Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  She may have escaped the final, but the ATV producers deemed her talented enough to appear in The Summer Show, a prime-time series of five 45-minute shows which began being broadcast a week after the gala final. For the first time on television she would be acting in comedy sketches instead of simply performing behind a piano.

  The Summer Show was supposed to be a British version of Laugh-In, and each week the themed shows took a lighthearted look at such topics as mystery and crime, health and doctors, showbusiness and sport.

  Victoria was one of only seven of the sixty-two New Faces’ winners chosen to appear in the show. Her exceptionally high score in the competition was obviously a key factor in her selection, but the producers may have also decided her plain and plump appearance could be used as a contrast to the pencil-thin and glamorous ex-beauty queen Marti Caine, another of The Summer Show’s stars. This may have also accounted for the inclusion of Lenny Henry and the 4ft 7in Welsh girl singer Charlie James. Making up the numbers were New Faces’ very first winner, the Cumbrian singer Trevor Chance, and comedians Aiden J. Harvey and Nicky Martyn.

  It was filmed in Studio D at Elstree Studios and the cast stayed in the nearby Spider’s Web Motel. A scriptwriting team was hired (much to Victoria’s chagrin) and there was a week’s rehearsal time between the shows for the songs. The performers, who were paid £175 a week, were encouraged to develop their versatility: instead of simply doing their party pieces they were thrown together in various combinations for songs, sketches and dances.

  Keen to get it off to a good start, a feature was arranged with the TV Times and the cast was photographed for the cover. On the day it was published Victoria and others excitedly crowded around, only to discover Marti had been made the solo cover star. Over breakfast someone stubbed out a cigarette on it.

  For the first show Leslie Crowther was enlisted as a guest host to inspire confidence. In one number he found himself duetting with Victoria, who was dressed in a huge bustle skirt. Victoria, who was billed as a singer-songwriter, hated the whole experience. ‘It was one of those really bad variety shows where they got the scripts out of other people’s dustbins,’ she said. ‘It was just dreadful.’ But at the time she was in no position to be choosy about accepting work. Marti Caine took a drop in pay to appear, but to Victoria the money seemed marvellous.

  Besides the dismal quality of the material, Victoria had to endure personal humiliation. She felt bad because she was too big for most of the costumes, and the wardrobe department was unsympathetic, rifling through the racks and sighing to her ‘If only you’d lose two stone you could wear this of Anna Massey’s.’

  The Summer Show resulted in Marti Caine being given her own television series and Lenny Henry becoming one of television’s Black and White Minstrels. Victoria returned to Priory Road and unemployment. She could not even console herself with the thought that she had scored a triumph over her old boyfriend. Earlier that year Bob Mason had starred in a Mike Leigh television play, The Permissive Society, and before the year was over one of his own plays was broadcast on BBC2.

  The Summer Show lacked the kudos Victoria would have liked, but for her professional stage debut the quality did move up a notch. Wordplay was written by and starred Roger McGough, who described it as

  A play on words … a play about words … how people use words and are used by them … a Celebration of Words – the music, the pattern, the sense and the non-sense … how words fail us … how we fail each other in our own mis-use of them … despite desperate attempts to communicate with those nearest and dearest to us – we remain bound and gagged.

  The overall theme was non-communication, something that Victoria, who had an almost non-existent relationship with her family and found herself unable to confront her manager, was well versed in.

  The 75-minute revue used sketches, songs, running gags and comic turns. Besides McGough the poet and Victoria, the cast featured recording artist Andy Roberts, John Gorman who, like McGough, was a member of The Scaffold, and Lindsay Ingram, who had worked extensively in fringe theatre. As well as being older than Victoria, the other members of the cast already knew each other through previous projects. Fortunately, they were sensitive enough to realise Victoria might have felt it all rather daunting and were very protective of her.

  Rehearsals were held in the Stanmore home of Andy Roberts and his wife in Middlesex, and Victoria lodged in their spare room for the fortnight-long rehearsal period.

  ‘She was very withdrawn,’ recalled Roberts. ‘I remember thinking it was slightly odd really because we were all gregarious and the house always had a lot of people in but Vicky didn’t seem to want to be around them. When we weren’t rehearsing she would sit in the bedroom eating biscuits on her own.’

  Roberts also formed a very accurate impression of Victoria’s absent manager. ‘This bloke was always phoning her up. It was like a throwback situation, like a sleazy agent somewhere who was completely invisible. You never saw him, he never turned up to see the show or anything like that.’

  The bittersweet songs that Victoria wrote for Wordplay – including one entitled ‘We’re Throwing a Party for the End of the World’ – impressed Roberts. ‘They were absolutely beautifully crafted and she was singing them really well. I thought the music was the most interesting thing about what she was doing. I told her that if she cut out the comedy she could be the English Randy Newman.’ It seems incredible to think now but, for a while, Victoria took Roberts’s advice, and later wrote to tell him that she had written some new songs that he might like better than her others as they had nicer music and no funny words.

  As well as the songs, Victoria also took part in some of the sketches. In ‘Germs’, she and Ingram played two old women sitting on a park bench discussing germs. ‘She was more nervous about the acting than being at the piano,’ said Ingram, who found Victoria extremely witty.

  Wordplay was deemed successful enough to transfer from the Edinburgh Festival to the Hampstead Theatre where it ran from 11 December 1975 to 10 January 1976, again under the direction of Jim Goddard.

  The Times’s Irving Wardle described it as an ‘interesting experience’ and singled out ‘the deadpan pianist Victoria Wood’ as being one of the ‘drollest personalities’. In the Guardian Michael Billington said she contributed ‘genial songs’, and in the Daily Telegraph John Barber conceded that she sang acceptably. Victoria’s best review came from the Financial Times’s B.A. Young, who praised her for being ‘particularly adept at socially-pointed songs’.

  Although Victoria still considered herself naive, it eventually dawned on her that her manager was not acting in her best interests. She had not rocketed to stardom and she was still in her Birmingham bedsit living on social security. The final straw came when she discovered he had turned down an offer from That’s Life. Victoria was mortified and phoned the BBC herself to inform them there had been a dreadful mistake. She managed to salvage the situation, and extricated herself from her management contract. Seeking new representation she wrote to Tony Hancock’s brother, Roger, who had managed the comedian and ran his own agency. Hancock turned her down and suggested she approach Richard Stone instead. Stone, who represented the likes of Benny Hill, Dave Allen, David Jason and Barbara Windsor, was impressed by the tapes Victoria sent and took her on.

  During the 1976 season of That’s Life when Victoria was its resident pianist, it was not a live programme but was recorded about an hour before it was broadcast on Sunday evenings. It was the most popular programme on British television with audiences of around 15 million and offered valuable exposure. Victoria reacted to the pressure by procrastinating.

  Although she had quite a formidable reputation herself, Esther Rantzen was a little unnerved by Victoria. ‘I was quite nervous of her,’ she recalled, ‘you never quite knew what she was thinking with those very sharp eyes on you.’ Rantzen would ring her on a Friday with an idea for a topical song (Victoria never read newspapers so was unable to come up with suggestions o
f her own), but Victoria did not begin writing until midnight on Saturdays, aiming to finish before her 2 a.m. clock alarm sounded. Even when she arrived at the studios with some jokey disposable song about the Sex Discrimination Act the problems were not over. More often than not she would discover her spot directly followed some grim item on plane crashes or mugged pensioners. But despite the conditions, Victoria felt she was in her natural environment. ‘I felt I was in the right place,’ she said. ‘The rest of the time I felt I was rather floundering.’

  The £30 she received for her fortnightly appearances was saved and used by Victoria to buy a mini-van. The money was certainly welcome, but the That’s Life experience was not entirely satisfactory. She had an uneasy relationship with the dominant Rantzen, who regarded the consumer magazine show as very much her baby; the public mistook Victoria for Pam Ayres (who had a similar hairstyle and surfaced on Opportunity Knocks at about the same time Victoria appeared on New Faces); television executives were not interested in offering her anything else; and her television appearances led to problems at Birmingham Labour Exchange.

  One man grew suspicious after seeing her on television on Sunday and then standing at his dole counter for her £11 allowance the next morning. He subjected her to countless interrogations in a back room, an experience which took some of the shine off her television appearances.

  When her contract with That’s Life was not renewed, she was signed up as a support act on Jasper Carrott’s sell-out tour. Once again it was good exposure and allowed her to practise her stage technique, but Victoria was well aware that the public were not turning out to see her. ‘It was supposed to be my big break, but it was terrible. I died on my arse wherever we went and people just sat tapping their watches and thinking “uuuhhh … when’s Jasper coming on?”.’

  In the summer of 1976 Victoria’s career path took a bizarre turn when she visited a friend in Leicester who was a member of the city’s Phoenix Theatre Company. Her arrival coincided with a dramatic crisis: the musical director of the company’s forthcoming production had dropped out at the last minute. Never one to turn down good money, Victoria readily agreed to stand in as a relief pianist.

  The show was Gunslinger, a musical by Richard Crane and Joss Buckley billed as ‘an action-packed celebration of the legendary Wild West’. Wild Willy Fifty Fingers underwent a sex change to become Wild Wilhelmina Fifty Fingers when Victoria was hired. Victoria was not mentioned in any of the reviews. Neither was Alan (Chief Blackmoon) Rickman, nor a 27-year-old overweight former librarian called Geoffrey Durham who played Buffalo Bill.

  It had been three years since Victoria’s last serious relationship and she found herself attracted to another member of the cast. She was therefore most disappointed when Geoffrey informed her that the object of her affection was gay. It was a lie, designed to advance his own romantic aims. The ploy worked. Victoria and Geoffrey had first met in the theatre’s crowded bar where she was intrigued by his appearance: he was wearing tights and sandals. ‘When I discovered that Geoffrey was doing a street show during the day and this was his costume, I didn’t hold it against him. I thought, you’ll do,’ she said. They ended up spending a day together, chainsmoking and talking, and found they had much in common. ‘Bumping into Victoria was the best thing that happened to me in my life,’ said Geoffrey, who was amazed at how shy she was. She in turn said that she could not have met a better person at that time in her life.

  Geoffrey was born in East Molesey, Surrey, on 22 July 1949, the son of a company director for a firm of dry cleaners. He had worked at Kingston public library – something that no doubt endeared him to the book-loving Victoria – but went on to read Spanish at Leeds University. After graduating he taught English in Spain before returning to Leeds where he worked as a stagehand in the local variety theatre. A year of acting in Glasgow followed before he embarked on his true ambition and became a director at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre. His rented room was beneath another member of the company, Julie Walters, who often used to pop in for a chat.

  ‘After being fired, I became a busker, did a mind-reading act and stunts,’ he said. ‘I taught myself to eat fire, quivering in front of a mirror and reading instructions from a book.’ His act also included lying on a bed of nails and a trick involving two members of the audience trying to strangle him with a rope. By his own admission they were not world-beating acts, but they provided quite a good living and experience in grabbing an audience’s attention. Geoffrey’s major creation was The Great Soprendo, an exuberant Torremolinos conjuror who was born at the Everyman in 1973.

  Emotionally and professionally, Geoffrey gave Victoria the encouragement and support she needed. His influence on her career was enormous. He accompanied her on jobs and even ironed her costumes; he got her organised; he told her exactly what part of her fledgling act worked and what did not.

  ‘It was my husband who first said, and made me think about – “Well, what the fuck are you going to do? How are you going to walk on stage? What are you going to wear and say?”,’ said Victoria. ‘Those questions had honestly never occurred to me.’ She adopted his motto: ‘I will sit down and make some money every day’ and, under his influence, she performed a children’s show with magic, Abracawhat?, at the Young Vic. Most importantly, he encouraged Victoria to develop her act by punctuating her songs with comic patter. Thanks largely to Geoffrey she crafted six minutes of workable stand-up material by 1977.

  ‘I was a frustrated extrovert. Stand-up comedy was the perfect situation,’ she said. ‘You’re doing all the talking and everyone else has to shut up and listen.’ The woman who had been overlooked as a child understood that going on stage and making jokes was a way of satiating a craving for approval. By diversifying her act to take in more than just music and song she was taking a leaf out of her father’s book: Stanley Wood always stressed the importance of having more than one string to your bow.

  In an age where there are almost as many female stand-up comedians as there are male it is difficult to appreciate just what a revolutionary step Victoria had taken. Back in the 1970s she was very much out there on her own, the concept of the female stand-up was something that she had to invent herself. London’s Comedy Store, which was the springboard for alternative comedy, did not open until May 1979. If such an establishment had existed earlier, it would have helped Victoria’s career enormously. But there were advantages.

  ‘I think it was fortunate that I managed to sneak in just before the alternative comedy explosion,’ she said. ‘It meant that I was that little bit ahead of the game.’ If she had emerged as part of that bandwagon it would have been a more comfortable ride, but she would have been a participant rather than a pioneer and would not have been as memorable.

  The entertainment milieu which Victoria was up against with her stand-up routine could not have been more unsuitable. The traditional working men’s club circuit, with its crude and sexist male comics, dominated and there was no platform for her brand of cabaret. The clubs were totally alien to what Victoria was trying to do and, to her credit, she refused to compromise her act, her looks or her outfits. ‘I wanted to wear a man’s suit and talk about spare tyres and spots. But they wanted me to put on a skimpy evening frock and stand there,’ she complained. ‘No one understood what I was about. It was difficult for me to establish myself.’

  Initially and ironically, Victoria sat down for her stand-up: she needed the security of the piano stool. Her lack of confidence was also reflected in the material, and she would make jokes about her weight to get easy laughs. There were not many ‘fat’ jokes, but in the absence of a catchphrase it was something that the audience could latch on to and Victoria became the ‘funny fat bird’.

  ‘I really don’t think I was very good at first,’ she said. ‘But if it’s comedy you’re interested in you just have to wait, because you’re not going to be good as a child. You can’t be. It’s a process you have to go through.’

  A series of nightmare engagements f
ollowed where Victoria found herself performing to drunken squaddies in Catterick, trying to earn laughs from an Irish rifle-shooting team and attempting to entertain at student balls where she went down so badly she felt embarrassed about collecting her fee. Applause was rarely heard; there was either silence, people carrying on their own conversations, or censorious statements like ‘Well, I don’t admire her dress sense.’

  She admits she died in those early performances. Audiences expected blue material, not witty ditties and a bit of patter. It was only ego and stubborness that kept her going.

  ‘I didn’t think about the obstacles,’ she said. ‘You don’t when you’re driven. You just go for it blindly.’

  5

  VICTORIA RETURNED TO her native North in 1977. Geoffrey’s first major job after quitting acting in favour of performing as The Great Soprendo was in the Silver Jubilee Victorian Music Hall staged at Morecambe’s Central Pier by the Lancaster-based Duke’s Theatre. Victoria joined him in the Lancashire seaside resort where Alan Bennett was conceived and which was the birthplace of Thora Hird and Eric Morecambe.

  The thrice-weekly variety show commenced on 20 June and The Visitor described The Great Soprendo, with his high-pitched giggle and ‘Olé Torremolinos’ catchphrase as one of the highlights of the show. Lill Roughley as a bawdy Britannia also attracted praise and caught Victoria’s eye: years later she would become a member of the Victoria Wood ‘repertory company’.

  When the show ended on 3 September Victoria and Geoffrey decided to remain in Morecambe. The decision was largely Victoria’s – she had enjoyed an Alan Bennett television play (Sunset Across the Bay) set in the town and thought it would be fun to live there. A move to London, which offered better work opportunities, would have been the logical thing to do but Victoria preferred to recreate the isolation that she had known all her life.