Food also represents identity in the bedsit scene where Pat offers to rustle up her favourite meal. All she needs is pasta, virgin olive oil, beef tomatoes, herbs and an avocado. Margaret has a tin of spaghetti, a jar of pickle and some powdered milk. Food is also used to show the shades of grey in the characters. Revisiting the Swiss Cottage Cafe where she worked as a teenage waitress, Pat devours her pre-famous favourite meal of egg, chips, peas and double fried bread with relish. And in the Regent Hotel Margaret discovers a liking for champagne. On an additional note Stella refers to Pat and Margaret’s home town as being in ‘black pudding country’. Victoria’s own home town, Bury, is famous for its black pudding, a dish that would have been every bit as unpalatable to the vegetarian Victoria as a return to her roots is for Pat.
The other big theme of the film is maternalism. Negligent and damaging mothers frequently occurred in Victoria’s work and in Pat and Margaret she had the opportunity to examine the relationship she had with her own mother.
One example of a bad mother in the film is Jim’s. In this lying smothering creature (a more caustic version of Maureen’s unseen parents in Talent), Victoria showed how dominant mothers are every bit as damaging as negligent mothers. They are utterly selfish and controlling and disguise manipulation as love. The dyslexic Jim cannot read the situation until Claire points out that his mother was thinking of herself, not him.
A fuller examination of a bad mother and the consequences comes in Vera. It is sometimes overlooked that Pat and Margaret are only half-sisters. The half they have in common is Vera, their respective fathers disappeared early in their lives. This setup allowed Victoria to dissect the mother–child relationship by making the mother the sole influence on the girls’ lives.
While Victoria’s own mother was no Vera, Helen Wood was just as ‘absent’ in Victoria’s childhood, locking herself away with her wool and work. Pat blasts Vera for what she did to Margaret, the little girl she left at 11 because she could not be bothered giving her the love and care of a mother. It was when Victoria reached 11 that Helen could concentrate fully on her academic career. Margaret also mirrors Victoria in the way she yearns to have a baby with Jim, perhaps to cancel out her own miserable early years and replace them with the ‘right’ sort of mother–child relationship.
There is anger at their mother’s treatment of them, but also an unspoken trauma in both Pat and Margaret concerning lost motherhood. Vera had children she did not want, Pat and Margaret wanted children they could not have; Pat lost her son through adoption and Margaret lost her child through miscarriage. The presence of the heavily pregnant Claire, proudly showing scans of her baby and delighting in each little kick serves as a constant reminder of their loss, but this was more accident than intention as Victoria was forced to incorporate Imrie’s real-life pregnancy into the script at the last minute.
In the film it is the star journalist Stella Kincaid who powers the plot by stirring up the sediment in the characters’ lives. She threatens to expose Pat and thus forces her into a race back to her Northern roots. In doing so a chain reaction is activated which makes Margaret, Pat and Jim re-examine their lives.
Stella has echoes of Pat, her own publicity is pinned to her office wall and there is a hint that the glamorous star journalist has equally humble roots, thanks to a passing mention of her time on the Leicester Mercury. Victoria’s cautious relationship with the press was mirrored slightly in Pat’s paranoia. The prospect of a journalist interviewing her mother would have delighted Victoria about as much as it did Pat.
The idea of a fractured family (like the Woods) plays a significant part in the film. Initially, there appears to be a vast gulf between Pat, Margaret and Vera, who do not even have a surname in common (Pat’s reeked of the Home Counties, Vera’s belonged to a different nation and Margaret’s clanged with Northernness). Yet the underlying similarities between the three give an added dimension to the characters.
As blood relatives Pat and Margaret are bound to share characteristics. Outwardly they seem to enjoy their lives, but they have had to convince themselves of this and it is a very brittle existence. Both know they are utterly dispensable; falling ratings of Glamor mean Pat’s contract might not be renewed, and Margaret’s contract at the motorway services means she can be disposed of without any notice. The sisters are united in their unhappiness.
The half the half-sisters have in common is Vera, and if Pat has inherited her mother’s determination, ruthlessness and resilience, it follows that Margaret too must have absorbed some of her mother’s qualities. The common link is denial; Vera and Pat deny their past and Margaret denies her present. As she admits to Pat at one point: ‘I know I spent all yesterday saying I wasn’t jealous and I was just glad to see you and I was happy living the way I do – well I’m not. I don’t want to be like this.’
A symbolic device that also unites the mother and daughters is the Spanish apartment complex. It was built over a chemical dump in much the same way that the characters have built their lives on insecure and polluted foundations. Like a time-bomb, the dump has consequences for the future just like the buried feelings of Vera, Pat and Margaret.
The three all share a strong desire for a glamorous lifestyle. It is Vera who ends up looking forward to a life in Hollywood with Pat and sharing equal billing with the likes of Jackie Stallone as a celebrity mother, but Margaret too has yearned for the same thing (‘I want what you’ve got!’). Although Margaret ultimately decides to ‘give it a go’ and remain in England with Jim, she is not averse to benefiting from Hollywood. It is Hollywood money that buys her the cafe; she fully intends to make visits to LA and she stands to become something of a celebrity through her link with Pat. A mini-series of her family life is on the cards and she is already imagining Meryl Streep portraying her.
The idea of separated siblings leading vastly different lives before being reunited was not unique dramatically. And the convenience of a well-timed pools win and a property development scandal to further the plot did border on cliché. But Victoria’s genius shone through in her treatment of her characters and her decision to make Pat, Margaret and Vera neither exclusively good or bad, wrong or right.
Pat operates in a profession full of hypocrisy and viciousness. At first she is presented as a total bitch, but through Victoria’s depiction of the celebrity landscape, the audience can, however reluctantly, sympathise with her. Pat is despicable but if she is to survive in such a backbiting profession can she really be blamed for adopting its customs? Even Victim Margaret is able to defend her sister.
Despite being an obviously sympathetic character, Margaret is not some blameless saint. She has settled for less and existed in a state of frustration, bemoaning her lowly lot in life but not acknowledging that she is partly responsible for it. She indulges herself with her unhappy childhood and harbours a 27-year-old grudge against Pat (‘You should have helped me’). But Pat, who had it far harder than Margaret, was brave and proactive enough to take a risk and head for London, rather than settling for a familiar rut. She is justified in telling the envious Margaret, ‘Then work for it! You’ve no idea what I had to do to get where I am now – do something!’ One could easily imagine the 1994 Victoria telling her 22-year-old self this same thing.
Victoria even managed to elicit some sympathy for Vera who, it must be said, had not had an easy life. She had been a prostitute with ‘two kids in a rotten council house, nosy neighbours, useless bloody husband smoking himself to death’. And it cannot be ignored that Vera, who was fully aware of Pat’s celebrity, never once tried to exploit her for financial gain until Stella appears on the scene.
In the climactic showdown Vera fully acknowledges that she is hard, cold, unkind and emotionally closed. But she has a very valid point when she says to Pat: ‘Would you have got out if I hadn’t shoved you out? … You should be thanking me for making you hard inside, because that’s what pushed you on.’ This overlapped into Victoria’s personal life and begged the question, if H
elen Wood had not been so remote and disinterested as a mother would Victoria have felt such a compulsion to make her mark?
‘What we really need is a happy ending,’ says Stella, but it was to Victoria’s credit that she avoided a neat conclusion. Unresolved issues were left hanging in the air. Vera has still not shown any remorse, Pat (albeit involuntarily) is prepared to collaborate with the dreaded Stella and prostitute her family for a book, and Margaret chooses to remain in the locale of her unhappiness, even though she admits: ‘there’s nowt doing here’. The airport farewell between the two sisters, with its painfully awkward ‘hug’, suggests that all has not been resolved.
By the time Victoria wrote Pat and Margaret she was extremely wealthy but she could also draw on her penny-pinching days in the Morecambe flat. Her own changed financial circumstances enabled her to empathise with both of the film’s leading characters. She knew that money matters, and its jingle could be heard throughout the film. The many outstanding debts of responsibility between the characters, apologies owed, paybacks, prices to be paid and costs to be counted were all explored. The transactions also extended to the value the characters place on themselves.
The script crackled with pithy lines. ‘You couldn’t get abortions round here then. We didn’t get muesli till last year,’ says a Northern housewife. ‘I don’t think I knew what love was till I bred my first Afghan,’ remarks Vera. It was a measure of Victoria’s generosity that she gave many of the film’s most memorable lines to Thora Hird. It had been an ambition of Victoria’s to work with the actress who, like Patricia Routledge and Julie Walters, were also favourites of Alan Bennett. Victoria had first attempted to work with Hird back in 1985 for As Seen On TV but the actress was not free until 1989. When Victoria tried to get her for her playlets in 1989 she missed the opportunity by a matter of days. As Jim’s mother ‘She’s playing you for a giddy kipper’ was one of Hird’s most widely quoted lines, but her most celebrated remark came in the indignant reaction to the news that Jim and Margaret had sex on her bed: ‘Not on the eiderdown!’
Recognisable Woodisms in the script included a raffia reference and the quirky career boast ‘formula’ (a woman is described as being ‘very high up in gum hygiene’).
Pat and Margaret was broadcast on 11 September and was as popular with the critics as it was with the public. ‘A masterful piece of work’ said Thomas Sutcliffe in the Independent, while in the Observer John Naughton described it as ‘a morality tale with great style and much class’. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Max Davidson praised Victoria’s ‘splendid performance’ and the Independent on Sunday’s Allison Pearson described her as ‘one of our finest writers, with a brain like a razor and an ear finely tuned to every emotional wavelength’. The dichotomy of the public figure and the private figure and the nature of fame had resonances which not even Victoria could predict, and the BBC repeated it on 6 September 1997, as part of its rescheduled programming to mark the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales.
It said something about Victoria’s pulling power that 9 million viewers watched the film, compared with the 2.4 million Screen One audience the previous week. The film showed a new maturity and sophistication in Victoria and for the first time in thirteen years she was able to show she was capable of writing a sustained piece of drama. It also demonstrated that Victoria, who used to mock her own acting abilities, was an accomplished actress, particularly when it came to scenes of pathos. Her performance earned her a BAFTA Best Actress nomination and the film itself received a BAFTA Best Single Drama nomination, an award it won at the British Press Guild Awards. Equally as satisfying for Victoria was the way in which she had proved LWT so wrong.
No sooner had the film been broadcast than the script was published, by Methuen. Further income was generated by her voicing a talking book of The Princess and the Frog and recording a shortened version of her 1993 stage show for the BBC. As with her All Day Breakfast, the Geoff Posner-produced and-directed Victoria Wood – Live In Your Own Home was given a prime-time slot on BBC1 on Christmas Day, attracting 13.38 million viewers and making it the sixth most popular programme in the country.
Despite such viewing figures, it prompted a backlash by some critics, who had grown tired of Victoria’s habit of recycling material. ‘I’m as big a sucker for nostalgia as anybody, but this was déjà vu,’ remarked A.A. Gill in the Sunday Times, before adding: ‘Victoria Wood has become a cross between Pam Ayres and Joyce Grenfell … The crooning and the mugging and the nudge-nudging were very predictable. It ceased to be anything more than tired grinworthy stuff about a decade ago.’ The Daily Express’s Compton Miller complained that he felt like he had blundered into a Christmas party while sober.
Victoria’s performance was, however, nominated for a BAFTA, but when she lost out to Rory Bremner cameras at the televised ceremony captured her indignation, giving the public a rare glimpse of an off guard Victoria.
13
THERAPY HAD FINALLY freed Victoria from the compulsion to inflict a punishing schedule upon herself and, reflecting on her 1994 workload, she decided to prioritise. ‘I thought, hang on, you don’t actually have to work this hard … I was running too fast,’ she said. Having experienced a miserable childhood herself, Victoria was determined that her own children would not suffer: ‘Awards and fame are so fleeting. They don’t bear comparison with having a relationship with two little children.’
Defying public expectation by undergoing therapy seemed to free up Victoria to explore other avenues that did not necessarily match her public image. One of these was Quakerism. She and Geoffrey started going to meetings to improve their lives together. Analysis had certainly helped the relationship (‘We used to fight and try to change each other but since we’ve both had therapy, life has become more peaceful’) but they needed spiritual assurance. They had always believed in God and had experimented with churchgoing in the past but it ‘just didn’t do it’ for Victoria. Clearly there was another hole in her life which needed filling.
The movement, which today has 18,000 followers in Britain and Ireland, began in the seventeenth century when people came together to revive what they saw as ‘primitive Christianity’. It was particularly strong in the Midlands, Yorkshire and the North West. Quakers believe that everyone may have direct experience of God and they search for His love and power in the everyday world. The simplicity of Quakerism undoubtedly appealed to Victoria. Free of dogma, there is no church calendar to obey. The emphasis is on daily life and experience rather than festivals and creeds. Meeting houses have no ornaments or religious symbols and meetings are held on Sundays only because it is the most convenient day. Quakerism is also a very democratic religion with no appointed minister or pastor; anyone may speak when they feel inspired to and the responsibility for the meeting belongs to all. The act of worship involves a group silence where those present meditate on God.
‘As I’ve got older, I am more interested in having a belief,’ said Victoria. ‘I think that when you are in your twenties and thirties you have so many other things going on in your head that there’s not much space for anything spiritual. But it does help to have a belief. If you don’t, it makes everything else seem pointless. To only think “you’re alive, you have acne and then you die” makes you wonder what it’s all for.’
While this more relaxed attitude allowed Victoria to reduce the pressure on herself, her idea of taking things easy was completely at odds with most other people’s. A new edition of Good Fun and Talent helped keep her profile up and she engaged in a number of typical celebrity activities. These included supporting a campaign to give public libraries access to National Lottery money, unveiling a blue plaque at Eric Morecambe’s former home in North Finchley, and being the first recipient of the Eric Morecambe Award, the first major award from Comic Heritage, the society dedicated to honouring Britain’s great comedians. Victoria had briefly met the comedian in a Manchester lift. ‘You’re that girl,’ Morecambe had said. ‘Yes, I am,’ replied Victoria, wh
o was chuffed to be recognised by him.
Geoffrey was no doubt appreciative of Victoria’s new laid-back attitude as it enabled him to do a show of his own. Admittedly a short run of Shattering Illusions (‘one man’s intrepid journey up his own sleeve’) at the King’s Head could not compare with Victoria’s nationwide tours, but combined with a growing number of appearances on television quiz and game shows, it allowed him to establish himself as someone other than The Great Soprendo. However, it was not too long before new demands on Victoria started to interfere.
Victoria had travelled to Ethiopia in 1990 to make a documentary showing how Comic Relief money had been spent, and in 1995 the charity persuaded her to return to Africa. The trip had been arranged for Lenny Henry but he had to pull out and Victoria was his reluctant replacement. ‘I didn’t want to go at all,’ she said. ‘I only volunteered as a joke. I said, “if you want me to be patronising in Africa, I’m quite happy to do that”.’ She spent her week living with the Masara family in the tiny farming community of Chivi, Zimbabwe, milking cows, weeding vegetable plots, making clay drainpipes and digging troughs. As someone whose offstage interaction with the public was sometimes characterised by an awkwardness, it came as no surprise that Victoria declined the villagers’ greeting offer of a dance. Living with ‘strange people’, she said, was not really her thing.
Refreshingly unsentimental, she was at pains to avoid condescension and refused to apologise for her own life of privilege.
Victoria Wood Page 25