“A Machine is Ruthless,” Ron Klopfanstein recaps Nolly, episode 2
For my review, cultural analysis, and recap of episode 1 of Nolly go to UticaPhoenix.net/TV
“This is a moment in history,” Noele “Nolly” Gordon says in a flashback to her legendary career as a journalist, “It is the very first time a woman has interviewed the Prime Minister.”
“I wager there were men who tried to stop that happening,” UK PM Harold Macmillian says.
Thus begins a theme repeated throughout the second episode of the Masterpiece series Nolly, airing on WCNY and PBS stations nationwide. Even for a popular and accomplished trailblazer like Gordon, sexism (combined with ageism) derails her television career despite the popularity of her show Crossroads.
Flash forward to 1981, and Gordon’s character Meg is coming to the end of her storyline. In a bit of meta dialogue, Nolly [in character] muses, “I’ll never be a majority shareholder in Crossroads [Motel] again. Soon, I’ll have nothing left. And what will I do then?”
In 1981, the cast is on set wondering and worrying about how Gordon’s Meg character will be written off the show. Co-stars Tony Adams and Jane Rossington talk about the vicissitudes of show business.
“I was here in the 1960s. I played an estate agent…and every Friday, they’d give out scripts just like today. Then, one Friday, there was no envelope, and I said, ‘Where’s my script?’ ‘They said, ‘You haven’t got any.’ ‘That’s how I knew I’d been sacked.’” Tony says while the cast holds their position, waiting for the director to call “clear.”
“Try getting pregnant,” Jane replies. “You disappear even faster.”
Indeed, until 1975’s Employment Protection Act, women in the UK could be and often were fired from their jobs for getting pregnant, particularly if they were acting on television shows playing the part of a non-pregnant character. Crossroads recast several characters in its first few decades for that very reason.
After the director calls “clear,” the cast tears into the envelopes containing the next week’s script and begins an impromptu table read, trying to figure out how Nolly’s character will be written out.
“There’s got to be clues; you’ve only got two weeks left, Nolly,” says Susan Hanson, who plays Diane.
“All it says is that I’m making my will and leaving everything to you,” Nolly says to Jane.
“Maybe I murder you!” she gasps.
Ironically, producer Jack Barton insists he cannot tell even Nolly how she is to be written out due to the increased public interest in the show.
“Do you know what happened?” he says, “A shot rang out that changed the world. That gunshot in an office in Dallas, J.R. Ewing hit the floor, and television will never be the same again. Now, here’s our chance to be as big as that. To be bigger than ‘Who Shot J.R.?’”
Then, he shows the press how he locks the script in the production office safe.
Once again, actor Paul Henry figures out what is happening by carefully analyzing the script for clues. He points out that a new character, Sam Hurst, with a mysterious past, may menace Meg. Immediately, the cast begins questioning the actor who is to play the possible murderer.
“He’s escaping his past because his wife and children died in a fire” is the little that Brian Badcoe knows about his character.
“Are you an arsonist?… Do you kill me?” Nolly wonders.
Paul calls attention to the fact that the “Sam Hurst” episode is scheduled to air on November 5th, Guy Fawkes Day, known to people in the UK as “bonfire night.”
Two days later, Jane visits Nolly and reveals that she has been filming a scene at a cemetery where her character mourns the death of Nolly’s character, Meg.
When the cast next assembles for a table read at a bar, it looks as if Meg will die by downing a bottle of pills in an attempted suicide while the motel burns down around her.
“If they’re killing me off,” Nolly says with disgust. “Then that’s my death. Cheap and tack and pathetic!”
The outlook for Meg seems even grimmer when Crossroads’ makeup artist Iris Chatterjee shows Nolly how the entire motel set has been removed from the studio and taken to an airfield to be burned down on camera.
“Come and see,” she says. “It’s gone! It’s all gone!”
“I just wonder, what did I do? Why do they hate me so much?” Nolly asks.
In her 1975 autobiography, My Life at Crossroads, Noele Gordon wrote, “When I am on the Crossroads set…the motel and the life that goes on around it become just as real for me as the viewers. But away from the studio, I become myself again—a professional actress—or at least I try.”
It turns out that Meg does not die in the fire. In a powerful scene, Nolly learns this when the script is delivered to her apartment. She sinks to her chair and sobs after she reads the last scene, perhaps from relief that her character will survive, perhaps from the impact of seeing in black and white how the character she has played for nearly 20 years will come to an end.
Act two begins with Nolly seeing old friend Larry Grayson’s stage show. After his performance, they meet up backstage in his dressing room. He is a famous English comedian who made several guest appearances on Crossroads. In a bittersweet exchange, Larry says he believes that Val Parnell, the married ATV executive with whom Gordon had a long-term love affair before his remarriage (to someone else) and died of a heart attack in 1972, would have reversed her firing from the show.
“Can’t help thinking…if he was still alive, he’d have helped, he’d have come charging to your rescue,” Larry says.
“That’s very romantic, but I don’t think he ever followed Crossroads,” she replies wearily.
“Bright things ahead,” Larry insists. “You’re going to be a bigger star than ever.”
“No, I won’t,” she shoots back. “I’m just an old soap star who’s been sacked.”
She tells him she doesn’t know what she will do.
“All those years, I kept my life empty, and waiting, I was waiting for him,” she says of Parnell. “But now, I stop filming and I’ve got nothing. That is my life outside the show. What am I going to do?”
Act three begins with a Crossroads bus arriving in Southhampton, where the QEII, the iconic cruise liner on which Nolly will be seen for the last time sailing off for America, is docked. Back at the studio, her cast mates reel from the void she has left. They bemoan the fact that her last scene is shot out of the studio without her castmates and familiar crew members with her.
“She spent decades in this studio,” Susan says. “She knows everyone. Not just us. I mean the cleaners, the security guards, the girls in reception, everyone!…but then her final days in Southhampton, miles away.”
Larry jumps from his chair and dashes off to meet the ship in Southhampton, where Nolly is discouraged by the cheapness of the location despite the elegant setting.
“You promised me the biggest suite on the QEII, but you didn’t promise the biggest kit to light the biggest suite on the QEII, did you?” she complains to Jack. “So we end up shooting in a tiny little corner. It’s a box. It’s a crate. It’s only marginally better than a hammock in steerage.”
She caps the monologue by saying, “You’re going to miss me, Jack.”
It is clear that he isn’t, but the crew certainly is.
“We worked with an absolute star,” says production assistant Liz.
Understandably, Nolly finds it difficult to muster the enthusiasm to give her goodbye wave from the deck of the QEII until she spots Tony on his boat come to give her the send-off she deserves.
In the fourth act, rather than watch her final Crossroads episode on television, Nolly and Tony decide to go shopping. Still, instead of taking her Rolls Royce, they hop on a double-decker bus, to the delight of the passengers excited to have a star in their midst. Well, there is one passenger who is decidedly not thrilled to be in the midst of a soap opera star.
In a spell-binding scene, Helena Bonhan Carter delivers an Emmy-worth monologue countering the sexism and elitism of a middle-aged man who dismisses the entire genre, saying, “It’s for women…it’s a lot of rubbish.”
Her demolishing reply, written by the genius Russell T. Davies, would make any soap opera actress, and certainly, any soap fan [like me], want to stand up and cheer.
“Oh, is it is that how it works because women, we sit there with our soap operas, and we’re all just a bit ridiculous, aren’t we?” Nolly fires back. “Aren’t we stupid? Aren’t we soft well? Men have pubs, football, and beer. Oh, and those are important things, aren’t they? They’re serious; they’re valid; they are worthwhile, so men can sit back and spread their legs and look at things that they love with contempt, with their lips curling with a sneer. Well, let me tell you, we feel contempt, we can smear, we curl our lips in disgust, and do you know when that is? When you walk into the bedroom and drop your trousers and stand there in saggy yellowing underpants…and then it gets worse, then you take them off!”
Nolly then tells Tony that he must return to work the next day and carry on like always.
“You be careful because it’s a machine, that program, and a machine is ruthless.” she cautions.
And so it is; the next day, the cast reassembles for rehearsal. Jane gingerly decides to break the tension by sitting in Nolly’s rehearsal room chair.
“I think so,” Tony says, patting her knee reassuringly.
However, Poppy, the new actress introduced in the first episode, is passed over when the scripts for the next week are distributed. The show must go on without her, as it is going on without Nolly.
“Do you think I’d let those bastards stop me?!” Nolly says to Tony in the final sequence. “I’ve got plans. I’m just getting started.”
Then we flashback to her backstage with Larry. He takes her hand and walks her out on stage.
“This is where you started,” he tells her. “And this is where you belong.”
“I am sixty-one years old,” she protests.
“Perfect age,” he counters. “You were born for this. Show them. All those men.”
She gathers herself and walks downstage.
“Watch me,” she says triumphantly and winks at the camera.
The next episode of Nolly airs on Sunday, March 31st, at 9 pm, as part of the Masterpiece series on WCNY or your local PBS station. For information on how you can support WCNY, visit https://www.wcny.org/support-wcny/member-benefits/.
Ron Klopfanstein is a multimedia investigative journalist, news and features editor, and creative content producer for the Utica Phoenix digital platform and 95.5 FM “The Heat” broadcast and streaming. He has been a lifelong fan of soap operas and has watched General Hospital for over 50 years.
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