Alison Steadman recalls filming British TV’s groundbreaking lesbian kiss – in 1974
Alison Steadman has opened up about being part of TV’s first lesbian kiss in the 1974 BBC drama Girl (BBC)
Actor Alison Steadman has opened up about filming TV’s first lesbian kiss – way back in 1974.
Alison Steadman, who is arguably best known for playing doting mother Pam to Matthew Horne’s Gavin in Gavin and Stacey, was part of TV’s first lesbian kiss in 1974.
She appeared opposite Myra Frances as a pair of military officers sharing an intimate moment in the then-controversial BBC play about gay women in the army, filmed as part of the drama anthology series Second City Firsts.
In an interview with The Guardian, Steadman shared the surprisingly nonchalant attitudes towards the kiss, which appeared on screen nearly 50 years ago.
The iconic actor revealed that although she “remembers being very nervous about the whole thing” she then “got over it.”
“Then I was worried about how my parents, who lived in a quiet suburban area of Liverpool, would cope,” she continued. “I thought: ‘My poor mum! The neighbours will be whispering: Did you see your daughter on television?'”
In reality, the actor recalled, both the cast and the director, Peter Gill, made the moment as natural as possible.
“By the time we came to record, this great director [Peter Gill] didn’t make a fuss and said: ‘So this is the bit where they kiss … All right, quick kiss, let’s carry on.’ I was just nervous about people’s reactions. But my mum was great, and the neighbours got over it quickly.”
When Steadman was first cast in Girl, she told The Guardian: “When I was offered the part I felt quite nervous. A completely new adventure. Never been offered anything like it before.”
She has previously credited Gill for not making a “fuss about the fact they were two women or that they had to kiss. He said it was just a love story”.
In 1994, the first pre-watershed lesbian kiss was aired on the programme Brookside, between Anna Friel and Nicola Stephenson.
The first lip-to-lip gay kiss aired on British TV in 1989 thanks to soap Eastenders, with Michael Cashman and Nicholas Donovan locking lips in a move that proved so controversial that Conservative MPs and pundits called for the show to be taken off air.
