Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  More serious is Lill’s growing neurosis about her weight; she has lost all self-belief and has been brainwashed by the diet industry and a callous lover. The guilt of eating one chocolate-covered raisin is enough to convince Lill that she will have to be wheeled around. It is down to Victoria to step in and convince Lill that her weight does not matter and has nothing to do with her value as a person. The playlet ends with Victoria and her chums sneaking out to the cafe and treating themselves to a greasy fry-up complete with additives and germs.

  The Library saw Anne Reid reprise another anxious spinster in the same mould as As Seen On TV’s Pamela Twill. Like Pamela, Sheila was entering the dating game, though she opted for video rather than computer dating. The extended format allowed Victoria to create a full character for Reid, who gave a brilliant performance. It was a perfect marriage of writer and performer. ‘I was the same with Sacha Distel in Boots’ explains a panic-stricken Sheila as a prospective date approaches. ‘The times I’ve been saddled with an unrequested bilberry yoghurt’ she complains of a liberty-taking milkman. Her funniest moments occur on her dates. First there is the humourless pedant Keith (Philip Lowrie) who dominates conversation. Sheila tries to converse but is reduced to making jarring irrelevancies (‘I see in the paper today Mrs Thatcher’s sporting a new brooch.’). She fares even worse with the cultured Richard (David Henry). To her the Great Painters are a set of table mats. Serendipity sees her linking up with John the librarian (Richard Kane). Victoria, acting as her chaperone, disguises herself as Northern bag Marjorie Witherstrop, but her cleverness backfires when she spends the evening getting chatted up in the kitchen by Ted (Danny O Dea), the randy old man.

  We’d Quite Like To Apologise sees Victoria setting off on a holiday abroad. As with the 1987 stage show, the need for audience identification meant it was a chartered flight to the lower-class Alicante. She is one of us even though, as she admits, she could have gone in the VIP lounge at the airport. The inevitable airport delay enables her to interact with very recognisable types – the hypochondriac (Una Stubbs), the sickeningly lovey-dovey young couple (Jane Horrocks and Richard Hope), the professional slut (Julie Walters) and the unhappily married couple (Lill Roughley and Philip Lowrie), who all want a piece of her. These ‘upsetting misfits’ are stock characters, but with Victoria’s handling they each bring off-the-wall humour to proceedings. The set-up also enabled Victoria to examine the English characteristics that most irritate her: inefficiency, bad manners, insularity and indecisiveness.

  ‘Television does funny things to people,’ warns Victoria at one point in Over To Pam, and uses the 28 minutes to prove her point.

  When Victoria collects her friend Lorraine (Kay Adshead) to take her to the television studios, she is in effect taking the viewer on a behind-the-scenes tour of the world of television in which disillusionment is inevitable. Victoria may be ‘in’ television, but her loyalties lie with Lorraine/the viewer. She is the television insider who is more at home with the outsider.

  Victoria narrowed her focus on daytime television, something that she saw an awful lot of while at home with Grace. ‘It’s so cheap and nasty. It’s such an easy formula to get women in the studio and pay them virtually nothing to say a few words. We should instead put up a caption saying “We have no TV worth showing”, and then leave the screen blank,’ she suggested. Seven years later she softened considerably and said:

  I’m not a snob about what’s on in the daytime. People with important, exciting jobs and wonderful family lives forget that television is an important part of people’s lives. Most people in this country can’t get out and go to the theatre and do exciting things. They are in their houses, and they want cosy, friendly people. They don’t need educating every minute of the day.

  To anyone who has ever been inside a television studio, the staff at Victoria’s Console TV are immediately recognisable types: the superior receptionist who aligns herself with the stars, the patronising researcher, the camp, neurotic assistant stage manager, the tactless make-up girl.

  The condescension doled out to Northern Lorraine is exactly the sort of treatment Victoria received in her early days when it seemed to her that television was run by mad Southerners. Indeed, the playlet could be seen as the more self-assured 1989 Victoria leading, protecting and advising her vulnerable and naive younger self. It was another example of her tackling and cancelling out the negatives of her own past. It is Victoria who stands up to the make-up girl, the researcher, the wardrobe department and, most triumphantly, the egocentric star of daytime television, Pam. This gloriously horrible creation was played by Julie Walters, and was an early incarnation of Pat Bedford in Victoria’s film, Pat and Margaret. Pam’s downfall is brought about by Victoria’s taking Lorraine’s place in the interview and giving her exactly the sort of interviewee she likes to exploit. Victoria’s impostor Lorraine was yet another thick Northern tart and, in a way, the real-life Victoria was exploiting the stereotype for laughs but disguising it as an attack against condescension. She confesses to a gleeful Pam that she had seven kids before she was eighteen but was so stupid she kept leaving them in skips. She goes on to give biographical details which are the mainstay of ‘Live With Pam’-type programmes; sexual abuse, tranquilliser addiction, alcoholism. The climax comes when Victoria whips off the blonde wig to reveal her true self and unmasks Pam as ‘the most patronising old cow to hit the airwaves since Mrs Bridges caught Ruby with her corsets on back to front’. Pam, who is a borderline hypoglycaemic, collapses and her show is axed. The day has been a learning experience for Lorraine. She had ended up on Chuck a Sausage hosted by Geoffrey Paige, who she is nuts about until she discovers he wears a toupee.

  As a country-dweller herself Victoria knew the gap between the rural idyll and actually living there, and she used it in Val de Ree. In this playlet she and Celia Imrie play two pals on a walking and camping holiday on the Yorkshire Moors. They soon learn the countryside is inhabited by yuppies and batty old women, not ‘loveable old farmers’ wives’. Bleak weather, disorientation and bickering add to the reality, and the complacent assumption that youth hostels have changed and are run more like hotels is soon discovered to be a myth. A stickler for realism, Victoria bought a tent when writing the script to make sure she named the parts correctly and could describe assembly instructions accurately.

  While out in the wilds she and Jackie (Imrie) meet an elderly duo – another typical Victoria feature – Mim (a relative of Good Fun’s Betty) and Daddy. Daddy has ‘terrorised the cardboard box business for 40 years’ a suburban boast akin to Happy Since I Met You’s Dennis (‘reasonably well thought of in chemical engineering’), As Seen On TV’s Nick who is ‘very high up in sewage’, and the husband in Lucky Bag who is ‘well thought of in the curtain-track world’.

  Victoria and Jackie trick their way into the youth hostel by pretending to be that night’s guest lecturers and it is only when they are congratulating themselves that they realise they will have to give a speech. The cleverer they think they are, the more things backfire on them.

  The opening of Staying In made it clear who Victoria wanted to be identified with. She is sitting on the sofa watching some mindless comedy film of old. She is in fact mirroring the viewer at home; both are facing each other through the prism of a television. Within seconds she gets the audience on her side with her irritation at having her viewing interrupted by a phone call. The call comes from her bossy friend, Jane (Deborah Grant), who asks Victoria to accompany her to a party.

  Victoria’s abhorrence of parties in real life – some aspects of shyness never seemed to leave her – had made its way into her stand-up monologues. She would describe dire suburban dos where she found herself in a kitchen full of women yapping about cystitis, or stuck with a couple who had done their own conveyancing. Her elevated place in the television firmament saw her being invited to the sort of swanky London parties satirised here. Despite her changed circumstances, Victoria cleverly manages to remain ‘one of us’
by undermining the event.

  The hostess is the upper-class Moira – the self-crowned most successful hostess in London Society – played by Patricia Hodge who was cast after Victoria heard an interview in which she revealed she would like to do more comedy. Moira is this playlet’s authority figure, ushering guests and introducing them to one another with a breezy confidence.

  The guests themselves are brainless, affluent movers and shakers. They are patronising, chauvinistic, even racist to a degree. Again, Victoria seems to be reassuring the viewer that ‘we are better than them’. It soon becomes clear that Victoria The Comedienne, Kevin The Rock Star (Richard Lintern) and Jim The Artist (Brian Burdon) – none of whom fulfil preconceived expectations – have been invited as party novelties. Needless to say it is Victoria who refuses to be compartmentalised and used in this way and who leads the other ‘goodies’ to the kitchen for good, simple shepherd’s pie. There she bonds with the young Scottish housekeeper Aisla, expressing a genuine interest in how she coped as a homeless person. When Moira discovers them, it is Victoria who stands up to her and, on behalf of the others, informs her that they have no wish to perform. The personification of the chattering classes is reduced to tears and her confidence is shown to be a veneer of insecurity caused by the brittleness of her circle. Unpretentious and natural Victoria saves the party with a good old-fashioned game of musical chairs.

  Triumphing over society was not enough for Victoria, she also mocked fellow comedians, serious playwrights and other Northerners. Setting herself above her contemporaries Victoria includes the detail that a ‘raunchy, anarchic, foul-mouthed, alternative comedienne’ had to drop out of the party because she was playing Dick Whittington in Windsor. Playwright Alan Hammond (Jim Broadbent) is held up to ridicule for being a Professional Northerner. Through this character, Victoria may also have been having a private dig at her old boyfriend. Bob Mason wrote ‘Northern’ plays and, like Alan Hammond, lived in Chiswick.

  The series of playlets contained many namechecks, textile/garment mentions, afflictions and high street/brand names. There were references to raffia, Tupperware, shoplifting, and nuns (a Mother Superior). Gynaecological references were reduced and Victoria made more use of wordplay and surrealism: the calorific value of a pillowcase; assuming someone is wearing a tie-neck blouse from the sound of their voice; mistaking a terrapin for an indoor plant; someone having a tweed sofa inserted in their mouth at a party in Brighton; the idea of faxing milk.

  The series saw Victoria’s love of language and its patterns being given more of an outlet. Aside from the usual use of extraneous dates, many of the characters Victoria encountered in the playlets had an idiosyncratic way of speaking, the oddness and humour heightened by the contrast with Victoria’s own realistic manner of speech.

  The tongue-tied malapropisms of Nicola in Mens Sana in Thingummy Doodah are a joy, as are the incongruous and unexpected utterances of Connie and Enid. The peculiar jargon of airport check-in staff is neatly captured in We’d Quite Like To Apologise and the overuse of figurative language is equally amusing. Keith’s utterances in The Library have a distinctive precision, and Mim’s refined and unexpected vocabulary in Val de Ree is every bit as comic. In the same playlet Joan Sims made the most of Susan’s strange speech.

  Sly little in-jokes, such as the awful video at the health farm being an ‘Acorn Enterprises’ production, and Anne Reid (Coronation Street’s Valerie Barlow) going on a blind date with Philip Lowrie (Coronation Street’s Dennis Tanner) crept in, along with another mocking remark about Celia Imrie’s nostrils.

  Victoria’s favourite names (Connie, Enid, Madge, Marge, Pam) featured in the series, as did typically Northern surnames such as Witherstrop, Wythenshawe and Mottershead. There was also a fondness for conjoining plain names to create amusing hybrids (Shulie, Saundra and Joyanne.)

  Weighty topical events such as Chernobyl, passive smoking, the ozone layer and global warming were lightened, with Victoria once again showing to her characters – and most people – that it is the smaller issues that matter. So for instance, when mention is made of the polar ice caps melting, Victoria remarks that some tropical islands will be completely submerged but she personally stands to lose a bit of a privet and a bird table. Similarly, in Mens Sana in Thingummy Doodah Lill’s declaration that today is the first day of the rest of her life jolts Connie into remembering that it is the first day of Lewis’s sale.

  11

  THE VICTORIA WOOD series marked a deliberate step towards mass appeal for Victoria. For the first time her work was to be shown on BBC1 at the viewer-friendly time of 8.30 p.m. In light of her past successes, expectations were high and Victoria was described in the press as one of the ‘First Ladies’ of British television. But it might have irked her that some of her thunder was stolen. Ten days before Victoria Wood started in November, ITV began broadcasting About Face, a series of six half-hour comedy plays starring Maureen Lipman. And an hour after the first episode of Victoria Wood ended, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones popped up in a new series of extended sketches. To have her originality questioned was irritating, but Victoria’s pride was further dented by the lack of customary praise by the critics. The Daily Express described the show as ‘tiresome stuff’ and the Daily Mirror said her targets were predictable and snobbish. A fault with the playlets was their weak endings. It was a shortcoming that had always dogged Victoria’s sketches and monologues. The quality of what came before was of such high calibre that most critics tended to overlook the clumsy ‘punchlines’, but not any more.

  There had been high expectations for the series and the first playlet attracted 13.16 million viewers, making it the 14th most popular programme in the country that week. The public were obviously disappointed with what they saw, because by the next week viewing figures had dropped to 11.03 million and the show slipped to number 29 in the ratings.

  Victoria had some concerns during the filming of the series, not least the decision not to film it before a live audience. The important instant response was missing, even though the finished tapes were later screened before an audience, and she described the recording as a ‘boring, diabolical and awful’ experience. Another change from the usual method of working concerned Geoffrey Posner. He still produced the series but only directed two of the playlets: Kevin Bishop had responsibility for the rest. The sense of continuity remained with the music, however, and David Firman was once again the musical director.

  Victoria accepted some of the blame for the disappointing reaction to the series herself: ‘It wasn’t as well written by me as it could have been, and I shouldn’t have been in all of the sketches.’ But like the boxer she had once wished to be, when she was in a corner she came out fighting. During the making of the shows she was not afraid of voicing her opinions. ‘It’s often the only way to get things done properly,’ she said. ‘It’s not easy to do without hurting people’s feelings. I think life is too short not to ask for what you want.’ This attitude was in dramatic contrast to the Victoria of old who would have smiled, kept her mouth shut and hated herself afterwards.

  ‘There’s a limit to your quest for popularity,’ she realised. ‘You have to say: “Well, I don’t care if people think I’m an old ratbag. I’m going to ask and get this right, whatever it is.” Years ago I would put up with things just to appear to be a nice person. Now I think “I want it done properly”, and I don’t care what they think of me.’

  The year had begun with Victoria in the witness box at Lewes Crown Court. A 33-year-old man was being prosecuted for stealing £20 from her shoulder bag which she left in a changing room while she popped to the toilet in a Brighton theatre during her last tour. He received a nine-month suspended sentence and was ordered to repay the £20 he stole. A more welcome public appearance came at the end of the year when Victoria was presented with an honorary degree by Lancaster University for her contribution to the arts (earlier in the year she had picked up another award, the TV Times Favourite Female Comedy Performer). Sh
e received her degree from the university chancellor Princess Alexandra. The university had given an honorary degree to Eric Morecambe in the 1970s and Victoria was thrilled at sharing the distinction.

  Her relationship with her parents had obviously improved, as she invited them to the ceremony. And her relationship with Geoffrey had also grown stronger, thanks largely to their mutual adoration of baby Grace. The usually reticent couple aired fulsome public praise for each other. ‘I’m her greatest fan. Nothing could give me more pleasure than her success. I can’t understand people who are jealous of their partner. And it hasn’t changed her at all. She’s exactly the same as she always was,’ said Geoffrey. Victoria reciprocated, but focused more on the career benefits:

  Geoff means everything to me; he writes none of it, thinks of none of the ideas, but if he didn’t like it I wouldn’t care to carry on. His enthusiasm is such a charge. Without it I would get very cold about what I’m doing. I’d very quickly decide ‘It’s no good, I’m going to stop doing it.’ I wouldn’t be able to gather myself up to write. It would go dead on me.

  Geoffrey’s growing security and fulfilment was demonstrated by his decision to kill off The Great Soprendo. ‘There are just things that I want to do that I could not do as Soprendo and tricks I wanted to perform that I could not, pretending to be Spanish,’ he explained. ‘I’m not going to stop doing magic, but I’m moving on, performing better and “impossible” tricks which I think I’ll be able to do more successfully as Geoffrey Durham than The Great Soprendo. I’ll open myself up and say, “This is me.” I used to enjoy dressing up – there was an element of hiding behind a character.’

  The unexpected weight loss since pregnancy, and the discovery that she was allergic to sugar and its subsequent banishment from her diet, meant it was a new, streamlined Victoria who embarked on a 60-date tour in 1990.