A power team tells the story of sacked legend Noele Gordon

With the controversial Queer as Folk, Nicola Shindler, at that point a newbie television producer, made her name as someone who wanted to make shows that were edgy but also brilliant.

Since then, she’s picked up 11 Baftas for her work but her dramas with Queer as Folk’s writer Russell T Davies are almost always event television (their most recent collaboration was It’s A Sin). So get ready for their brilliant new three-parter Nolly, which starts on ITVX on February 2.

Based on the sacking of Crossroads star Noele Gordon in 1981, and starring Helena Bonham Carter as the soap legend, it is funny and moving and quietly political.

This is the story of an older woman getting brutally fired from the television show she headlined, something that, unfortunately, still happens today. Just to have a woman in her 60s at the centre of a drama —Noele was 61 when she was sacked — still feels groundbreaking.

Nolly is the first show of Shindler’s new production company, Quay Street Production. “It is quite a radical subject,” she says.

“She is such a fascinating character. She’s complex. She’s lived a life, as so many older women have and it feels important to tell her story. Older women still get fired all the time and the way it happened to Noele was particularly brutal.

“Things have changed a bit — there are more female production companies and writers — but the way women are described and reviewed and judged is still different from the way men are judged, even today.”

Nolly Credit ITV (3)

Bonham Carter filming Nolly

Shindler always knew that she wanted a charismatic star to play Nolly and Bonham Carter, who identifies as Jewish thanks to a Jewish maternal grandmother (albeit one who converted to Catholicism on marrying her husband who was himself half Jewish), jumped at the chance to play such a meaty role.

“I didn’t know much about her but she fizzed off the page as soon as I read the script and I thought how have I not known of her before?” she says of Noele. “She is a sensational woman, a life force.

Quite apart from Crossroads, she was the first female to ever interview a Prime Minister on television and she helped invent daytime television.

“Our show looks at how she was appallingly treated — that’s what inspired Russell to write it. She never discovered quite why she was sacked and it was hard for her because the public was always asking her about it.

“I love to do my research and I managed to find the interview she did with Russell Harty on the night she was sacked. She came on and sang Some People with such gumption and fierceness that I thought, ‘we all need a bit of Nolly in us’. And actually, I did find she legitimised my bossy side.”

Bonham Carter was just a teenager when Noele was sacked but she can empathise with the sexism she faced.

“Looking back on it, I remember going to America when I was 19 or 20 — I was pretty young — and I just felt so deficient because my legs didn’t go on for six years. I wasn’t particularly sexual and I just felt I didn’t have the right body and there was no career for me.
“Looking back, I think, ‘Why was I so fixated on the fact that I didn’t have the right body?’

But there weren’t many parts for me and that’s basically why I did costume dramas — there were good parts and that was where the writing was.

“This story isn’t about sex but it’s sort of a #MeToo story because she was sacked in her prime and I suspect it was because people were threatened by her — she was clever — probably cleverer than most of the people on the show. And they resented her power and the fact that she was right most of the time.”

On a similar theme, Vanessa Feltz has hinted that ageism was a factor in her leaving the BBC, and has suggested it is why the veteran DJ Ken Bruce had also quit the station.

Vanessa Feltz GettyImages-1446247539

Vanessa Feltz (Getty Images)