Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  Nuns were once again used for comic effect, and ‘Tupperware’, ‘raffia’ ‘tumble dryer’ and ‘barmy’, which would, like coconut matting, become almost talismanic to Victoria, all got a mention. But the accusation most levelled at Victoria was that she was overly reliant on high street/brand names, and these were already heavily evident in Good Fun.

  The play is rooted in some of Victoria’s own experiences, albeit to a lesser extent than Talent. The locale, the annexe of an arts centre in North West England, is described as being on the top floor of an old neglected building such as a church hall, school, or Conservative Club – environments that Victoria experienced through The Swish of the Curtain, the Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop and Bury Military Band.

  Passing mention is made to Radcliffe (part of Bury), That’s Life and ‘Christine Palmer’, a name reminiscent of Chrissie Poulter who was on Victoria’s university course and went into community theatre. In fact, Victoria’s university tutor, Gerry McCarthy, believed Chrissie was the inspiration for the play.

  Victoria freely admitted to being obsessed about her school days and this seems to have seeped into Good Fun. Gail Melling was her victim at Bury Grammar and a schoolmate character called Gail is victimised in the play. Gail Melling was extremely thin at school and the last Victoria knew of her was that she was going on to teacher training college. In Good Fun Victoria specifies Gail (who name-drops nicknames and surnames of Victoria’s Bury Grammar contemporaries) is 8st 10, a teacher and has a dreary Lancashire accent. For good measure she makes Gail dull, disapproving and humourless.

  In spite of the internal difficulties, the critics gave Good Fun a generally favourable reaction, though not as effusive as that for Talent. More than one observed how plot seemed to have been sacrificed for a string of unsubtle jokes. The unrelenting unflattering portraits of men and the play’s overlong, sometimes rambling, nature was also commented upon, and although Annabel Leventon, Noreen Kershaw, Julie Walters and Charles McKeown all drew praise, Tim Brown of the Morning Telegraph remarked: ‘Miss Wood is clearly stretched keeping up with the rest of the cast.’

  Before the modified version of Good Fun was staged, two events occurred that helped restore Victoria’s confidence. Granada commissioned a pilot sketch show from her (‘just sketches and songs – no big deal really,’ she remarked with her customary self-deprecation), and she won the Pye Colour Television Award for Most Promising Writer. The award, which she received on her 27th birthday, was made in association with the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain which gave Victoria a certain kudos. The £300 prize money was also welcome, but the fact that she was being rewarded for Talent, a play written two years previously, when her latest offering had failed to make it into London, gave a degree of negativity to her success. Mindful of this she remarked: ‘Winning awards can be a bit of a handicap. It flashes your name around but people expect you to do something fantastic next time.’ However, the praise (Talent also won an award at the Film and Television Festival of New York) reactivated her ambition and she began talking about making a film if the funding could be found.

  Nearly A Happy Ending, the sequel to Talent, was broadcast on 1 June 1980. ‘My real point is to show that people don’t really know what they want,’ said Victoria of her second Granada television play. It begins with a depressed Julie, whose boyfriend has been killed in a car crash and whose mother is back in a psychiatric hospital, suffering from depression. She has been spending her days watching Playschool and drinking coffee out of a vase. In comparison Maureen’s life is on an upswing; she has passed her driving test and lost weight. The girls plan a night out but first Julie accompanies Maureen to the slimming club. In the car Maureen reveals to Julie how she had always planned to lose her virginity once she reached target weight. Her only criterion is the man who obliges her does not have tattoos. The car breaks down but randy businessmen Tim (Freddie Fletcher) and Ken (Mike Kelly) come to the rescue and invite them to their annual conference/convention at a nearby hotel.

  At the bar the girls hit it off with the barman (Christopher Godwin). Tellingly, the first sympathetic male character to be created by Victoria was emasculated by his homosexuality. Later Julie fixes Maureen up with a character called Tony (Paul Seed). This prompts a genuinely moving and rhapsodic hymn from Maureen, revealing a lifetime of yearning and a long-awaited release from it. In his room Tony is taken aback by Maureen’s stark and clinical request for sex. Meanwhile, Julie has formed a rapport with comedian Les Dickey (Peter Martin) and is seriously considering forming a double act with him.

  Maureen returns, her virginity still intact. Julie tells her sex is over-rated, but goes ahead and plans a rendezvous with Tony for herself anyway. Julie arranges for Tony to drive her home in Maureen’s car and fixes a taxi for Maureen. When Maureen is understandably upset at Julie’s about-face concerning men, Julie justifies herself in song. At 26 she is already resigned to physical decline and as all men are the same anyway, she might as well take what’s on offer. Such a defeatist attitude is a sad contrast to her final song in Talent, where she fought against her likely fate and the audience was left with the feeling that her self-awareness would take her further in life. Now she is going to settle for cigarettes and alcohol. The song becomes a duet and cleverly develops into an anthem of happy failure with both girls admitting they have not got a clue. To them, life is the soggy bottom sheet, a canteen dinner, a shopping list of things they can’t afford. The girls are united in a belief that even if they do not go far or find their star they are nearly happy where they are.

  The play allowed Victoria to target one of her pet hates: the slimming industry. The ritual of the weigh-in is shown in all its ridiculous tragedy with polite applause for those who are on target and rebukes for those who have failed. One character, Evelyn (Pat Roe), desperately assures guru Madge (Rosemary Williams) that ‘the cellophane [wrapped round the stomach to achieve weight loss through sweating] didn’t come off until Wednesday afternoon’. But it is not just weight that is disapproved of; on seeing Julie’s rounded shoulders, Madge expresses a desire to get her on the floor with a broom handle one Tuesday evening.

  Victoria highlighted the underlying deceit of the slimming industry – its success is based on peoples’ failure – with the song ‘Don’t Get Cocky Baby’. With a chorus that is a musical pastiche of ‘Keep Young And Beautiful’, the song gives cautionary tales of ‘successful’ dieters, with the gloating refrain ‘Don’t get cocky baby you’re going to be back next month’. Victoria had addressed the dangers of slimming in her New Faces’ song, when Lorraine says: ‘I might fade away and be just a veil and a pile of bones.’ In ‘Don’t Get Cocky Baby’ she again alluded to anorexia with the mention of Fiona who ‘slimmed herself to bones and specs’.

  So strong was Victoria’s hatred of the industry that she likened it to drug dealing, making money by creating neurosis and feeding off people’s emotional reasons for overeating. She emphasised how dieting was not the solution to life’s problems in Maureen’s song ‘I Might As Well Be Fat’. In fact, the most significant moment of the play comes when the spurned Maureen realises the phrases she has adopted from her parents and Madge, and on which she anchors her life, are actually empty and meaningless. When the barman asks her what she means by ‘A stick of celery a day keeps the elasticated trousers away’ she pauses, considers it and eventually replies ‘I don’t know’. In doing so she signifies her development and independence.

  Victoria also used the play to pour scorn on the sexist attitudes she herself experienced in her career. Tony tells Julie: ‘Comediennes are always a bit ugly and that’s why they’re comediennes. I’ve met a few, they’re very hard ladies.’ Maureen tells Julie that she can’t stand up and tell jokes for the simple fact that ‘Girls don’t.’

  Victoria’s sharpened command of language yielded some unique and acute descriptions (Julie’s long-suffering Auntie Kathleen is said to have a bum resembling frozen pastry that’s been walked on by someone wearing sti
lettos, and Maureen says she was so fat she looked like she’d been badly sprayed with insulating plastic foam).

  Victoria also developed the use of extraneous fine detail for humorous effect: Julie says the digital clock she threw at her mother didn’t break but stayed on 15.42. Likewise, the double entendre of a Marks & Spencer’s spotted dick is eclipsed by the comical specification that it was an individual spotted dick.

  This type of detail was also applied to specific dates, a technique first used in Good Fun where Betty says her next-door neighbour has disliked them since 5 November 1967, when the Catherine wheel flew off the horse chestnut. It is also a significant date for Nearly A Happy Ending as Les reveals his wife has had a continuous headache since Bonfire Night 1947.

  Victoria’s habit of relating the unrelated was heard in Good Fun when Lynne asks: ‘How can I have a baby? I’ve never even had a goldfish’. Here it is used again when, on being asked if she’s ever had a push start before, Julie replies that she’s never even had Irish coffee.

  Name-dropping, textiles/garments, sexual/gynaecological references, afflictions and high street/brand names all got their customary mention. Nuns got yet another outing, with Julie saying that they have fun by playing billiards. Suburban lust is also revisited, with Good Fun’s ‘nude monopoly’ here becoming ‘strip tiddlywinks’. The tumble dryer once again merits a mention and the play is also littered with Margarets, Pams, Renees and Pats – names that would appear regularly in Victoria’s ‘register’.

  The practice of using an older character for an added perspective that was first used in Talent and followed in Good Fun, is continued here with the brief appearance of the toilet attendant played by Jill Summers who, like Bill Waddington before her, would go on to become a Coronation Street regular.

  As always there were autobiographical elements present, nowhere more so than in Maureen’s address, Castle Hill Road, the Wood family home. The singers at the conference are named Silver Sensation; the group Sweet Sensation appeared on New Faces in the same year as Victoria. And Victoria would have known all about the plight of comedian Les, booked to perform for a businessmen’s convention.

  The play ends with Julie being bored to death by Tony and Maureen tucking into a box of Black Magic. It was the last time the public would see Maureen and Julie. Granada had tried to persuade Victoria to write another play about them, or possibly a series, but she knew she had exhausted the characters and sensibly decided to close the book on them.

  Victoria’s songs were always a bone of contention for critics. For Nearly A Happy Ending, The Times’ Michael Ratcliffe admired her ‘exceptionally fluent and communicative’ lyrics, but complained of the ‘tuneless and self-effacing jingles’ which accompanied them. The Daily Mail’s Herbert Kretzmer, on the other hand, thought the lyrics ‘sometimes crashingly clumsy’. Ratcliffe likened Victoria to a sea lion on Blackpool prom, Kretzmer said she was stuck in a ‘self-admiring rut’ and even Clive James, who would later become a champion of Victoria as a performer and a person, said she looked like Orson Welles and her jokes fell into shape as naturally as her figure didn’t. The coup de grâce came from the Sunday Times’ Russell Davies, who was of the opinion that without Julie Walters, Victoria ‘might not get away with it’.

  There was little time to dwell on such reactions because later that same month the new, improved version of Good Fun, this time directed by Peter James, was staged, again at Sheffield. Sharper and pacier, James cut out Leland’s gimmicky staging – the set no longer glowed and the band were in the orchestra pit as opposed to zooming in and out from the back wall – and encouraged a more naturalistic approach to the roles by the three replacement actors.

  Annabel Leventon was not asked to reprise the role of Liz, which went to ex Liver Bird Polly James. Replacing Julie Walters was Meg Johnson, who made the mistake of attempting to play the cartoonish Betty as a realistic person. Sam Kelly took over as Frank.

  Victoria’s contribution was to prune the play of some of its wordiness, graft on some Plot and add two new songs. As with Talent, the play’s songs enabled Victoria to give a greater insight into the characters than dialogue ever could. This is particularly so with three numbers given to Liz. ‘Liz’s Song’ opens the play. Through it she seeks to establish the fact that she is ‘nice’, but there is a seam of discontentment running through it, realised by some imaginative similes. ‘I’ll Do Anything’ shows her willingness to sacrifice her ego in order to have Mike. She is comically prepared to learn enamelling, buy lavatory paper in bulk, diet, live in Tring and wear Littlewoods’ blouses. Victoria’s obvious antipathy to such a lifestyle would soften in future years, the scorn turning into a more light-hearted mockery.

  Liz’s final song, and the song that ends the play, is the extremely caustic ‘Good Fun’. We learn her niceness stemmed not from compassion, but from poor self-image. She surrounded herself with the sick and socially deprived to make herself look and feel better. She has always envied Elsie for breaking her rules about things an ugly girl should do. Selfishness is her new resolve – she does not care who has lost as long as she can win.

  Other songs of note were ‘Handicrafts’, an affectionate swipe at arts, crafts and evening classes, ‘Bloody Clowns’, a song about disillusionment, and ‘I’ve Had It Up To Here’. This is a litany of complaints about men who see women as bits of gynaecology and leave them cold and wet. It also heralded a preoccupation which would surface throughout Victoria’s career: disillusionment and dissatisfaction with sex. As she later explained: ‘I do think there are a lot of people out there who don’t like sex very much so that’s why it makes a good comic target.’

  Despite the changes, Good Fun remained unsatisfactory and, as the Doncaster Evening Post’s Stephen McClarence pointed out, attempting to turn it into a Well-Made Play was comparable to trying to turn Coronation Street into King Lear.

  7

  GOOD FUN WAS not good enough to earn Victoria a place on the London stage; for that she turned to stand-up. When it opened at the King’s Head in September, the punningly titled Funny Turns was presented as a new revue by Victoria and Geoffrey. In reality it was largely a rehash of the revue they had been touring on and off since 1977, with material from Tickling My Ivories and songs from Victoria’s back catalogue.

  Geoffrey went onstage first and the reaction he got from the critics as The Great Soprendo debunks the popular assumption that he rode on the back of Victoria’s success. It took a particular skill to bedazzle jaded metropolitans with traditional tricks and revive the art of magic into dynamic entertainment. The character of Soprendo (‘I am very big in The Canaries’), with his waxed moustache and Liberace shirts, gave Geoffrey’s technical conjuring talent an extra edge. He peppered the act with such gems as ‘You have been a wonderful audience, everything I have done, you have given me the clap’, which were eagerly lapped up.

  Included in Victoria’s routine was ‘Fourteen Again’ from Talent and ‘Love Song’ from In At The Death. Another old song, ‘Music and Movement’, which is a nostalgic look at a 1950s childhood through the eyes of a disgruntled and indignant schoolboy, was already two years old, having first been aired on a radio show in Manchester. Her decision to use Good Fun’s ‘I’ve Had It Up To Here’ led some of the uninitiated to assume it was a feminist anthem written from the heart, rather than for a character. It was modified slightly for Funny Turns. The original had the lyrics:

  I’ve had it up to here with blokes

  And all their stupid dirty jokes

  About poofs and wogs and nigs and

  Buying pokes in pigs and

  Here’s a funny one about John Noakes.

  But for the Funny Turns version the last three lines borrowed from the song ‘Make A Joke’:

  It’s not a lot of fun

  To hear the one about the nun,

  the marrow, the banana and John Noakes

  which, besides removing the racist and homophobic elements, made sense of the ‘dirty jokes’ aspect o
f the lyric.

  Taking the supermarket counter, suburbia and the surgical ward as the landscapes for her routine, Victoria expounded a dissatisfaction and disinterest in sex and a scathing opinion of Morecambe. New was the character monologue, a device inherited from Joyce Grenfell that remained a staple of Victoria’s stage work. Her first creation was a condescending Women’s Institute president outlining events for the coming season, such as Mr Ripley’s talk ‘Life has a lot to offer even if you’ve got no bowels’.

  For once, the press laid off Victoria’s appearance, apart from Eric Shorter in the Daily Telegraph who described her as ‘a plucky, buxom singing blonde from Lancashire’. Far more perceptive was The Times’ Irving Wardle, who said she delivered her words ‘as if serving a pound of crumbly Lancashire cheese across the counter of a corner shop’. He described her as ‘a voice from the social junk heap: inspired by supermarket queues, slimming aids, Women’s Institute meetings, handicraft hobbies and the inexhaustible heap of modern trash with which we while away the time.’

  Funny Turns may have originally been regarded as an hors d’oeuvre to the King’s Head production of Good Fun (featuring a cast independent of Victoria), but it turned out to be the main course. The critics were even less impressed with the new production than the Sheffield productions, and the Guardian’s Nicholas de Jongh branded it a ‘tiny disaster in which Miss Wood’s marks of individuality have coarsened into repetitive sequences of sniggering knockabout’. The troubles the play had caused did not prevent Victoria from naming her production company after it. Good Fun, which she set up in 1982, had herself as director and Geoffrey as co-director and secretary.

  After Funny Turns was over Geoffrey momentarily had the spotlight solely on him when he appeared as Abanazar in the Crucible’s pantomime of Aladdin. He spoke to Victoria on the phone every day and she sent him a synopsis of each Coronation Street episode he had missed. They did not meet up until the afternoon of Christmas Eve when Victoria went to see the matinée. Afterwards she drove them to a York hotel where Geoffrey was booked for a Christmas Day cabaret; money came before pleasure. The festivities were short-lived and on Boxing Day Victoria dropped him back at Sheffield while she returned to Morecambe to continue work on the Granada play. Her pilot sketch show was in the can and Granada presumably liked what they saw because the next day they commissioned an entire series.