Craig Cash: 'Caroline Aherne was an ordinary girl with an extraordinary talent'

“It’s still an open wound,” he says. “I was reticent, but I wanted the film to be balanced, to show the funny side of Caroline, the biggest part of her. To me, she was an ordinary girl with an extraordinary talent.”

Cash, who first worked with Aherne on Manchester radio station KFM in the early 1990s, says it was their shared sense of humour that inspired them to write together. In 1995, they created The Mrs Merton Show, where she dressed up as a little old lady to plant gentle but deadly grenades on her unsuspecting guests, from Chris Eubank to Bernard Manning. Her innocent enquiry to Debbie McGee, “So, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” lives on in legend.

Veteran producer Andy Harries signed up the show as head of comedy at Granada TV. He believes that, from her very first comedy commission, Aherne was ahead of her time, becoming one of the original British showrunners.

He remembers, “She told me, ‘You’re not editing it without me. I know what makes people laugh.’ She had the whole toolkit – wrote, directed, produced, starred. You couldn’t argue with her. She’d just tell you to eff off.”

Then, in 1998 came The Royle Family, which Cash and Aherne wrote and starred in as Dave and Denise, permanently sharing the front room with her parents Jim and Barbara (Ricky Tomlinson and Sue Johnston).

“We took inspiration from real life and our families,” Cash says. “And we watched the documentary about hairdressers Three Salons at the Seaside, which we thought was hilarious. Sometimes people get bogged down in plot and narrative at the expense of character and dialogue. For us it was all about the pauses, how people really are.”

Harries says Aherne had absorbed the British tradition of Ken Loach’s film work, naturalistic and real, taken Brookside’s Ricky and Sue and reinvented them in a family comedy: “She came from that background so she knew what she was doing, showing families laughing at the small things in life.” The sitcom still draws huge audiences, which pleases Cash: “If we can make people laugh 25 years later, we’ve done a great thing.”

Cash reveals in the film that he and Aherne kept laughing, even when he visited her in hospital in the days before her death. “I did this stupid walk for her benefit, but I’d gone to the wrong room. Caroline thought it was hilarious.” His voice catches. “She always wanted to make me laugh, even when she was telling me her days were numbered.”

And that’s how he’d like her to be remembered, along with her loyalty and generosity. He shares one more story: “I met her for a drink in Soho. She’d gone to a cashpoint but given all her money straight to a homeless person. At the pub, she said, ‘I’ve got no money. Can you buy me a drink?’"

Caroline Aherne: Comedy Queen will air on BBC Two on Christmas Day at 10:25pm. Looking for something to watch in the meantime? Check out more of our Documentaries coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to see what's on tonight.

Try Radio Times magazine today and get 10 issues for only £10 – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.