Alison Steadman has said she didn't realise how much of a “big deal” her iconic on-screen lesbian kiss was in the 1970s.
It was the first lesbian kiss on UK television, and was met with mixed reaction at the time.
Steadman shared the then-controversial kiss with Myra Frances in the drama anthology series Second City Firsts.
The episode, Girl, which aired in the 1970s focused on gay women in the army, where Steadman’s character was one of the military officers.
Speaking about the kiss to Radio Times, the 78-year-old actress said: “I don’t think I realised at the time .
“It was within the first two or three years of me doing television, but I was most concerned for my parents, really. They were from a small community in Liverpool where everybody knew everybody and suddenly their daughter was on television doing a lesbian kiss! But they were so good about it.”
She went on to say that her parents were always “so proud” of her for going into acting.
“My dad made this lovely speech… he was sure I’d succeed, but if it wasn’t working out and I wanted to come back home, I shouldn’t be ashamed because the time at drama school will have enriched my life.
“It was such a progressive, compassionate attitude,” said the star.
While viewers wouldn’t react to a lesbian kiss in 2025, things were very different in 1974.
According to the BBC, viewers were warned about the drama's content prior to the broadcast and discussions were held about whether the kiss should have been postponed.
And in a BBC audience research report commissioned at the time, viewers expressed dissatisfaction about the show's “distasteful” and “deliberately set out to shock” content.
20 years after Steadman’s on screen kiss, stars Anna Friel and Nicola Stephenson shared the first pre-watershed lesbian kiss on Brookside.
The first gay kiss came in 1987, when Michael Cashman and Gary Hailes, who played Colin Russell and Barry Clark on EastEnders, shared a brief kiss.
In 1989, Cashman and Nicholas Donovan, who played Colin and Guido Smith, shared a lip-to-lip. Conservative MPs and pundits demanded the cancellation of the show because of how controversial their kiss was.
