Noele “Nolly” Gordon: TV Trailblazer
The very real Noele Gordon was a television legend in her own unconventional lifetime. Trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Gordon gave up years on the stage to make history in the male-dominated world of 1950s TV. Known to all as “Nolly,” she was game to try new things and seemed to have a burning desire to break barriers. Get ready to meet this intrepid pioneer who became one of the most famous and beloved faces on British television.
- 1.
Gordon was the First Woman Broadcast on Color TV
Noele Gordon as a young stage actor. Courtesy of The Noele Gordon Archive. In 1938, Scottish inventor and TV pioneer John Logie Baird plucked the blue-eyed and very dark-haired Noele Gordon off a theater stage to take part in his color transmission experiments. The teenager became the first woman transmitted in color—in motion—from a camera to television sets later that year.
Baird “used to send his Rolls-Royce to pick me up after shows and take me to his studio where I sat in front of a color TV camera while technicians tried out various effects,” Gordon wrote in her memoir, My Life at Crossroads. “Between ‘takes’, I drank bottled beer and ate sandwiches with those gorgeous young men Baird had working for him. It was great fun, but I sometimes used to wonder what the neighbors thought when I was delivered back at my digs in a chocolate Rolls-Royce at six o’clock in the morning.”
- 2.
Nolly was Both TV Executive and On-Screen Personality
Noele Gordon in a circus themed episode of Lunchbox. Courtesy of The Noele Gordon Archive. Parliament first approved commercial television in 1954. Realizing TV would soon reshape everything, Gordon spent a year at New York University to study American production on both sides of the camera.
Her hunch paid off. Returning home, Noele Gordon became the first female executive at Associated Television (ATV), part of the Independent Television (ITV) network. She worked as a trainee director, oversaw women’s lifestyle programs, then helped launch a five-day-a-week broadcast operation in 1956. When airtime needed filling, she valiantly hosted ITV’s first major chat show, Tea with Noele Gordon, then a daytime magazine style show called Lunchbox, during which she “drove a tank, a bus, a train, and a racing car. Went down a mineshaft looking for coal. I’ll have a go at anything,” she said in an interview with her fan club. She hosted up to 10 programs a week at one point, including Midland Sport, a fishing show called A New Angle on Noele Gordon, plus specials like Noele Gordon Takes the Air documenting her learning to fly a plane. She seemed literally indefatigable.
- 3.
Noele Gordon Became UK’s Most Popular TV Actress
Crossroads cast in 1969. Courtesy of The Noele Gordon Archive. Gordon went straight from hosting Lunchbox to starring in Crossroads, a soap opera that her network built around her. When launched in 1964, it was the country’s first half-hour daily serial. Nolly played widow turned motel owner Meg Richardson and almost lickety-split became the UK’s favorite female TV star, winning more awards between 1968 and 1981 than any other. She became the inaugural celebrity placed in the TV Times (UK) Hall of Fame. Hers was arguably now a household name.
And while Gordon could be direct and opinionated, by all accounts she was intent on making Crossroads the best it could be. “We were always encouraged to make [script] alterations if a line was difficult or wrong and we were encouraged to put up ideas,” she said to her fan club.
“She wasn’t easy, she didn’t suffer fools, so she may have put people’s backs up,” says Helena Bonham Carter, who portrays Gordon in the miniseries Nolly on MASTERPIECE. “They said she was somebody who had formidable opinions, was a formidable character, but also had a huge heart. She was a dedicated professional—and she ran the ship!”
- 4.
They Called Nolly ‘The Godmother’ On Set
Crossroads actors (left to right) Noele Gordon, Jane Rossington, and Roger Tonge. Courtesy of The Noele Gordon Archive. Gordon wrote in her memoir that Crossroads castmates nicknamed her “The Godmother.” She also signed her Christmas cards that way! It seems she knew everyone’s birthday and performed numerous acts of kindness on the down low. Nolly took younger actors under her experienced wing and taught them proper studio manners and offered advice. Her devoted on-screen children Jill (Jane Rossington) and Sandy (Roger Tonge) called her ‘mother’ on set and off. “I get a little kick out of it,” Gordon wrote. “No one is more delighted than I am when they come to me with their real-life problems just as though I was their real mother.”
Nolly creator Russell T Davies says, “What was remarkable was how much Noele was loved. … She could clearly be tough at work…although no one would have blinked twice if that was a man. And when she did lose her temper, she very much aimed it upwards at the bosses, not down at the workers on the floor. She was properly, properly loved.”
- 5.
Gordon Did Not Go Quietly
Noele Gordon in the 1981 stage production of Gypsy. Noele Gordon was shown the door after 18 years on Crossroads, at the height of the show’s success and the peak of her fame. She personally broke the news to press and, for all we know, savored the outcry that erupted from her 15 million fans. “She was very famous, and it was a very public humiliation,” says Nolly creator Davies. “Nolly went through that before the invention of social media when the public platform was television. Everyone gets piled on online these days; she was the first!” (Again!)
It’s not hard to find an online video from an ATV holiday party held soon after her sacking. An audacious Gordon heads to a microphone dressed in mourning black—complete with veil—and croons Say that We’re Sweethearts Again, including the lyrics, “I never knew that our romance had ended/Until you poisoned my food.”
