by Gogglebox
HAVE YOU EVER MET A CELEBRITY?
LINDA: I used to cut Bucks Fizz’s hair. I owned a hairdresser’s in Rainham called Lindy Lou’s. It was very popular. I used to do Mike Nolan’s mum and all his family. And on the night before he got famous, he was in. He said, ‘I’ve got someone interested in me, listen to this.’ And while I did his highlights (because he was right blond) he put this record on. And I go, ‘Ain’t she got a good voice?’ He went, ‘That’s me.’ I went, ‘Oh, you sound like Frankie Valli.’
EVER GOT ANYTHING
OUT OF GOGGLEBOX?
PETE: I’m always getting recognised in taxis and they all take your photo, but I’ve had nobody buy me a beer.
WHAT DOES TV
MEAN TO YOU?
GEORGE: I think it’s a commodity that needs to be used for a better cause.
FANCY DRESS
LINDA: I’ve done fancy dress as Vicky Pollard. And Su Pollard. Su Pollard was in Rainham Carnival and we won it. I had all the chalet maid’s things, I’ve got photographs of it. And Vicky Pollard I did recently at fancy dress. All shocking pink. I kept going round all night, eating off the buffet going, ‘Yeah, I’ve got me baby parked outside.’
PETE: It was brilliant.
LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL
LEON: Titanic made me cry. The ending. And Pretty Woman.
JUNE: I cried at Quartet. And unfairness towards people, that makes me upset. The disabled: they’re still not getting a fair crack of the whip. And the elderly. And in Coronation Street, the story about Hayley having pancreatic cancer. We were very upset when we saw that. And then we met one of the writers, Jan McVerry, just by chance. She’s local. We were having a coffee and she recognised us. And we were so delighted to talk to her. I said how well researched it was, and she came to thank us and for us to pass on thanks to Gogglebox for putting it on and for showing everybody’s reactions.
I’m sure soaps have to have fires and dramatic things to keep everybody’s interest going, but things like cancer do open up the world, because I think in every family somebody is touched, even if not directly.
LINDA, PETE & GEORGE, CLACTON-ON-SEA
LINDA: Anything to do with animals or children. I cry terrible. I cried at the end of Educating Yorkshire with the boy with the stammer. I was ever so upset because George had a stammer when he was a little boy, and that’s how I helped him. I used to sing to him, ‘Do you want your breakfast, George?’
PETE: It was like being in an opera.
LINDA: And he could answer me without stammering, by singing, ‘Oh yes please, Mummy …’
PETE: Now you can’t stop him talking, can you?
THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON
ANDREW: Touched by an Angel. We were on holiday in Cyprus, watching it, and we were all sobbing our eyes out, weren’t we?
LOUIS: I cried when Miranda nearly died in Call the Midwife.
CAROLYNE: We nearly died that day. We thought she was going to lose the baby.
STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON
CHRIS: The programme on being gay in Russia. That was absolutely awful. It was that whole thing of: you didn’t want to watch it, but you had to, because you couldn’t believe what was actually going on, and you didn’t know whether to cry or be angry. When I went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. And even the next day I felt really affected by it. I was bullied as a kid, and a lot of the people on that programme were being manipulated and bullied by these horrible straight people. And it sort of took me back to when I used to be bullied for being gay.
THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY
UMAR: As you get older – I don’t know if it’s sentimentality or what – but stuff moves you more. The bit right at the end of the last Lord of the Rings film. The Return of the King.
BAASIT: They have that big-ass war and Frodo’s gone through all that stuff and Aragorn becomes the king and they’re just humbly standing there and they bow in front of him. And he says, ‘You bow for no man.’ And the whole kingdom bows for those guys. It’s done really well.
UMAR: I think you appreciate what the film is trying to tell you.
BAASIT: Don’t trust short people. Because they’ll kick your ass.
STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH
STEPH: After you become a parent, your own mortality suddenly becomes very real. We tend to cry at anything to do with loss of child, loss of parent – loss of any kind. Any cancers, illness – can’t cope with it. And if we see it’s in the description, we won’t watch it on that very basis: that we know it’ll absolutely kill us. Tug at our heart strings.
DOM: There was a time almost every film that we chose had a background story about a woman losing her mother or someone dying of cancer.
STEPH: And I’d only just lost my mother. And it was a bit like when you buy a car and you suddenly see loads of them on the road. I remember taking a DVD to Mother in hospital so we could sit and watch it together in the afternoon, and it was about a woman losing her mother to cancer, but it didn’t say that in the beginning, so we’re both sitting there watching it, and I suddenly went, ‘Waaahhh,’ and my mother’s going, ‘This is really horrible!’ We didn’t turn it off though. And luckily, she had a great sense of humour, so she was like, ‘Oh well, we’re halfway through it, let’s see what happens in the end.’ ‘We fucking know what’s going to happen in the end, Mum! She’s going to die!’ It’s a bit like watching Jesus Christ Superstar. ‘What happens in the end?’ I do remember having a conversation with somebody (who shall remain unnamed) about the film The Passion of the Christ. I was explaining about the film and she said, ‘My God, it sounds amazing. What happened in the end?’ Mind you, Dom cries at Lassie.
DOM: Yeah …
STEPH: He’s a total poof now. I thought you were going last night.
DOM: Yeah … there was one tiny little tear. At the end of the wedding scene, or something. Whatever it was.
STEPH: But everybody was so happy.
DOM: It got emotional. And, bloody hell, I’m sitting there, top lip starts going and, you know …
STEPH: Oh, God. It was so funny.
DOM: … and I was very tired.
THE TAPPERS, NORTH LONDON
NIKKI: We’re a little bit soft in this house.
AMY: We’re always crying at the TV. Always. There was one programme that we watched and it was just the most depressing thing I’ve ever sat through. It was basically a bunch of pensioners, with dementia or something wrong with them, and they were just dying. And it was just the most horrendous thing to watch. And I cried the whole way through it. Tears down my face. Non-stop.
NIKKI: I’ll make another cup of tea.
THE MOFFATTS, COUNTY DURHAM
SCARLETT: And, you know, Comic Relief and that, where they have those African kids and they have flies all in their eyes and that? We don’t cry at chick flicks, though, do we? Like Titanic and all that. Just charity appeals. I once started crying at the train station, ended up giving £11 a month. That was for cats. I don’t even like cats. Or those donkey adverts. It’s got a limp, it’s so sad, and it’s been working for eighteen hours a day and you’re just, like, ‘That poor donkey.’ It just wants to chill out and it can’t. Because they’re just dragging it around. It wants to chill out, with carrots, like on the beach or whatever. It’s got hooves and sad eyes. I don’t like seeing people with sad eyes.
REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE
KATE: They showed us something on Gogglebox which was a Sports Relief thing where there was an older gentleman whose wife had died, and Sports Relief were funding a phone line for him to be able to talk to other people. And apparently when they showed it to all the Goggleboxers, they were all sobbing, because this old guy was really lonely and he was crying. That didn’t affect me really. Because what affects me more is the actual guy who I go and visit, whose wife died last year, who I go and have a cup of tea with, and who comes to church. Because he’s real. And that upsets me.
I don’t cry for the telly. Part of my own therapy is watching telly.
Because I do such a crazy job. One minute I can be stood in assembly dressed as an Oompa Loompa on World Book Day, and half an hour later – literally half an hour later – I can be burying a baby. And I don’t cry the days when I carry a dead baby into church. Of course I don’t. But when I come home from a really difficult funeral, I open a bottle of wine, hug the kids extra tight, and watch really crap TV.
And that’s the power of television. It has the power to move you to tears, to stimulate conversation, to help you to relax. It’s the most powerful thing in anyone’s sitting room.
And that’s why, when people said to me, ‘Oh, Gogglebox, what a stupid idea for a show, it’s about watching people watching telly …’ Well, you’ve missed the point of the show. Because it’s actually about watching people.
That’s what it’s about.
People.
A MEETING
CAROLYNE: One day I was in a supermarket car park in Brighton, and I had a trolley. And the car park had been shut, so in order to get my £1 coin back I had to wheel the trolley all the way outside the supermarket, down a side street and then up a whole flight of stairs.
CHRIS: I was in Morrisons car park and I was walking down this big row of concrete steps. And there was this woman pulling this trolley up the bloody steps.
CAROLYNE: So I was dragging this trolley up some stairs, really with a lot of difficulty…
CHRIS: So I turned round and said, ‘Would you like a hand with that, love?’
CAROLYNE: …and I heard this voice say, ‘Can I help you with that, love?’ And I thought, ‘It’s Chris!’
CHRIS: And she sort of looked at me and she went ‘Oh, Chris!’
CAROLYNE: And he looked at me and I looked at him.
CHRIS: And I thought, ‘Oh God! Is it some crank? Have I done her hair?’ And then I noticed the pink lipstick and the penny dropped: it was Carolyne from the Michaels.
CAROLYNE: And we both said, ‘It’s YOU!’ And we had this huge hug.
CHRIS: So I had a good old chat with her. She was lovely. Absolutely lovely.
CAROLYNE: Honestly, it was like meeting an old friend.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A book like this doesn’t happen on its own. It needs lots of help. And this book had a lot of help from a lot of lovely people. And when lovely people are helpful, it’s polite to say thank you.
So, thank you, first, to Rev. Kate and Graham; Sid, Umar and Baasit; Mark, Betty and Scarlett; Leon and June; Ralf, Viv, Eve and Jay; Bill and Josef; Linda, Pete and George; Stephen and Chris; Sandy and Sandra; Andrew, Carolyne, Louis and Alex; Jonathan, Nikki, Josh and Amy; and Steph and Dom. Without their help, this book would have been embarrassingly short.
Second helpings of thank you to Tania Alexander, Melissa Bartlett and Gemma Scholes at Studio Lambert; Katy Follain and Natasha Hodgson at Canongate; Anne Miles at transcripts4u; intrepid researcher and spreadsheet maven Victoria Thomas; TV historian and all-round good egg Joe Moran; and the formidable Cat Ledger, for whom the word ‘agent’ was surely invented.
Last but not least, special thanks go to the wonderful David Glover and those lovely people at Channel 4 for their continual love and support.