Manipulative, tyrannical and frankly terrifying, Nurse Ratched, from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is almost more memorable than her nemesis McMurphy.
A sadist in the role of healer/mother, she enacts some of our deepest taboos.
This week, Netflix launches its new series Ratched, starring Sarah Paulson as the eponymous nurse in a chilling origin story. To celebrate, we’ve picked the other large-looming bit-part players whose early lives we’d like to see televised.
Lynn Benfield (Alan Partridge)
Her employer believes that, technically, her life’s not worth insuring. But how did timid Lynn Benfield end up as long-suffering PA to Alan Partridge on a salary of just eight grand a year? You don’t get the diplomatic skills to warn a middle-aged man with a mediocre broadcasting career that he needs to downgrade his car to a Mini Metro without having seen some things in life. A look at Benfield’s backstory could finally go beyond her dedication to her local Baptist church and uncover how she became the silent and deceptively ruthless engine behind Partridge’s tumultuous career. Maybe he poached the PA from Eamonn Holmes. Jessie Thompson
Arwen (The Lord of the Rings)
Society still casts judgment on age-gap relationships — especially when the older party is a woman — so let’s hear it for Arwen Undómiel, who bagged herself an outdoorsy stud 2,700 years her junior. J.R.R. “sausage party” Tolkien didn’t exactly crush the Bechdel Test, so a prequel about my favourite cradle-snatching elf, based on his LOTR appendix “Tale of Aragon and Arwen”, would be a good place to start, building on the larger role Peter Jackson gave Liv Tyler in the movies, which were still so male they had to cast female extras with stick-on beards. I’m thinking horsey chase scenes, whispery woodland liaisons and more panne velvet than a Brighton charity shop. Lucy Pavia
Emily (The Devil Wears Prada)
Emily Blunt gave one of her best performances as the cold-hearted, uptight, deeply-stressed Emily in The Devil Wears Prada, a character who now reads as an overworked soul with a sensitive core who was thoroughly done over by her employer (she got hit by a car because she was being asked to work while sick! That’s insane!) I’d love a mini-series about Emily’s move to New York — why she left England, how on Earth she got a visa, how she made friends in a new city, and how she found her way into this amazing/awful job. Emily is rather two-dimensional in the film, and acts as comic relief, but I think her trials and tribulations would be ripe for an engaging, moving, funny, poignant drama about a brave young woman striking out on her own in a cut-throat industry in a chaotic city. George Fenwick
Godot (Waiting for Godot)
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I’d most like to see a spin-off drama about Godot from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a play in which, famously, “nothing happens, twice” and where the titular character never turns up. I envisage a one-man sitcom where Godot is always prevented from leaving his flat by some Mr Bean-ish misadventure: getting his head stuck in the bannisters, accidentally supergluing the door shut. Many Shakespeare characters warrant more airtime too: swashbuckling Fortinbras in Hamlet, melancholy Jaques in As You Like It, and the Thane of Angus in Macbeth, who is mentioned in a stage direction — “Enter Ross and Angus” — but says nothing, and is ignored by everyone else in the play, including Ross. There’s a world of anxiety, anger and hurt to unpack, right there. Nick Curtis
Caroline Bingley - Pride & Prejudice
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Pride and Prejudice’s minor characters have provided rich material for literary spin-offs. There are already books dedicated to a handful of Bennet hangers-on, yet no one has tried to imagine an origin story for social-climbing ice-queen Caroline Bingley, the sharp-tongued sister of Jane Bennet’s love interest with a longstanding crush on Mr Darcy. Her formative years in “one of the first private seminaries in town,” dashing around London spending too much money and dishing out pithy one-liners, would surely provide the perfect source material for a period prequel in the darkly comic vein of The Favourite, with shades of Gossip Girl. Katie Rosseinsky
The Fat Controller (Thomas the Tank Engine)
Thomas the Tank Engine is surely overdue a gritty live-action reboot. And who better to carry the franchise than railway commissioner, Sir Topham Hatt? There must be more to the Fat Controller. A mobster launching a Sopranos-style take-over of Sodor’s railways (we are talking about a man who, canonically, bricked up a staff member in a railway tunnel)? An overworked official darkly unravelling under the stress of managing a collapsing railway sector (“Does he ... does he actually think I’m a sentient talking train?”, a perturbed Thomas Tankerson, head of the drivers’ union, would ask, putting the phone down). Either way, we’re talking a steamy, post-industrial noir offering: “Hatt.” Samuel Fishwick
Terri Coverley (The Thick of It)
The Thick of It’s scene-stealing busybody had more foot-in-mouth moments than the governments she worked for, and that’s saying something. How did someone that incompetent rise to an important role within the civil service? Is that level of sheer tactlessness born, or made? And did she ever get her dog, Max, into Britain’s Got Talent? All these questions — and more — could be addressed in a drama that focused on Terri, taking us from her early days at Sainsbury’s and then Waitrose, and through her time in the civil service. We would see her struggle with her conscience — specifically, not having one — and perhaps (hopefully) start to understand the opaque motivations that made her do so many utterly inexplicable things. Phoebe Luckhurst
Ugly Naked Guy - Friends
For 10 series, Friends teased us with the mystery of Ugly Naked Guy, the man in the apartment opposite Monica and Rachel. All the characters were fixated on him — we learned what he ate, we worried for him in the episode where they feared he might be dead — but despite having seen him without his clothes on we never saw his face or learned his name. I’m still curious. So instead of a Friends comeback, which would only be disappointing, why not satisfy those who crave a reprise through the eyes of their enigmatic neighbour? For starters, I’d like to know his turkey recipe and what became of Ugly Naked Girl. Susannah Butter
Holly Gibney (Mr Mercedes/The Outsider)
Stephen King confessed he’d fallen in love with his own fictional heroine, Holly Gibney, when he introduced her in Mr Mercedes, the first in a crime-horror trilogy, as the sidekick to dyspeptic private dick, Bill Hodges.
Shy, awkward and on the spectrum, Holly was also extraordinarily perceptive, spotting clues that others didn’t. King revived her in his 2018 novel, The Outsider, to help another detective solve the curious case of a doppelgänger murder, adapted into an HBO series starring Cynthia Erivo as Holly. And again, in his 2020 novella, If It Bleeds, where we learned about her childhood issues. Come on HBO, it’s time to give her her own show. Katie Law
