Heartbreak Motel:Nolly.

I remember Crossroads. But I don't remember much about it. I remember the theme tune by Tony Hatch, I remember it was on at 6.30pm (which seemed to fall between children's TV and 'proper' evening entertainment and when I did watch it it was probably while eating my tea on a black and white portable in the kitchen), I remember Benny in his woolly hat and his presumably unrequited love for Miss Diane, and I remember a smoothie called Adam Chance.

That's about it. I don't actually remember Noele 'Nolly' Gordon being on it at all. Even though she was the most famous thing about it. Nolly (ITVX, written by Russell T Davies and directed by Peter Hoar) tells her story, at least some of it, and it tells it in a very enjoyable, and ultimately quite moving, way.

The year is 1981 and Nolly (Helena Bonham-Carter) has been the star of Crossroads since its inception in 1964. She played Meg Mortimer, owner of the Crossroads motel in the West Midlands somewhere. With fifteen million viewers per episode, Nolly has become such a big star that fans queue outside for her autograph. On the news she's referred to as "the Queen of the Midlands", she wears fur coats and bosses around the producers and though she claims that everyone has "equal status" and that "the star of the show is the motel" she clearly doesn't actually believe that.

She changes the scripts if she doesn't like them, she changes where people stand to deliver their lines, and she tells actors not to do Brummie accents and instead to use RP. One of these is new cast member Poppy (Bethany Antonia), who plays Honour - not a genuine Crossroads character but a plot device employed by the makers of Nolly, who nearly makes the fatal mistake of sitting in Nolly's empty chair in rehearsals.

Nolly takes Poppy under her wing - to a degree - but it is Tony Adams - not that one - whom she has the closest relationship. Adams (Augustus Prew) plays the aforesaid Adam Chance. He is Nolly's friend and confidante and together they drink wine, gossip, go on late night shopping sprees, and wonder if they've become "old fashioned". Nolly also appears to be close to Jane Rossington (Antonia Bernath) who plays her on-screen daughter, Jill. Rossington sometimes calls Nolly mum and that's not the only time in Nolly when the blurring of real and imagined lives happens.

Though Nolly acts the big star in the studio, her home life is shown to be quite lonely. She lives alone and turns the television off in anger when the (more successful) Coronation Street comes on. Coronation Street from the Fred Gee era too. Classic Coronation Street.

The ever reliable Con O'Neill plays Crossroads producer Jack Barton and it is he that Nolly over-rides the most. Nolly's agent Michael Summerton (Max Brown), a man who once played a dalek in Dr Who, goes to ATV's Head of Programming (ATV being the makers of Crossroads) Charles Denton (Tim Wallers) to try and broker a better deal, more pay and more holiday, for Nolly but Denton's answer is not what he expects. Denton's decided he's going to sack Nolly.

She doesn't take it well. She's distraught, devastated, and heartbroken. She goes to the press, tells them she practically invented daytime television and announces, with no little drama, that "the star of the show has been sacked". So much for the motel being the star.

Sackloads of complaints, however, roll from fans outraged at Nolly's sacking/Meg's forthcoming exit. But, as with all controlling people, when they can longer control others they try to control the narrative and, in this, Nolly is no different. She wants to have a say in how Meg exits the show. She particularly doesn't want Meg to be killed off. But Barton, sensing a new era in soaps, wants a moment to compete with "who shot JR?".

That all happens in the first forty-five minutes. For the next hour and a half we find out what does, eventually, happen to Meg, what does eventually happen to Crossroads, and, most importantly, of all, what becomes of Nolly herself. There will be no spoilers from me on that but it'll come as no surprise that, as comes to us all at a certain age, there's a lot of looking back and a lot of wondering about the lives we've lead and the lives we could have lead. A lot of considering what's the best way of using the time left.

Nolly, of course, doesn't go out quietly. There's a great scene where she sits with Larry Grayson (Mark Gatiss obviously relishing the role and excelling in it) backstage and the two of them open up about the changing nature of show business, about reaching their sell by dates, and what they think is the best way to deal with that.

There's quite a bit of that in Nolly. It's set in a Britain that doesn't quite exist anymore. It's greyer but it's also more innocent looking (though that could just be because I was still a teenage boy when Nolly was axed from Crossroads) and the way the Crossroads actors treated each other almost like a second family reminded of a time when work places could be like that. Before heavy data, KPIs, and fake brand value bullshit took over.

Of course it wasn't always great back then. Sexism, racism, and homophobia were rife, health and safety was virtually non-existent (people smoked in offices), and there was a booze culture that no doubt cut short more than a few lives. But Nolly is a show that looks back through rose tinted spectacles and it's all the more charming for that.

There are references to Rentaghost, This Is Your Life, Derek Nimmo, Game For A Laugh, Brideshead Revisited, Jimmy Tarbuck, and VHS videos for us kids of the eighties to savour, the real Tony Adams makes a cameo, and many of the original Crossroads characters are recreated. Some of which it turned out I did remember after all. 

There's Richard Lintern playing Ronnie Allen who played David Hunter, Clare Foster as Sue Lloyd who played David's wife Barbara, and of course there's Paul Henry's Benny, played in Nolly by Lloyd Griffith. Miss Diane too, played in Crossroads by Susan Hanson who in turn is portrayed by Chloe Harris. There's even an appearance of the chef Shughie McFee. Played in Crossroads by Angus Lennie who is played in Nolly by Gordon Kane. Shughie is the character responsible for my mate Shep's brother nickname, Shoey. Shoey, like Shep, comes from Cumbria but when they moved down south as kids people thought he sounded like Scottish Shughie McFee so he was given the nickname Shoey and it's stuck until this day.

I digress. By watching Nolly, I learnt that Noele Gordon was the first woman in the world to appear on colour television (in 1938 as part of John Logie Baird's (John Mackay) first ever colour transmission) and that she was the first woman ever to interview a British PM in the form of Harold MacMillan (Nicholas Gecks).

The best line of the show was given to O'Neill's Barton (as he tells Nolly about his past work, he recalls working at a circus "backstage with clowns. That's savage") and there's even a little dig about people not being able to afford to put their heating which chimed all too loudly with those undergoing the enforced and conscious cruelty of our current government but mostly it's an enjoyable romp through an era that though only forty years ago appears much older.

Prew is deliciously camp as Adams but it is of course Bonham-Carter who commands the screen. She plays Nolly not as a monster, that'd be too easy and it'd also be unfair, but as a complex and nuanced individual struggling to find a place in a world that is moving on regardless. Towards the end, things got pretty emotional. As they tend to when people find themselves untethered and unmoored. It is to the great credit of Russell T Davies, Peter Hoar, and the entire cast of Nolly that those feelings came over so affectingly.