Caroline Aherne’s life to be celebrated in Christmas special on BBC

Writer and actor Craig Cash says a Christmas special celebrating Caroline Aherne’s life will air over the festive period.

Good friends Aherne and Cash worked together on The Royle Family and a number of other comedies over the years, until Aherne sadly died of cancer in 2016.

Cash said the late star asked him to cover for her and record the voiceover on Gogglebox after her diagnosis.

Aherne was the first presenter for the Channel 4 programme, providing the commentary for it since the show began in 2013 until shortly before she passed away.

Cash said it was during her treatment for the disease that she turned to him for help to cover for her when she was too sick.

“She just asked me if I’d do the show for her if she was poorly and when she had to go for chemo, so of course I said yes just to help out, because I couldn’t help in any other way,” he told the BBC.

He said he still feels her ‘presence’ when he records the voiceover for the show in the studio and said the work was like ‘a gift that she left me’.

He said: “It was really lovely, because it feels like a gift she has left me and I’m very grateful.

“It felt like only natural I should keep doing it and I feel like she’s with me sometimes.

“When I go in the studio where we used to record it, I can feel her presence sometimes.

“That feels a bit weird but true.”

A Gogglebox 10 Year Anniversary Special aired this March to celebrate a great decade of TV, showing some of it best stand-out moments.

Cash and Aherne worked together on many projects over the years, including The Mrs Merton Show and The Fast Show, after they met in the 1980s.

Their work in both writing and acting on The Royle Family became their best known and loved.

Cash said the idea for The Royle Family, which was first broadcast on BBC One in 1998, was born out of an idea Aherne had while she was still working on The Mrs Merton Show.

The Stockport-born star said: “We wanted to write something that we knew and the likes of which we grew up in, as opposed to the posh middle-class families that you got on TV at that time.

“The working title was the Wythenshawe Project, because Caroline was from Wythenshawe and we set it in Wythenshawe.

“We just wanted it to be about a family like our family really and that’s what it ended up being, just sat there watching telly.”

The show went on to become a British classic and is often repeated over the festive season where families sit together and laugh at the relatable humour.

But Cash admitted that when it was first developed, ‘nobody wanted to make it, because it was just about people sat around talking drivel’.

Cash said he and Aherne ‘had to convince them’.

He continued: ” Caroline actually threatened not to do any more Mrs Merton shows if they didn’t commission it. She meant it as well.”

Though he said some executives were still not convinced. 

“When we’d made it, they [still] didn’t really want to put it out,” he said.

“They were looking at and saying, ‘people will be climbing the walls’, because it’s people just sat round talking.”

Cash said he was delighted when the show found success but was shocked at how wide an audience it reached.

He said: “I thought it would only be popular in Manchester or the North-West. But I get in taxis in London and [the drivers] say, ‘it’s just like my house’.

“It turns out to be a lot of people’s real lives.”

The star said he speaks about how he still feels his friend Aherne’s presence with him in the new documentary about her life, which is due to come out this Christmas.