Craig Cash, a British writer and actor, has revealed that he sometimes feels the “presence” of his late friend Caroline Aherne during the recordings of his voiceovers for the television show Gogglebox. Cash and Aherne had worked together on several shows, including the beloved BBC series The Royle Family. He said Aherne had asked him to cover for her on Gogglebox after her cancer diagnosis. Since her death, the work has been like “a gift that she left me.”
Cash made this revelation during a BBC Radio Manchester interview. He added that the BBC would air a special programme celebrating Aherne’s life during Christmas. Aherne was the first presenter of the Channel 4 programme, providing commentary from its inception in 2013 to a short time before her death in 2016.
Cash said that Aherne had first asked him to help her with the programme during her treatment for cancer. “She just asked me if I’d do the show for her if she was poorly and when she had to go for chemo, so of course I said yes just to help out, because I couldn’t help in any other way,” he said. After her death, he was asked to continue in the role, which he had come to see as a present from Aherne.
Cash said that it felt natural to keep doing the voiceovers and that he felt like Aherne was sometimes with him while he was in the studio. He added, “When I go in the studio where we used to record it, I can feel her presence sometimes. That feels a bit weird but true.”
Cash and Aherne had worked on various projects together, including the BBC hit series The Mrs Merton Show and The Fast Show, after meeting in Manchester in the late 1980s. However, it was their work in front of and behind the camera on The Royle Family that made them best known. The show, which was first aired on the BBC in 1998, sprang from an idea Aherne had while still working on The Mrs Merton Show. The much-loved patriarch Jim Royle, portrayed by Ricky Tomlinson, was “basically my dad apart from we couldn’t make him a big [Manchester] City fan because Ricky was a Scouser.”
Although the show has become a TV classic and is often repeated, finding new audiences every time, Cash said that at the time of development, “nobody wanted to make it, because it was just about people sat around talking drivel.” He added, “We had to convince them [because] they all said ‘no, it won’t work.
Read the full article from The BBC here: Read More