They rented a first-floor flat at 12 Oxford Street for £13 a week and set about stamping their identities on their first real home together. The coconut welcome mat and the bean bags added a touch of domesticity, but it was the five wall-to-wall shelves crammed with Victoria’s paperback collection which dominated. Equally as important to her was her upright piano (beneath a photograph of Bob Hope) and the blue painted table which served as her work desk.
The flat itself formed part of a terrace that overlooked the bus station and was only a few minutes away from the seafront. The cobbled back alley was the closest Victoria ever came to stereotypical Northern living.
They quickly established a work pattern which, although productive, was not conducive to a healthy relationship and caused many arguments. While Geoffrey crashed and Olé’d his way through daytime rehearsals of his act, Victoria worked through the night. Their next-door neighbours, who ran a boarding house, were far from happy with the arrangements. ‘There were [sic] piano going at all hours,’ said Harry Lambert.
Blue is supposedly a calming influence, but the colour scheme of Victoria and Geoffrey’s flat did not have the desired effect and once again the Lamberts suffered. ‘They certainly had their set-tos and fallings-out,’ recalled Lambert. Volcanic shouting matches could be triggered by something as simple as Geoffrey spilling shoe dye on the carpet. The rows were glossed over in later life by Victoria who spoke lovingly of how she and Geoffrey struggled together, taking each other’s bookings and buying each other’s stamps. ‘There were times when I couldn’t tell you where I stopped and he started,’ she said.
Their frequent separations made life more peaceful for the Lamberts. Geoffrey was getting more and more bookings at hotels, conferences and parties, and demand for Victoria was slowly growing. She did a short three-night stint at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London with the Birmingham comedian John Dowie and, perhaps, picked up a few ideas from him for her own act. Dowie, after all, was credited with establishing the observational humour which became such an important part of alternative comedy. The Sunday Times preview of the show described Victoria as ‘a rose with several thorns’.
Her forays to the capital continued when she did a musical comedy slot on Radio 4’s Start The Week, an experience she loathed. Producer Dan Gardhouse remembered her as being so shy that she would arrive at the studio early, record her song and leave before the other guests arrived. But the reason for Victoria’s hit-and-run approach was more complicated than mere timidity.
‘I just felt completely out of place,’ she explained. ‘I found the atmosphere unwelcoming. I was new to it all, so it was difficult to relax and fit in. I thought, everybody knows more than me, and most of them are middle-aged men; I don’t know how to communicate with them … I was only asked once to sit around the table with other guests. And they took my microphone away because I couldn’t think of anything to say. Richard Baker asked something like, “have you ever felt alienated?”, and it got to me. I said, “Well, I feel alienated now”, and he moved on. He didn’t want to talk about that.’
In At The Death was a revue that saw the birth of the career Victoria had yearned for. The production ran at London’s Bush Theatre from 13 July to 6 August 1978 and was the most significant turning point in her professional life.
Director Dusty Hughes had been impressed by Victoria’s songwriting skills when he saw one of her ICA shows, and he invited her to write and perform songs for the Alternative Theatre Company’s sketch show about mortality. Victoria was initially reluctant. She had grown accustomed to the autonomy of her solo shows. To her, three weeks at the Bush was like committing to do a decade of The Mousetrap, and being just one of the six-strong writing team did not suit her individualistic approach to work. She only decided to sign up after attending a cast meeting at writer Snoo Wilson’s house. Alison Fiske, Godfrey Jackman, Philip Jackson and Clive Merrison all made a positive impression, but it was the ‘jolly’ girl who attracted Victoria’s attention.
Ever since the unsuccessful audition at Manchester Polytechnic, Victoria had often wondered what had become of the amusing girl with the tiny eyes who had shown her around. She discovered the answer one lunchtime when Julie Walters, the sixth cast member, began talking about how she had studied at the polytechnic. ‘Suddenly the face from the past, and the face in front of me, blended into one,’ said Victoria.
The two girls hit it off immediately and spent their lunchtimes giggling and gossiping over liver and peas in a Shepherd’s Bush cafe. Besides a shared sense of humour they were also connected by their uncomfortable upbringings. Like Victoria, Walters, who by that time had had a West End hit with Funny Peculiar, was the baby of her family and had also been overshadowed by her older siblings. Her mother, too, was a difficult woman of Irish descent and Julie’s education was every bit as unhappy as Victoria’s. ‘I’ve always been a nervous girl,’ said Walters. ‘It goes back to the sense of inadequacy I felt at school. I grew up thinking I wasn’t good enough.’
The topicality of In At The Death made the revue a perfect vehicle for That’s Life veteran Victoria. She was the major contributor, her enthusiasm fed by having an outlet for untapped creative energy on the professional stage. Work began on 4 June when the writers were asked to write their impressions of the week as seen through the newspapers. While Ken Campbell sought inspiration in the obscurity of the Malaysian New Straits Times, and Nigel Baldwin scoured the pages of the Holyhead and Anglesey Chronicle, Victoria remained strictly national and predominantly tabloid. Accessibility was all.
Of the six items in the first half of the revue, four were written by Victoria. There was a touching requiem for Guy the Gorilla, followed by ‘Battered Wives’, a song inspired by a story in the Sun about domestic violence. A third song, ‘Road Blocks’, based on the death of a teenage motorcyclist killed in a police chase through Surrey, was sung by Walters. ‘Love Song’, performed by Godfrey Jackman, is of particular interest since it is an example of Victoria opting for sentimentality over grim reality. Its origins lay in a Southwark man’s attempt to allow his dying, hospitalised wife to spend her final days at home. The couple in Victoria’s song were portrayed as sweethearts, with the husband reminiscing happily about their early life together. There was the embarrassment on the honeymoon night, a war-time trip to the seaside, and his habit of making her breakfast. He takes a box of chocolates to her in hospital and discovers she has died. He collects her wedding ring and false teeth.
For the second half of the revue Victoria supplied ‘Dear Mum’, in which Alison Fiske played a middle-class woman who could not be bothered visiting her elderly mother in a nursing home. There was also ‘Abortion’, a haunting song about a girl lying in a mental hospital thinking about her aborted baby.
The critics were impressed with Victoria. The Daily Telegraph said her songs ‘successfully blend a gallows humour with an unexpected touch of humanity’ and the West London Observer said they made the poetry of Pam Ayres seem like the mutterings of a village idiot by comparison. Time Out’s Ros Franey wrote: ‘Victoria Wood’s musical epigrams brilliantly embroider the action.’
By luck, Victoria was cast in Ron Hutchinson’s ‘Compensation’ and Dusty Hughes’s ‘Ghouls’, two of the more understandable sketches of the revue. In the former she was cast as the gleefully malignant schoolboy, Munty. Since the piece was about a Belfast family’s compensation scam, accents were called for. Victoria could not manage one so Munty was made a deaf mute. Like ‘Compensation’, ‘Ghouls’ involved the entire cast and Victoria played Michelle, one of a group of sightseers who treated disasters as a chance for a trip out. It was Hughes’s response to the thousands who turned out for the Staines air crash.
Victoria almost discovered her true talent by accident. The revue was too short, and because she could not find any more deaths to write songs about, she tentatively asked Hughes if she could pen a comedy sketch instead. He agreed and Victoria wrote ‘Sex’. During the writing process she disc
overed her true voice. ‘It was the first thing I’d written with proper jokes and I thought, “aha”,’ she said. ‘I’d suddenly found something I could do. It was a blinding flash, like learning a new language.’ She had locked into her unique brand of comedy and it felt wonderful. From that moment on she knew she had connected with something that was going to make it all work.
‘Sex’ was inspired by a Daily Express report about an Anne-Marie Sykes of Cheshire, who was determined to have a test-tube baby despite medical experts warning of the dangers of malformed embryos – not the most promising material from which to wring comedy. Victoria set it in a Manchester library with Walters as the panicky teenage girl who thinks she might be pregnant. She seeks family planning advice from Victoria’s prudish librarian and then a concerned middle-class lady (Alison Fiske), searching the shelves for a copy of Vegetarianism And The One Parent Family, joins in the discussion. She asks the bewildered Walters what stage she is at in the menstrual cycle. ‘Taurus,’ she replies. It transpired that the girl had never actually had sex.
For the critics and audience who had sat with sympathetic embarrassment through such spectacles as Clive Merrison cavorting and mouthing jungle noises; an almost unbearable hot gospel duet about a Californian evangelist’s claim that witches were out to conquer the world, and a sketch that utilised Gothic sounds and an overhead projector to tell the tale of a woman journeying underground in pursuit of her dead husband, ‘Sex’ was a welcome relief.
Irving Wardle in The Times rated Victoria as a ‘great discovery’ who got more poetry out of Manchester speech than he had heard for years. ‘Had she coincided with the satire boom,’ he wrote, ‘Miss Wood would have walked away with The Frost Programme.’ The West London Observer described ‘Sex’ as ‘15 minutes of sheer delight’ and recognised the importance of culture clash in the humour, something that would become a central strand of Victoria’s later work.
The critics were unanimous that all the most poignant and amusing moments of the revue were supplied by Victoria, be she acting, singing, playing the guitar or sitting at the piano. The Financial Times said she was a ‘delightful discovery’ and Francis King in the Sunday Telegraph predicted much more would be heard of her.
Encouraging though the reviews were, even some of the more perceptive critics felt compelled to allude to Victoria’s size. The New Statesman’s Benedict Nightingale felt that with time she might have a future as a comic dramatist, but then he went on to describe how she ‘plumply accompanies’ and ‘trundles out from behind her piano’. And Plays and Players’ Steve Grant, after describing her as a superb performer who dominated the production, tainted the praise with the warning: ‘Watch the coyness, Victoria. Everyone loves a fat girl but inside you there’s a good deal more.’ He summed her up as a ‘coy, tubby, mischievous mixture of Blossom Dearie, Randy Newman and Pam Ayres’.
But the combination of her songs, ‘Sex’ and her fortunate placing in other people’s sketches ensured Victoria emerged as the one true talent of an otherwise mediocre revue. The critics were not the only ones impressed by her abilities. David Leland, then a director at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, was so taken with the sketch and her songs that he invited Victoria and Ron Hutchinson to collaborate on a play for the Crucible’s 1978 New Play Season.
Leland suggested they base their play on the strippers who worked in the pub beneath the Bush Theatre. Victoria had never thought of writing a play before so the seedy setting was almost immaterial to her: the important thing was she had been commissioned to write a full-length work for the theatre. So she and Hutchinson dutifully spent an evening watching the strip show as part of their research. The act consisted of a large girl walking out of the ladies’ lavatory and removing her clothes before walking back into the lavatory. Typically it was not the display of flesh that caught Victoria’s eye, but the poignancy in the detail. She noticed that the girl kept her boots on throughout because the floor was filthy.
When Hutchinson decided he was too busy to work on the play, Leland took a gamble and asked Victoria to write it herself. She was not keen on visiting more strip clubs and instead came up with her own idea for a play. Following the age-old maxim, she wrote about what she knew and spent all night condensing her own experiences and ideas into a half-page outline, which she posted through Leland’s letter box at six o’clock the next morning. The urgency was warranted because the Crucible had to have its publicity posters that week. Leland liked what he read and the play was one of six that would be premiered that season.
Rather audaciously, Victoria decided to name her play Talent. Its subject matter – the backstage goings-on at a talent show – made it an obvious title, but there was also a risk: if it failed then its name would haunt her and the critics would have a field day.
She returned to Morecambe to write Talent with a deadline of six weeks. Inspired, she completed it in just three. ‘I found when I started writing that I had been fed in all sorts of ways I was not even aware,’ she said. ‘People were coming out of my pen that I had not ever been aware of hearing but all those voices and all those people, they had soaked into me somehow.’
Geoffrey typed the script out for her, an example of their improved relationship. Professionally, too, they were growing stronger, partly through their decision to take bookings together – Geoffrey with his magic, and Victoria with her songs and stand-up. In fact one of the advantages of Victoria accepting the Crucible job was that she and Geoffrey could perform their own acts after the play.
Talent was set backstage at a nightclub where Julie nervously prepares for a talent show assisted by her dour, literal-minded fat friend, Maureen. Hope turns to disillusionment as Julie realises the contest is rigged, and to spare herself from humiliation she leaves the club rather than take her turn in the spotlight.
Along the way we are introduced to the World of Victoria Wood for the first time. It is a place where people refrain from carrying alarm clocks for fear of being mistaken for bomb scares; where a gynaecological operation prohibits the wearing of stretch-pants and the moving of spin driers; where a face pack could double as a tasty meal; where having 280 KitKats is a status symbol; where a mother lives on Consulate and Smoky Bacon crisps; where nervous breakdowns are only discussed on Boxing Day; and where too much tomato soup comes before a loss of faith as a reason for a disenchanted nun to leave a convent.
Talent’s inhabitants speak with a quasi-Ortonese precision (Maureen says a furniture store is having ‘startling reductions on Formica kitchen units’). Added to this are Alan Bennett-style overtones and amusingly incongruous images (Sacha Distel playing Bingo in Morecambe; Pam Ayres stripping off her corset and reciting a poem about hedgehogs), which delight and surprise.
It is tempting to see Talent as an exploration of the relationship between attractive gutsy girls and fat plain ones. Victoria herself was fascinated by the dynamic and keen to elaborate on how pretty girls use their mousy friends. She once stated that Talent was simply ‘The Story of the Fat One and the Thin One’ and it is true that there are a few disparaging references to Maureen’s weight in the play – the arena in which judgement takes place is, after all, a nightclub called Bunter’s. But Talent can better be seen as a metaphor for being trapped in an unsatisfactory situation – something Victoria (who was too independent to be anyone’s fat adjunct) knew all about.
Julie is trapped by her circumstances. She is engaged to the unreliable Dave and stuck in a dreary job. She desperately clings to her showbusiness illusions as a means of escape, but the odds of winning the talent contest or a passport to the life she desires are against her.
Victoria cleverly invested the character with self-awareness, most notably demonstrated in the songs ‘Fourteen Again’ and ‘Bored With This’. In the former, Julie looks back longingly to her schooldays when she was funny, famous and the centre of attention. She admits she had no idea then that she would one day wake up feeling bored. In ‘Bored With This’ she anticipates the future and, in a
frenzy of frustration, describes with venom the likely fate that awaits: the marriage; the honeymoon; the keep-fit classes; the baby; the having the boss to dinner; the flirting with the milkman; the gin in the afternoon; the Valium. ‘Bored With This’ was thematically similar to Victoria’s New Faces’ song, ‘Lorraine’, and even shares the detail of the stainless steel wedding present. It was also an early example of her tendency to recycle her own material (a few years later ‘Fourteen Again’ would, like ‘Love Song’ from In At The Death, be incorporated into her stage act).
Maureen, too, is trapped, but in her case she is held prisoner by her weight and her parents. Her fatness and her denial of it makes her defensive and sour. In depicting Maureen’s relationship with her parents Victoria swings to the other extreme of her own family experience. Maureen’s suffocating relationship with her appalling mother and father – she quotes them like others would quote their boyfriends and spends her evenings playing board games with them – was every bit as damaging as Helen and Stanley Wood’s disinterest in the young Victoria.
The theme of being trapped is underlined by Talent’s claustrophobic setting. Apart from a brief exchange in a corridor, the entire play takes place in a small and cramped backstage room. Metaphorically speaking it is also dramatic shorthand for Maureen and Julie’s inability to take centre stage in Life. To a certain extent the two girls represented different aspects of Victoria’s own personality: the ambitious and dedicated Julie and the sullen and ill-fitting Maureen. Victoria returned to this technique and refined her approach 16 years later with her screenplay Pat and Margaret.
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