© BBC/Passion Docs/Trevor Leighton BBC to remember Caroline Aherne in new documentary
...as another celebrates French and Saunders
Caroline Aherne and French & Saunders are to be celebrated in two new BBC documentaries this Christmas.
Airing as part of the Arena arts strand, the film Caroline Aherne: Comedy Queen, features unseen photographs and contributions from a cast of her lifelong friends and colleagues, including Steve Coogan, Jon Thompson, Craig Cash, Sue Johnston and producer Andy Harries.
The film traces Aherne’s life from childhood in Wythenshawe, Manchester, through her early adventures on the city’s alternative stand-up scene and the breakthrough moment when the BBC commissioned The Mrs Merton Show.
Her legacy was assured with The Royle Family, which she co-created with Cash. Co-writers Henry Normal and Phil Mealy, and fellow cast members including Ricky Tomlinson and Ralf Little will all be contributing to the 70-minute documentary.
The BBC adds that her friends ‘recall not just the lasting cultural and creative legacy she left behind’ following her death of cancer in 2016 at the age of 52, ‘but of the joy she found in human life, her inimitable sense of mischief and the happiness she brought those closest to her’.
The documentary, produced and directed by Claire Whalley and Hannah Lowes, will air on BBC Two over Christmas. It is one of three new Arena projects announced today, with the others focussing on Noel Coward and poet and playwright Kae Tempest.
To mark the new commissions, the BBC has put a raft of previous documentaries on iPlayer, including Ken Dodd’s Happiness and Oooh Er Missus! The Frankie Howerd Story. Mark Bell, commissioning editor for Arena, said: ‘The Arena archive is a treasure house of the best in creative documentary over nearly five decades and continues to be extraordinary.’
Meanwhile. Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders are to be the subject of the next Imagine profile from Alan Yentob, subtitled Pointed, Bitchy, Bitter.
The hour-long BBC One programme ‘explores a brand of comedy based on satire, silliness and above all friendship’, which began when they were college flatmates, playing pranks and inventing characters.
The film charts their journey from the game-changing Comic Strip team, which helped launch the new Channel 4 in 1982, to becoming probably the most successful double act of the last 40 years.
It features interviews with their contemporaries Alexei Sayle, Nigel Planer and Adrian Edmondson – Saunders’ husband – as well as
later generations of female comics such as Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, who French and Saunders encouraged as young comedians.
Yentob also goes behind the scenes at a recording of their successful Titting About podcast to explore their relationship today.
As previously revealed, BBC One with also be screening French’s latest stand-up show Dawn French Is A Huge Twat over the Christmas period.
Published: 29 Nov 2023
