While Victoria maintained her usual practice of name-dropping (Eva Braun, Phyllis Calvert, Maurice Chevalier, Alma Cogan, Lord Delfont, Janet Ellis, Fergie, George Formby, Princess Margaret and Wincey Willis), the recurrent character names of Pam, Pat and Renee, and afflictions (gyppy kidney, diabetes, whitlows, blindness, athlete’s foot and haemorrhoids), she was unusually sparing with high street/brand names.
Whereas 1988 saw Julie Walters score a much-needed cinematic success with Buster, Victoria’s chance to make a film was frustratingly snatched away. She had been approached to adapt Jill Tweedie’s 1986 comic novel, Internal Affairs, for the screen. Paul Hogan was set to play the Adonis-like photographer, Kelly, with Victoria herself co-starring in the film. She was cast to play Charlotte Macanally, ‘a large, white mound’ of a woman who lives in Kentish Town. The luckless 37-year-old is in a floundering marriage and works at a fertility counselling clinic in Clerkenwell, but has an aversion to the smell of thawing semen. She finds herself going in an advisory role to a South-East Asian island. There, she meets freelance photographer Kelly, who helps her become self-assured and carefree, before, ironically, returning home pregnant.
It was the sort of vehicle that could have enabled Victoria to make the transition to international stardom, but the project crumbled when Hogan’s salary demands became too high.
International success would most likely have meant leaving Silverdale. At that time Victoria was still trying to justify living in rural isolation on practical grounds. ‘I think it’s nice to be where everyone else isn’t,’ she said. ‘I do like to keep away from other comics. I don’t want to end up doing the same as everybody else and also I can get a lot more work done if I’m living in a place where there’s not people ringing up and knocking on the door every two minutes.’
In fact Victoria and Geoffrey did move from Stankelt Road, but only five minutes away to the other side of the village. Cove Lea was tucked away in the cul-de-sac of Cove Road. The house had originally been several eighteenth-century cottages, which accounted for its higgedly piggedly interior. It boasted six bedrooms and two open fireplaces. It had its own orchard on the other side of the road and beyond the fruit trees and daffodils lay buttercup meadows. The huge rear garden was park-like in proportion, and the property had a barbed-wire protected perimeter path affording spectacular views over the bay.
Despite feeling more comfortable in her isolation, Victoria was roped in to take part in the first studio-based Comic Relief night on BBC1 in February 1988. She and Walters performed a short Margery and Joan sketch in which they demonstrated how to turn a leather jacket into a bookmark. The event raised more than £13 million, and in the coming years Victoria’s involvement would grow stronger.
For the third year running she picked up a BAFTA award, this time the Best Light Entertainment Programme for the As Seen On TV Special. She was also named BBC TV Personality of the Year by the Variety Club of Great Britain. Her droll sense of humour caused those attending the Hilton Hotel ceremony to erupt with laughter when she reminded them just how irritating it was to be stuck behind a Variety Club coach on the motorway.
With her career successfully established, Victoria’s mind turned to motherhood. The pregnancies of Julie Walters and other friends helped encourage her and Geoffrey to try for a family of their own. ‘I feel like a clock is ticking away and that time is running out,’ she explained. After 20 years of ‘doing exactly what I’d wanted’ Victoria had a yearning to be responsible for somebody else. ‘I had to make sure I had done what I wanted to do in my career just in case having a baby meant I couldn’t carry on working,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I would have handled it so well any earlier. You just know in yourself what would be a good time for you.’
She did not want to be newly pregnant on the April leg of the tour which she had resurrected from 1987, nor did she want to be too pregnant. Conceiving the baby was arranged with a military precision that owed more to efficiency than romance. It meant Victoria had to fly back from Dublin and make a midnight drive from Heathrow to rendezvous with Geoffrey, who had been touring the country as The Great Soprendo.
London Weekend Television’s Audience With … shows were extremely pressurised occasions for the honoured celebrity, yet Victoria was six months pregnant when she stood before her peers in August 1988. Amazingly, she gave a 90-minute performance of her stage show without a single fluff or recording break. After weeks of touring the show she was well prepared, the material was primed and all she had to do was deliver it.
‘It was very nerve-wracking because I could see their faces all lit up, with the cameras on them,’ she recalled. ‘They were a very friendly audience but not a normal one, so I was trying to play to the normal audience behind them and to ignore the celebrities. Thank God they put Julie in the front row, so I could see a friendly face.’ She described it as a hellish experience:
Not only are they who they are but they’re all lit up so you can see them, whereas in the theatre you can’t see anything except the exit signs. You’re trying to concentrate, but when you look out, you can see all the horrible little blank faces staring back at you and you don’t know what to expect. And, on top of that, they’re all hyped up because they know they’re on camera, too.
Victoria had a say on who was featured on the guest list, which included Judi Dench, Dave Allen, Joan Bakewell, Dawn French and Michael Grade. Wisely, she acknowledged the artificiality of the situation, remarking:
‘We’ve not done bad here tonight. Who have we got? Some friends of Wincey Willis and some people from Guildford. They’re all up there – the people from Guildford. We don’t show them because they’re not famous.’
The staged questions of Audiences With could be embarrassing, but Victoria saw to that by ripping into her interrogators, making a mockery of the contrived situation. Julie Walters was ‘star of Educating Rita and “Typhoo One Cup” – and she only got that because Meryl Streep turned it down’, Celia Imrie was described as someone who needed exposure, and when Joan Bakewell asked a question about big bosoms, Victoria mocked: ‘She’s slumming it really tonight, Joan, isn’t she really? I suppose MENSA was shut was it? Having a new billiard table put in, is that it?’
After the recording of An Audience With, Victoria told a few trusted friends like Julie, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders about her pregnancy, but it was still a closely guarded secret – helped no doubt by the fact that she actually began to lose weight. ‘I felt it was nobody’s business,’ she said about her pregnancy. ‘And that if anything went wrong I’d have to deal with the publicity as well as the actual happening.’
The hush-hush pregnancy became public when royal reporters spotted Victoria attending an ante-natal class at the exclusive £500-a-night Portland Hospital in London, where the Duchess of York gave birth to Princess Beatrice. Victoria’s reason for going upmarket was, she said, privacy. She imagined autograph hunters would plague her if she had gone to a Morecambe hospital. A member of staff confirmed Victoria’s pregnancy to a tabloid journalist, but Victoria still managed some subterfuge by pretending the baby was due in November rather than October. ‘I was determined to get to know my daughter properly without any interference from outside … She belongs to a part of my life which is Geoff’s and mine.’
A brief holiday in August and a switch to Jane Fonda pregnancy workout tapes were the only concessions Victoria made to her condition. Work was still at the forefront of her mind and an idea was germinating that would have made for a very revealing insight into her life had it come to fruition. The play she was working on was set in 1969, about adolescence, and based on herself and events in her life.
Grace Durham was born on 1 October 1988 and was given the middle name Eleanor after Victoria’s paternal grandmother. Victoria went into hospital at 3 a.m. to be induced, but the delivery rooms were all in use. Throughout the night she and Geoffrey watched the Olympics’ synchronised swimming, and when that finished Geoffrey popped out for a drink, returning ju
st in time for the birth. Victoria had wanted natural childbirth but in the event had an epidural. The placenta was dropped on the floor and the nurse was mortified when Victoria pretended she had wanted to eat it. It wasn’t the only gag; Fergie had given birth at the same hospital just two months before, prompting Victoria to remark, ‘I knew it was the VIP suite, I found a couple of long ginger hairs under the pillow.’
An Audience With Victoria Wood was given a prime-time 9.05 p.m. Saturday night slot on 10 December, earning Victoria two more BAFTA awards for Best Light Entertainment Programme and Best Light Entertainment Performance. It also earned her the TV Times Favourite Female Comedy Performer award.
The villagers of Silverdale were unlikely to pay to see Victoria on stage, but they could not escape seeing her on TV. Part of the routine included a swipe at Silverdale: ‘I live in the dullest place on God’s Earth with the most stupid, thick people.’ After hearing such lines the villagers refused to speak to her. As village elder Cyril Farrer said: ‘If you kick one we all limp.’
Victoria’s actual opinion of her neighbours was ambivalent and vaguely patronising: ‘I do like the people. I’m not saying they’re better people than others, but I feel much more comfortable with Northerners. I just love the way they talk. The way they use language … But I do like to get away from them … fairly often.’
Shortly after An Audience With Victoria Wood was televised Victoria released an album (Victoria Wood Live) of the stage show just in time for Christmas. It was recorded at The Dome in Brighton and produced by Geoffrey. It revealed just how financially astute she was – the same material had been used on stage, on television, released as an LP and, later, as a video. She was also making money from the publication of Talent and Good Fun by Methuen.
Such exposure did not extend to Grace, and Victoria would not permit photographs of her for anything but the family album. It was indicative of her utter obsession for Grace and parenthood. ‘I don’t think I ever had a normal life until she was born,’ she declared. But, punitively, she felt there had to be no dropping of standards. So scared was she of becoming the kind of mother who ‘sat around for nine months covered in sick’ that she got up at 4.50 a.m. to dress and do the housework. ‘I never slobbed about at home, the house was always spotless and I was never late for an appointment,’ she said years later. ‘I was totally ridiculous really.’ Providing further insight into her state of mind at that time, she added:
‘I was very manic – I’m compulsive and did it to the detriment of everything else. I did the ironing in the middle of the night. I’d never done the ironing before, but my big failing as a person is that I have to do everything perfectly. I don’t think I spoke to Geoff for the first three months.’
By Victoria’s own admission, Geoffrey was not a natural father, preferring to do the shopping and cooking instead. This suited her as it meant she was the one who had total involvement with the baby. With the adolescence-based play completed, Victoria spent the weeks leading up to Christmas getting to know Grace in their recently acquired North London flat while Geoffrey was appearing in yet another pantomime.
Bored by the television sketch show format and frustrated at not being able to recapture her earlier successes at writing plays, a series of six individual half-hour playlets – or ‘playdolinos’ as Victoria referred to them – was the perfect compromise. It allowed her to try to sustain characters and material without asking to be judged as a fully blown dramatist, and work commenced in January 1989.
As always the hardest part was the beginning and Victoria came up with a number of ways to avoid writing. These included writing letters and chatting to Geoffrey over the intercom. He was busy preparing for a new Thames Television series, The Best of Magic, in his office at the other end of the house. Exercise was another good delaying tactic and, combined with Victoria’s abandonment of junk food in favour of fruit, she lost two stones. Grace provided an additional distraction, although it was strictly on Victoria’s terms. Within three months of giving birth she acquired a nanny.
‘It was hard to get going at first, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing,’ said Victoria of the new series. ‘What appears on paper is usually very bad, not funny, terrible even, at first – but at least I’ve started … I get miserable when I think the writing isn’t going well. Every time I’ve ever written anything, the first months or so have been just awful. Even though I know it’ll finally sort itself out, I get miserable. But it has to be gone through.’
Of the creative process, she said: ‘I don’t write things that are based on funny things that happened to me. I just can’t write about the way I live. It wouldn’t be interesting. I get up every day and I write and that’s it.’ She did not aim for topicality because of the gap between writing the material and performing it, and she never used jokes as such.
‘What I’ve learned is to work instinctively within the limits of what I can use, what I personally find funny,’ she explained.
‘I have certain characters I like and others I don’t like so much. The ones I like I often get it right – certainly that’s the direction I’m going more now. You create sympathy for one character and direct laughter at the other.’
The characters in the series were written with specific actresses in mind, but in a marked departure, Victoria decided to play a version of herself. ‘I want people to like me and the people who play my friends, and not everybody else,’ she said. Fiction allowed her to rewrite her own childhood. The scripts were completed by July, one play was even written in just two days.
Much as Victoria tended to give the impression she was disconnected from the baggage which showbusiness brought, it was not always true. In August she travelled to Edinburgh to lecture on soap operas at Melvyn Bragg’s behest and 1989 also saw her lend her name to that cliché, the Celebrity Good Cause. She was one of several celebrity mothers to join Pamela Stephenson’s Parents for Safe Food Campaign and was given special responsibility for ‘Labelling’. She used her simple, Northern mum-who-just-happens-to-be-a-star persona to distance herself from the backslapping worthiness and described how she was so overawed by the glamour of a Pamela Stephenson dinner party that she spent the entire evening sitting in silence.
It had been nine years since Victoria had given a sustained acting performance so the prospect of the playlets may have caused some trepidation. She eased her way around any nervousness by opting to play ‘herself’. She was ‘Miss Wood’; she is ‘in television’; she could have used the VIP lounge at an airport; she is au fait with television; she is ‘a much-loved and irreplaceable entertainer’; she is a ‘comedienne’. It was an unusual concept for British television – even Tony Hancock, while playing ‘Tony Hancock’ never acknowledged that the character was a television celebrity. But Victoria’s decision may have confused the audience. She was ‘Victoria Wood’, Una Stubbs was ‘Una’ and Lill Roughley was ‘Lill’, yet the likes of Celia Imrie and Julie Walters went under a variety of guises. Identity was a recurring feature of the series. Victoria would be mistaken for a travel representative, a carol singer and Dawn French, but she also deliberately assumed the identity of an exotic dancer called Sapphire, the old bag Marjorie Witherstrop, Lorraine – an update on Kelly-Marie Tunstall, adventurer Miss Elizabeth Gough and a wealthy brainless bore. Even when she is introduced as ‘the comedienne’ at a cocktail party, the host’s assumption that the act can simply be turned on was Victoria’s way of showing that she was a person first and a performer second.
The series was also unusual in Victoria’s use of straight-to-camera asides, explanations and confessions. Stand-up was her forte and the to-camera moments were a way of securing direct communication with her audience.
She observed comedic conventions with the frequent appearances of authority figures and it was in her treatment of them that she revealed a personal development. Whereas in the past she played the victim, in the playlets she was usually the one who mocked/stood up to/outwitted the authority figures. In Mens
Sana In Thingummy Doodah it is Judy the efficient keep-fit instructor (‘she’s worked by a computer in Milford Haven’); in The Library it is the gorgon Madge (‘awfully narrow-minded, makes Mary Whitehouse look like a topless waitress’); in Over To Pam it is the dreadful daytime television star Pam (‘patronising old cow’); in Val de Ree it is the batty youth hostel owner, Susan.
Along with identity, choice figures prominently in the playlets. Who should Sheila date? Should Lill embrace the diet industry? Should Victoria go on holiday? Should she masquerade as Elizabeth Gough? Should she sacrifice her own pleasure for that of a friend?
The targets were predictable: the diet industry, airport delays, daytime television, country living, pretentiousness and superficiality. But Victoria was able to weave unpredictable, offbeat and very funny characters, incidents and dialogue into the most simple of plotlines.
The series kicked off with Mens Sana in Thingummy Doodah. Victoria’s hatred of the diet industry was no secret, she had already taken a swipe at it back in 1980’s Nearly A Happy Ending. But now she extended her attack by setting the entire playlet in Pinkney’s Hydro, a health farm. Victoria, who had only been to a health farm once, reluctantly accompanied her friend, Lill (Lill Roughley), who believes that losing weight will encourage her boyfriend to leave his wife for her. Throughout the playlet Victoria mocks the whole regime, from the masseur who tells Lill that underneath her fat she’s actually very slim, to such weight-based afflictions as underarm swoop and runaway midriff. The empty-headed model Sallyanne (Georgia Allen) is held up to ridicule for believing that eating a hard-boiled egg before every meal means the egg will ‘eat’ some of the meal for her, in much the same way that the unhappy teenaged Victoria believed in the magical abilities of grapefruit.
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