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Joyce Barry’s family seems to be full of contradictions. (As if the fact that she ever got through her prison officer training successfully and nobody had thought to sack her for incompetence wasn’t amazing enough.) Ask most regular viewers who she was married to before Mervin and they will probably tell you Norm. Norm was first seen at Colleen Powell’s leaving party mid-way through the series, and made a few insignificant appearances over the next hundred episodes or so. But at Meg’s housewarming party some time earlier in the series, Joyce’s husband was clearly a completely different man, going by the very different name of Terry! And it doesn’t appear that she had remarried as she had always been known as Mrs Barry, which was Norm’s surname. Unless of course both husbands had the same name, and she had an ‘Importance of Being Ernest’ type obsession with it.
Norm had played very little part in the scheme of things until Joyce started telling Meg how she was bored with him. At around the same time, Mervin Pringle had started working as the Prison cook, and got on well with Joyce. As her interest in Mervin grew, along with her disinterest in Norm, she eventually told Meg she was going to move out to get away from living with her husband, staying with Meg for a short time.
In the middle of her angst and confusion, poor Joyce even took an overdose, and Meg came home to discover her sprawled on the carpet. She quickly recovered (Joyce, not Meg) and although Meg and Dennis didn’t report her suicide attempt at work, it was still noticed that Joyce looked ill.
It wasn’t long before she decided to leave Norm for good. A fat, middle-aged, greying, irritating, excuse for a man. And er so different from Mervin. In the meantime, she received a note from Norm saying his colleague Beryl Simmons was being “very supportive”.
Nothing was heard of Norm for some time after, while life went on for Joycie (a prison seige, the revelation about Mervin’s epilepsy, a blackmail attempt, and so on). Then out of the blue, a phone call told Joyce that Norm had been rushed to hospital after a heart attack. Joyce and Mervin were greeted by Beryl, who told Joyce that Norm had constantly talked about her. Which was a bit hard to imagine, as he’d barely said a word in all the episodes we’d seen him slouched in front of the television.
Sadly Norm did not even appear in his final scenes, his death took place conveniently (and economically) just off camera. As even the doctor who broke the news to Joyce and Beryl wasn’t actually visible.
As if the death wasn’t harrowing enough, Joyce’s miserable son Jim turned up unexpectedly. Particularly unexpectedly for regular viewers, who remembered earlier in the series when Joyce said she was unable to have children.
Poor Norm. Most of the time he seemed little more than an accessory in Joyce’s home (like a set of floral curtains). Even when he did have a significant part in a subplot he didn’t get any dialogue, let alone an appearance on screen. But the point of Norm was not what he did on camera, it was what he represented. He symbolised the dullness of Joyce’s domestic life, and her feeling trapped, which she came to realise at the time Mervin appeared on the scene.
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