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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 353032" data-attributes="member: 22">I assumed Honor was based on Chloe Sylvestre's character - Meg's Black foster daughter - transplanted from ten years earlier. I guess the function of Poppy (the fictional actress playing Honor - I'm confusing myself now) was to act as a novice: our way into the way the backstage world of Crossroads worked. As detailed by Matthew Sweet in his Twitter thread, the actress who played Trina MacDonald, like Chloe Sylvestre herself, was and is a woman with a lot more life experience than Poppy so it might have been a bit of a disservice to try and squeeze her into such a functional role. Far cleaner, I think, to invent a character from scratch and have fun with it.Nolly didn't do what I thought it might. It didn't debunk any of the preconceptions and prejudices that exist about Crossroads. When Diane matter-of-factly describes it as a tatty little soap and Adam casually describes it as shit, nobody disagrees, least of all Nolly herself. But while Russell T Davies doesn’t exactly contradict the Acorn Antiques absurdity of Xrds, he does contextualise it, making you understand why, as tatty and shit as it might have been, it mattered to people, even though the people it mattered to the most - who judging by what he showed us on screen were mostly female, mostly working-class, often Black and often seemingly gay - could be dismissed almost easily as the soap itself. (That's what the scene on the bus expressed so well. My guess is that scene never happened, but I think that's what RTD is so good at: creating something fictional to express a larger truth.)When she is fired as Noele Gordon, Helena Bonham Carter essentially enacts the same ridiculous scenario as Julie Walters did when Mrs O was written out of Acorn Antiques, but whereas Walters and Victoria Wood made you laugh at the soap diva with delusions of grandeur, RTD and HBC make you see that she’s aware of the ridiculousness and is trapped inside it. (She just wants to know why she was dumped, which how anyone in that situation would react.) In other words, they humanise the situation. (It's so strange to think back to a time when Bonham Carter was largely thought of this posh girl in corsets complaining about how hard it is to be a beautiful actress while Julie Walters was the working class and earthy one. Now it's Bonham Carter adding grit and depth to a role Walters once sent up so cruelly, albeit brilliantly. While I think of it, Bonham Carter's physicality in her fantastic portrayal of Princess Margaret in The Crown often reminded me of Mrs Overall.)I think Nolly helped me to identify something I've never been able to quite put my finger on about Noele Gordon's performance in Crossroads, If RTD's version of events is to be believed, the actress poured her heart and soul, her entire life, identity and career into something she knew and accepted was beneath her: a tatty little soap. It's sort of admirable and condescending at the same time, and that combination of superiority and dedication is just as evident in the character of Meg herself. I watched a wedding episode from November 66 recently and you can see it in the way she glides round the reception afterwards from one group of guests to another. She's great: totally involved the scene and above it all at the same time.</blockquote>

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