Caroline Aherne: Actor and writer who created modern comedy classics

Caroline Aherne, who has died aged 52 of cancer, was responsible for some of the most distinctive and memorable comedy creations of the 1990s. From the Mrs Merton Show to The Royle Family, her characters were waspish but warmly observed, and gave audiences an all-too-rare taste of comedy that reflected their relationship with television and love-hate feelings about celebrity.

She was one of the few members of the British comedy pantheon not to be male, metropolitan and privileged, and her work often drew on her background.

Aherne made her name with the Mrs Merton Show, a chat show featuring the eponymous horn-rimmed, chintzy-sleeved northern housewife who fired faux-naive questions at her hapless celebrity guests: "What first attracted you to the short, balding millionaire Paul Daniels?" she once asked his wife Debbie McGee.

The Royle Family, the sitcom she co-wrote with Craig Cash, was groundbreaking in its portrayal of a working-class Manchester family watching TV in their front room. It was a sitcom that drew on the British tradition of 1950s kitchen sink dramas and the films of Mike Leigh, but it was more compassionate than either.

There was more to her comic armoury than Mrs Merton and Denise Royle, though they were her best-known characters. In the 1990s sketch programme The Fast Show, Aherne played the Mediterranean weather girl Paola Fisch (catchphrase "scorchio!"), and a cheeky checkout girl who insulted customers.

Irish parents

Aherne was born in London to Irish immigrants, Bert, a labourer on the railways, and Maureen, a school dinner lady. When she was two, the family moved to Wythenshawe, Manchester.

The Royle Family

may well have been inspired by the Aherne family, with her father serving as unwitting prototype for sharp-tongued, moaning Jim Royle. She recalled later: “My dad was always going on about the immersion, and about lights being left on. ‘It’s like feckin’ Blackpool illuminations,’ he used to say.”

Both she and her older brother Patrick were born with a rare cancer of the retina, retinoblastoma, that caused Patrick to lose an eye, and left Caroline almost unsighted in one eye.

Precociously intelligent, she scored 176 in an IQ test and got nine As in her O-levels at her convent grammar school. She studied drama at Liverpool Polytechnic, and in the late 1980s took a job at BBC Manchester as secretary to Janet Street-Porter. During this time she began to develop an act on the Manchester comedy circuit.

The Mrs Merton Show, which ran from 1995 to 1998 on the BBC, had an audience composed of real-life pensioners and an in-house band, Hooky and the Boys, led by her first husband, Joy Division and New Order bassist Peter Hook, whom she married in 1994. The couple divorced in 1997. The Royle Family ran for three seasons from 1998 to 2000, followed by specials until 2012.

Struggle with health

For all that she was feted by critics and garlanded with awards, Aherne struggled with fame and with her health. In 1998, at her mews home in Notting Hill, she tried to take her own life. She was treated for depression and alcoholism at the Priory clinic in 1998, and was also treated there in 2002.

In addition, she suffered bladder cancer related to her eye condition. In 2014, as part of a charity drive to raise money to treat other patients suffering from the disease, she announced she was suffering from lung cancer.

In 2001, she announced she was quitting showbusiness, because she no longer wanted to be famous. She moved for a while to Australia.

In later years, Aherne never equalled her earlier successes, still less the celebrity that came from writing and performing in two hit TV shows. She eschewed the media spotlight and lived quietly at a house in Manchester not far from her mother’s home.

She wrote such dramas as The Fattest Man in Britain (2009) and The Security Men (2013), as well as taking minor roles, such as a barmaid in a comedy called Sunshine (2008) with Steve Coogan.

Perhaps fittingly, one of her last TV roles was to narrate Gogglebox, the weekly Channel 4 documentary series in which TV viewers watch other TV viewers watching TV.