became a cultural touchstone that the author alights on the real purpose of his book, placing it in a lineage with Mike Leigh and Ken Loach that in turn led to The Office. 

Aherne and Cash’s determination to stick to their guns and gently push boundaries still engages and inspires, with the pair coming back stronger after a disastrous pilot that was supposedly buried in Aherne’s mother’s back garden. And then after a couple of iffy specials that somewhat diluted its track record.

Without holding back in acknowledging failures such as Mrs Merton and Malcolm and The Security Men, he still strives to find the fleeting moments of brilliance in both. He highlights Gogglebox as part of her surviving legacy, with the hit Channel 4 people-watching format’s clear debt to The Royle Family and the baton-passing of her narration to Cash’s. And he gives almost equal weight to Aherne’s impact upon younger female comics, quoting the likes of Diane Morgan and beneficiaries of the BBC bursary in her name, such as Amy Gledhill, Kiri Pritchard-McLean and Sophie Willan.

Willan doubtless isn’t the only one who felt that seeing ’Caroline and Victoria Wood made me feel like [being a comedian] could be a very real and attainable achievement for a girl like me … Like Caroline, my comedy is full of vivid characters that depict authentic and naturally funny people.’

Scott’s heartfelt writing, likewise, speaks to a life fundamentally changed by Aherne’s genius, a lamentation for all the great comedy that her death robbed the world of.

• Caroline Aherne: Rebel In Disguise by David Scott was published yesterday by Manchester University Press. It os available from Amazon priced £16.97 in hardback – or from uk.bookshop.org, below, which supports independent bookstores.  

• The Arena documentary Caroline Aherne: Queen of Comedy is available on iPlayer.

Published: 27 May 2026