It is a decade since the world lost Caroline Aherne – an extraordinary talent and a relatable genius

Of all the great artists and entertainers who died in 2016, Caroline Aherne was one of the hardest losses. She was only 52, a relatively young woman who should still by rights be with us now. 

She wouldn’t welcome the accolade, but she was also a national treasure: a writer, comedian and actor of exceptional talent who made an awful lot of people very happy. We didn’t just admire her work, whether as Mrs Merton or as co-creator/star of The Royle Family, we liked her as a person. 

At the risk of sounding weirdly parasocial, she belonged to that vanishingly rare breed of celebrities you could easily imagine having as a friend or acquaintance who makes you laugh at work or down the pub. 

That’s a quality some celebrities try very hard to cultivate, but Aherne always felt like the real, unselfconscious deal. 

Naturally funny, likeable and clever (she had an IQ of 176, so an actual genius), her huge success and generations-spanning appeal were rooted in the fact that she was an ‘ordinary’ working-class person with an extraordinary gift for capturing our shared life experience through a prism of acutely observed comedy. 

The characters she created, usually in conjunction with her close friend and writing partner Craig Cash, were people we recognised. We’ve all met a Jim Royle, for example, that lazy, miserly, often boorish yet fundamentally decent Royle patriarch. He might even be a member of your own family. He might even be you. And that’s OK, you weren’t being held up to abject ridicule. 

Much like the Royles themselves, Aherne always took the piss with warmth and affection. Even when she cheekily mocked her celebrity guests in the deceptively innocent, purple-rinsed guise of OAP chat show host Mrs Merton, there was never anything cruel or sneering about her comedy. She never punched down. 

“So Debbie, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” 

That loaded question, which Aherne as Merton faux-gently fired at the magician’s wife and glamorous on-stage assistant Debbie McGee, is rightly regarded as a classic line. An immortal put-down. It’s important to remember, however, that McGee didn’t laugh through gritted teeth. She was genuinely tickled by Aherne’s willingness to go there. She got the joke, and because she actually loved her talented millionaire husband, didn’t feel offended at all. One suspects that Aherne instinctively knew that: Debbie will be up for a daft laugh, just as I am. 

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Her instincts also proved correct during that famous Mrs Merton interview with the racist comedian Bernard Manning, an encounter in which Aherne basically breaks character to challenge him on his bigotry. Her elderly studio audience laugh along with him at first, but when she gradually exposes just how unrepentantly horrible he was, you can sense their discomfort. As Aherne later acknowledged, some of those pensioners were probably quite racist themselves, but you would hope that interview made them question some of their knee-jerk prejudices.     

She did that a lot in her work, it was a defining characteristic. As her friend and occasional collaborator Steve Coogan observed in the touching 2023 BBC documentary Caroline Aherne: Queen of Comedy – which is still on iPlayer – she was inarguable proof that “clever, intelligent comedy can appeal to everyone”.

Most of us first became aware of Aherne via her memorable contributions to The Fast Show. One of her recurring characters, Our Janine, was a pregnant, working-class teenage girl whose stream-of-consciousness monologues oscillated between naive absurdity and utter bleakness. But you never got the impression that Aherne was laughing at this kid; it’s more that she was – like so many great comedians – fully aware that comedy and tragedy, absurdity and pathos, are sometimes barely indistinguishable. They exist side by side, poking at each other like family-members squashed on an old settee. 

Compare her treatment of Janine to the way Catherine Tate and Little Britain depicted working-class teenage girls. Scornful stereotypes perpetrated by middle-class comedians going for cheap laughs. 

Matt Lucas has, at least, latterly expressed sincere regret. Aherne, however, never had to apologise for anything. Sure, some of those later Royle Family festive specials were atrocious, gobsmacking disasters in which formerly nuanced and beloved characters were turned into cartoon caricatures of their former selves. God only knows what happened there, but fortunately no one ever thinks of them when they remember the woman who helped to redefine what a British sitcom could be. 

Aherne adored Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, and saw no reason why you couldn’t combine those influences to create a programme in which nothing and everything happens all at once. 

Aherne was adamant that it shouldn’t have a laugh track, that it should be shot on film, in real time. She knew it would work; just let it breathe and be what it is. 

Whenever Ricky Gervais boasts that The Office changed the sitcom landscape, remember The Royle Family did it first. 

When funny people die our grief is tinged with a kind of selfish disbelief that this person will no longer be around to make us laugh. But the work lives on forever. 

We didn’t know Caroline Aherne, she owed us nothing. That she gave us so much was a blessing. 

Caroline Aherne: Rebel in Disguise, a new biography by David Scott, is out now (Manchester University Press, £16.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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