Drama soap – Weekend – Kommersant
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Russell T Davis’ series about the fate of Noelle Gordon, the star of a successful soap opera, was released on the British channel ITV, without explanation. A production soap drama becomes a real drama.
In 1975, on the set of the popular soap opera Crossroads, unconditional one-man command reigns: the star of the series, Noel Gordon, nicknamed Nolly (Helena Bonham Carter), is actually in charge, and the director obsequiously follows her instructions, not to mention the actors, lighting and other personnel who looks into her mouth. She tells the young debutante not to speak with a Birmingham accent, and she obeys – even though the producer mumbles something against, Nolly will have the last word. She directs her scenes herself, and in this series, all the scenes are hers. We see what is happening in the magical halls of television through the eyes of that very debutante, at whom everyone hisses in unison when she almost takes Nolli’s chair – the throne on which she has been sitting for more than a decade. “Come on, darling, try,” Nolly orders her, “because we are watched by 45 million: 15 million people three days a week!” She still dares to squeak that it’s still the same 15, but fades under Nolly’s derogatory gaze.
Six years later, a tectonic shift occurs in the telehalls: the Knollies do not renew their contract. She is simply fired due to producer arbitrariness, although Crossroads on ITV is still popular and steals TV awards from Coronation Street (it must be said here that The Street is the longest-running soap opera in Britain, which is on ITV to this day). Nolly is broken, dumbfounded, lost and, instead of getting into a beautiful pose, they say, “she left herself,” she dumps the whole truth to journalists – she was simply thrown out of the series without explanation. And here she is, a drama heavily mixed with “soap”: a single woman in her sixties, without a family and children, whose life was meant by this damn work, and she did it perfectly, and now she just doesn’t know how to live on.
The author of the current telebiography Russell T Davies (“A Very English Scandal”, “The Years”, “It’s a Sin”) and ate a dog himself on soap operas. His name is hallowed for centuries by Doctor Who fans – after all, it was he who successfully restarted Doctor in 2005 – but during his long television career he took part in the creation of a wide variety of soaps, including composing series for all that or Coronation Streets. In Nolly’s story, he masterfully turns “soap” into a drama as sad as the Beatles’ song about Eleanor Rigby. Here she comes after filming to her empty apartment full of meaningless knick-knacks, and lights lamps and floor lamps one after another: her house looks like an extension of the film set, where the same scenery on duty is placed everywhere. An aging woman’s only pastime is to call a fellow actor, a soulmate who lives across the street (like in a sentimental TV series, their windows face each other!), and go to look at the evening windows of closed shops. Nollie herself looks like a soap opera character, and Davis constantly emphasizes this: yes, this series was synonymous with the cheapest production in the 1970s – the scenery shook, the lines sounded stupid, and one day the character went to decorate the tree and never returned to the frame. But people loved this TV show, for them the evening episode of “Crossroads” was an outlet after a hard day and personified peace, constancy and stability. And Nolly’s departure became a real drama.
Every soap opera lasts as long as it has some suspense, some kind of cliffhanger at the end of the episode. Davis turns the riddle of Nolly’s dismissal into such intrigue. Her dictation on the set, which he demonstrates at the beginning, is a seed so that we think that we are talking about the arbitrariness of a capricious star, which the producers rightly stopped. But in fact, her commanding behavior was not at all the tyranny of a presumptuous prima. Noel Gordon studied the principles of TV production in New York back in the 1950s and managed to work on TV in all guises: producer, reporter (it was in this capacity that she interviewed the Prime Minister in 1958), talk show host, TV program writer . No one knew better than her how to make her series.
At some point, it seems that the reason for the dismissal of a successful actress was male dictate, and Davis willingly voices this version: they say that men despise soap operas, they can only sit with their legs apart and look with contempt at what we love— and male television producers are no better. But the riddle is solved almost in a detective way: Nolly discovers the truth by accident, and this truth is amazing. Her life was ruined by pure chance. There were no insidious intrigues, no evil enemies and intrigues – only a few awkward conversations and misunderstood words. It’s as ridiculous as climbing the stairs to decorate the Christmas tree – and never appear in the frame again. But this is no longer a soap opera collision: such is the dramaturgy of life itself. Davis skillfully wraps it up in an imaginary happy ending, but at the same time this is the very story that argues with the uplifting “soap” standard: life is finite, unlike Coronation Street.
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