NEW ITV drama, Nolly, reveals how “Queen of Crossroads” Noele Gordon was cruelly sacked - but her co-star on the soap has revealed how it was typical of the shoddy way the show was run.
Tony Adams, who played Adam Chance on the teatime favourite, is seen in the three-parter as the adoring companion of Nolly, played by Helena Bonham Carter, 56.
Now 82 and retired, he insists her axing from Crossroads in 1981 was more to do with the general contempt the show’s bosses showed the soap, rather than any clash of personalities.
Tony said: “Noele was the queen of the show. A lot of people thought she was very difficult but we never saw that. She may have been difficult with the hierarchy and the producer and director but with us she was absolutely fine.
“Noele was there when I started and was a household name. I was quite frightened when I went there as I didn’t know what to expect. I had a long scene with Nolly, my first scene.
“She understood that I was nervous as it was a very big show, then over 20million viewers, but she made you feel as if you knew what you were doing.
“Noele cared about the people she worked with. She used to work until 11pm at night and do all the scenes at home with them.
“She was a great lady. The show was her life.”
Tony, played in Nolly by Augustus Prew, joined Crossroads in 1978. By that time Nolly had already been the star of the show - as motel boss Meg Mortimer - since it launched 14 years earlier.
But, like so many cast and crew, she took him under her wing and they enjoyed a long relationship - though it was always platonic, not least because she was 20 years older than him.
He was there when she was told she was being sacked by show boss Jack Barton, leaving her bemused and devastated.
Tony recalls: “My phone went. I answered it and she said: ‘Darling where are you? Can you come and see me straight away?
“Darling I have been sacked. I have been sacked. Jack Barton is to phone me at 9am and I want you here on the extension to listen to what he has to say to me.’ I said I would get there.
“I was like there was no way they could sack her as she was Crossroads. What they were hoping for was the public to switch off the show.”
Tony believes the axing of Nolly was all part of the bosses trying to wind down the show, which was always viewed as a poor cousin to its long-standing ITV rival Coronation Street.
It gained a reputation for its dodgy sets, continuity errors and choppy acting. Much of which was down to every expense being spared in the show’s making.
Tony said: “We did get £40 an episode and we got £128, out of which we had to buy our own clothes and find our own digs and accommodation and pay for food.
“The show changed my life, but you did not get a lot of money. I have heard people at the time in Coronation Street were buying £400,000 houses.”
The disregard for the cast also contributed to the continuity errors, because if anyone fell out with the bosses they would be written out as punishment.
Tony said: “I was written out for a year. I was silly really as I bought a motor car. What happened was I said to Noele, ‘I do love your Rolls Royce’ She used to say, ‘Here are the keys, go and drive it.’
“I bought one and Jack Barton got to hear about it. He did not think a member of his cast should be going around in a Rolls Royce. Like “Who does he think he is?”
“So they wrote me out for a year and I didn’t get paid.”
All the glaring errors were difficult to change on a show which had a lightning speed turnover. Not that it mattered too much to fans.
Tony said: “It was a factory, Crossroads, in many ways. People think you couldn’t do six episodes in five days and there were mistakes, without question. But people loved the quirks, it was loved by a lot of people.”
These quirks are lovingly highlighted in new drama Nolly, including the shopping trips which she and Tony would take when they wanted to chew the fat.
He said: “She once asked me out to lunch and I thought we would go in her Rolls Royce. I followed her out and she took me on the No 23 bus which stopped right outside Rackhams department store, which was our local store.”
Nolly tragically died of stomach cancer in 1985, aged 65, and three years later ITV decided to finally drop the axe on Crossroads.
Tony said: “I just think the TV bosses thought they could do something better than Crossroads, and it lasted until 1988.
“I decided to leave at a time when I thought I was done with my character. I asked them to release me and they said: ‘It is not just you. We are taking the show off.’
“I knew before anybody else that the show was coming off. I had made up my mind that I wanted to go anyway. I thought: ‘I won’t regret leaving as it is coming off anyway.’
“When the show ended people were shaken. We were a family and we had wonderful people right down from make-up to dressers. I did think “Why take it off?” It was not going as well as it could.
“In fact I often wonder if it could still be around today.”#
Secret 20-year affair with theatre tycoon... jilted for a younger woman
By Alison Maloney
NOELE GORDON was one of the most famous stars of her era, her screen wedding at Birmingham Cathedral attracting a crowd of 10,000.
Yet despite dozens of proposals, Nolly never tied the knot in real life. She “left her life empty” in a doomed romance with married TV impresario Val Parnell - who brutally dumped her for a younger mistress.
Now ITVX drama, Nolly, briefly touches on her tragic love life, and her heartbreak over the man she called the “big love of my life.”
The secret affair, which she finally revealed to fans in 1981, meant she turned down high-profile suitors. She said none of them stood a chance “while I was obsessed with Mr Television.”
“My association with Val was plain and simple, we were lovers, although we never lived together,” she said.
“We were in love. This I can’t deny, nor would I wish to. I’m proud to have been head over heels in love with a most marvellous man, a true friend. I’m happy to have given him 20 years of my life.
“And if it was to happen all over again tomorrow I would do the same. I don’t need to make any excuses.”
Nolly met Val, 27 years her senior, at 18, when she was engaged to Army captain John Crichton - later a high court judge - who proposed during an air raid during the Second World War at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool.
The young actress was touring in Black Velvet and, having met her at a party, John came to every show he could.
When German bombers flew over the city, the gallant soldier, “boyishly handsome in his khaki uniform”, joined her in the hotel’s cellar, along with other guests.
“As we crouched there in semi-darkness he held my hand – more to calm my fears, I thought, than to be romantic,” she said. “But love can hit you at any time and at any place – even in a Liverpool cellar.”
“Before I realised what was happening this Army captain was telling me how much he loved me.”
The smitten soldier begged her to marry him and she agreed, adding, “He kissed me and it was only at that moment I realised I had accepted him.”
The pair planned a register office wedding, invited guests and planned a honeymoon. But just six days before the big day, she got a letter from her fiance saying he couldn’t go through with it.
“I cried. I cried a lot,” she said. “Months later, mutual friends told me his family had put pressure on him not to marry me. They had nothing against me personally but they didn’t want him to marry an actress.”
Nolly’s first encounter with Val was on the same tour, on the final date before her doomed wedding.
Seeing her leaving the theatre with her bags packed, he asked where she was going and she told him she was giving up showbusiness to get married.
“You’ll be back in six months,” he said. “Marriage isn’t for you. You’re not the type.”
As predicted, she soon returned to the tour and went on to star in the musical Let’s Face It, in London’s West End, and soon afterwards she bumped into Val at a charity gala at the Grosvenor House Hotel, and he asked her to dance.
Describing him as “slim, elegant… a marvellous dancer” the evening as “pure magic”, she added: “All my girlish dreams had come true. This had to be my Great Romance.
We sipped champagne. He looked into my eyes and at that moment I knew I’d met Mr Right. Nothing special was said. He didn’t flirt with me. He didn’t have to. But at that moment we both knew our love story had begun.”
The following morning he called at her parent’s London house, winning them over with an armful of lettuces and cabbages from his Buckinghamshire Garden, and they began to meet every day for lunch.
While Noele was an up-and-coming young actress, Val was already a huge name in showbusiness, owner of several theatres including the London Palladium, and known for discovering stars, including Norman Wisdom, Max Bygraves and the then 12-year-old Julie Andrews.
His TV show, Sunday Night at the London Palladium, boasted huge US headliners including Bob Hope, Jack Benny and Judy Garland.
Still “prim and virginal”, Nolly revealed it took months before she “succumbed to his overtures that we should become lovers in the full sense of the word”, finally giving in over champagne at his flat in Westminster, central London.
“The more I saw of him, the more I loved him,” she added. He was such an entertaining, thoughtful and considerate companion. He made me laugh. He was lots of fun. He was the most attractive man I’d ever met.”
Throughout their 20-year affair, the couple remained “discreet” in a bid to avoid hurting his wife, Helen, and limit any damage to Nolly’s career.
Despite being “head over heels in love”, they never spent a full night together and, when she joined him on his frequent trips abroad, they travelled on separate planes.
“It was always separate rooms in whatever cities we were visiting, whether in England or abroad,” she said “I was deliriously happy and I know Val felt the same.”
Despite his connections, Nolly was adamant the relationship didn’t help her career, insisting, “the fact that I was Val Parnell’s girlfriend actually worked against me.”
Noele’s other admirers included New York stockbroker Sumner Walters, who met her at a cocktail party and “fell madly in love” but she turned him down because he wanted her to move to Long Island and give up her career.
Another unnamed Hollywood agent proposed on Broadway and “used to phone me every night from California. It must have cost him thousands in phone calls. Every call was a proposal. I never said ‘yes.’ I just didn’t love him.”
After she auditioned for the musical Brigadoo, composer Frederick Loewe asked her to marry him, “so that you will always be there to sing my songs.”
Despite the many offers, however, Noele remains devoted to Val for two decades, describing their romance as a “deep, sincere, permanent love match” adding: “Instead of burning itself out, our love became stronger each day.”
But in the mid-60s, when Noele was at the height of her Crossroads fame, she was staying in New York when he arrived at her studio flat and “the bombshell dropped.”
“I’d expected to be taken out to dinner and had bought a new dress, had a hairdo, drenched myself in my favourite perfume which Val had bought me in Paris, and taken extra care with my make-up,” she said. “I needn’t have bothered. There was no greeting kiss.”
Val told her: “It’s all over Baby, I’m sorry. I’ve fallen in love with someone else.”
“He carried on talking but it was as if the voice came from another world,” she said. “To this day I’ve no idea what he was saying. I was numbed. Everything around me became a total haze. I just kept hearing those first few words, “It’s all over, Baby,” going round and round in my head like a long-playing record.
“I stared at him; stunned, confused, in utter disbelief. I was completely shattered. But I had to face it. If he didn’t want me in his life anymore. There was no use shouting or screaming. That would have gotten me nowhere. Much better to walk away from the whole situation.
“When he’d gone I fell to pieces. The next few days were a nightmare of sorrow. I looked ghastly and felt even worse.”
The other woman was the much younger aspiring singer Aileen Cochrane and Nolly faced further heartbreak when Val - who had insisted he couldn’t divorce his wife because of his Catholic faith - went on to wed his new mistress in 1966.
Nolly eventually went on to have a fling with actor Anthony Waters, 27 years her junior, who she called “My Viking”, but they eventually drifted apart.
In her book, My Fabulous Brothers, Lew Grade’s sister Rita Grade Freeman wrote that Val Parnell was “a man who just had to have the adulation of other women. One woman could never satisfy him.”
In contrast, Nolly was a one man woman, who pined for her “Darling Pussy” until the day she died.