Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  I was anxious it wouldn’t come over the wrong way. I didn’t want to say ‘these people have a worse life than we do’. They don’t have a horrible, violent, crime-ridden society like us. They just don’t have any water – that’s why there is so little food … I didn’t feel bad. I think that would be patronising to pity them. They are not wounded pigeons, they are just people. I don’t feel guilty for being born into this country and having enough money.

  The sketch which Victoria had been invited to write for Comic Relief 1995 saw her in more comfortable territory. It also demonstrated her more relaxed relationship with her one-time rival Dawn French, for whom she wrote a Vanessa Feltz people-show parody. Victoria was happy to be a supporting character, alongside the likes of Lynda Bellingham and Jim Broadbent, while Dawn played the ‘star’. The sketch was completely barmy. Victoria’s Birmingham housewife, Carrie, was married to a man who loved ping-pong more than her; Lill Roughley played a woman whose marriage lasted all of three minutes until her husband burped; Anne Reid’s character lived next door to a man who thought his penis told him to order large portions of coleslaw from Kentucky Fried Chicken; Duncan Preston’s character had undergone 17 operations to make him look like his hero, Duncan Preston. But amidst this barminess Victoria’s acute observation of daytime television was once again clearly evident. There was the affected indignation of presenter Dawn, the stiltedness of the contributors and the empty and meaningless ‘audience’ statements piped up at inopportune moments (‘If love’s on the table, who needs gravy?’).

  Victoria’s African experiences for Comic Relief may have been partly responsible for her choice of journey when she was asked to film a Great Railway Journeys documentary for the BBC in the summer of 1995. While other presenters in the series travelled across such countries as Canada and South America, Victoria turned down journeys in Paraguay and Vietnam in favour of a trip from Crewe to Crewe via the west and east coasts. It was an extremely intelligent decision in that it allowed her to examine the familiar – the everyday that was overlooked. It was a similar approach to her state-of-the-nation themed stage acts and it also had the advantage of setting her apart from the other presenters and maintaining her down-to-earth credentials with the public.

  A reluctance to spend too long away from Grace and Henry also influenced her choice of journey. She filmed it in two-day bursts over six weeks, rather than in one block, so that she could spend as much time as possible at home.

  The nature of the documentary called for a certain amount of spontaneity, which was not always one of Victoria’s strong points. She radiated awkwardness when a drunken Scotsman gave her money for Comic Relief, and her encounters and interviews with a trainspotter, an extra from Brief Encounter, a Barbara Cartland-worshipping cafe owner and a woman with bits of the Forth Bridge falling into her back garden were rather stilted, uncomfortable, forced and patronising. It was only while recording the well-thought-out commentary back in the studio that Victoria added her faintly sarcastic comments and shafts of wit.

  From the outset (‘One of my biggest worries has come true. Under the new-style BBC if you’re a comedian once you hit 40 you have to stop telling jokes and just be in documentaries’) it was clear that this was a darker, more peevish Victoria Wood than the public was used to. In fact, throughout the documentary there was a sense of anger, despondency, gloom and pessimism. At Carnforth she sounded like a Northern matron bemoaning the state of the station, and at Barrow there was lazy outrage (‘I have a huge prejudice against nuclear power – totally ill-informed, but deep rooted’). Cold sarcasm was used on several occasions, from the £125 wage of a rail worker (‘I don’t think you get much more than that for running the railways do you? Oh no, I’m probably thinking of £1.25 million’) to Princess Diana’s involvement with Relate (‘Did I read Lady Di works for it now? I should think she’s in there every morning, wouldn’t you? Opening up and dusting the photocopier, in an overall’). In one of a number of digs against the government she remarked: ‘Now there’s no jobs for young people I wonder if the government will decide it’s not worth educating them and they might as well just start hanging around aged five, just to get used to it.’ Even an eraser purchased from a Christian bookshop and made in Taiwan set her off (‘Probably [made] by a four-year-old manacled to a workbench’).

  ‘What a filthy old world it is’, exclaimed Victoria, who found York dirty, cold and so full of traffic fumes she could hardly breathe. Then, assuming the role of Everywoman, she cut through the flannel to state:

  We need to stop using our cars. We need good, fast trains that connect with other trains that are affordable, reliable, safe with proper food on them with clean toilets. There’s no point calling us customers and smiling at us with walkie talkies if we can’t even buy a ticket at our local station or book over the phone for a journey that involves two different railway companies … We’ve given up on travelling hopefully, but we do expect to arrive.

  ‘It has never been proved that being overweight is bad for your health’, Victoria protested in 1991. When Slimmer Magazine used her as its cover star she raged: ‘I think the whole slimming industry could do with a great big bomb shoved under it – I hate it.’ Five years later, however, when Geoffrey had shed seven stones through a combination of healthy eating, Canadian Airforce exercises, an exercise bike and a rowing machine, her opinion on the whole weight issue changed. ‘I don’t know a single fat person – well, perhaps one – who actually enjoys being fat,’ she said. The new slimline Geoffrey was pictured grinning in the tabloids, proudly disclosing that his waistline had shrunk from 46 inches to 34. ‘He is a shining example’ said Victoria.

  Her own figure remained trim and toned thanks to the aerobics and healthy eating. It was important that she kept in shape for her tours, another of which was scheduled for 1996. Victoria spent the first few months writing the show and trying it out at venues in Watford and High Wycombe on Sunday evenings. Publicity posters for the show showed her hunching her shoulders with her jumper pulled up to her nose. It was an interesting image, suggesting a shyness that was curiously at odds with the scope of the very tour it advertised.

  The 68-date tour kicked off in Leicester on 3 May and would take in Sheffield, Ipswich, Blackpool, Wolverhampton, Bradford, Newcastle, Bournemouth, Brighton, Nottingham, Oxford, Southend, Manchester, Cambridge and London. It was the first time Victoria had left the children at home, reluctantly conceding that it would not be fair to disturb their routines by dragging them all over the country. To ensure she would not be away from home for too long, she tried to work four out of every seven nights and took the whole of August off.

  Photographs of Grace and Henry were the first things that came out of Victoria’s bag whenever she entered a new dressing room, and home-made good luck cards adorned the walls.

  July 1996 marked the 20th anniversary of Geoffrey and Victoria getting together, and to commemorate the occasion they bought each other wedding rings at last, engraved with the date of their first meeting. Victoria regarded the day as of far more significance than her actual wedding day, and every year, she and Geoffrey arranged to do something special on the day. That year Geoffrey had wanted to celebrate by going windsurfing with Victoria in Majorca, but she forgot the plans and found herself working in Southend, so they booked into a hotel there instead.

  For the tour Victoria performed an average of three dates at each venue, apart from Manchester where she has always received the most affectionate responses from fans who regard her as one of their own. The 12 nights she played at the city’s Palace Theatre were topped only by another sell-out 15 nights at the Royal Albert Hall. The tour was heavy going in itself, but there was the additional pressure of being accompanied by a South Bank Show film crew who followed the tour from Blackpool to Manchester. Her tantrum with London Weekend Television over the way it handled Pat and Margaret, and her vow that she would never work with the company again, was forgotten when the opportunity of being the subject of a prestigio
us and intelligent documentary arose.

  Some of the topics the stage show targeted were rather dated. Crossroads, for instance, had not been on television for eight years, and savaging Mr Men books or discussing cellulite and trips to the supermarket was hardly cutting edge. But as Victoria said: ‘I have no aspirations to push back the barriers of comedy.’

  By now she had polished her technique. This involved taking a shared everyday experience, such as moving house, and using it to explore the English character with all its stubbornness, inhibition, cowardice and hypocrisy. As with her 1993 show, Victoria again explained how she was so out of place in Highgate, but again she did not risk incurring audience alienation by actually mentioning the place by name.

  In her two previous tours she had covered, respectively, conception and birth, so she now naturally progressed to the pitfalls of caring for toddlers and how she had become an ‘old bag mother’ since having a second child. What was surprising was the way in which she incorporated her mother, siblings and miserable youth into a routine, which at one time would have been totally out of bounds. Discussing Christmas family get-togethers – a subject she had briefly touched upon in Happy Since I Met You and previously discussed in her 1987 stage show – Victoria asked:

  What is this invisible signal that goes out to normal intelligent people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, this signal that says ‘You must leave the place where you live, where you have a life, where you have fun, and where people respect you, you must leave that place, you must go back to the place where you spent some of the most miserable years of your life.’?

  The only thing worse, she reasoned, was spending Christmas with someone else’s family. This routine once again allowed her to ‘play’ multiple characters and juggle their various exploits to increasingly hysterical effect.

  It was apparent, though seemingly not to her laughing audiences, that Victoria felt a certain distaste for the sort of lives lived and attitudes of those living in an avenue of semis, often seen as her traditional heartland.

  A balance was struck between her belief in the irrelevance of weight (‘Every woman I know, of whatever size, has got a little roll of fat concealed somewhere’) and her old habit of self-deprecation (‘I’ve got a huge roll of fat round here which I don’t worry about, except sometimes I think if I fell into a canal would anyone bother to throw me a life belt’). She told reporters: ‘I’m working on not being self-deprecating. But it’s a British thing, I was born with it. I couldn’t come on stage and tell them how marvellous I am.’

  Victoria continued to build on her growing taste for mime, giving the audience a child’s dazed reaction to its panicking mother; a patient of colonic irrigation; a facelifted dry cleaner; a woman trying to look alluring in lingerie; and a woman having an orgasm.

  Disillusionment and dissatisfaction with sex featured once more (‘It’s never got any better. Sex. There’s just something so stressful about it. I keep thinking in the end they will just have to faze it out altogether’). Victoria also continued to treat weighty contemporary issues with a deftly humorous touch. In the past she had looked at Aids and global warming and now she turned her attention to drugs. ‘I can’t see the point of Ecstasy,’ she said. ‘I think if I wanted to get dehydrated and jump around with a load of people I’ve never met before I could go to a Methodist barn dance.’

  ‘Kimberley’s Friend’ made a welcome return, demonstrating a nice line in bathos (‘I’m going to my evening class, it’s a new one. Awareness of Self it’s called. We use, like, Jungian techniques and confrontational therapies to bring about a profound change in our inner being. Well it was that or basic pastry’). The other two character monologues featured in the show were familiar types: Hayley Bailey the Step class instructor was a variant of ‘Fattitude’s’ Madge, and there was yet another crass Northern woman giving a tour around an unappealing cosmetic surgery.

  In her early stage shows the songs far outnumbered the stand-up (or rather sit-down) routines, but as Victoria’s confidence grew the songs featured less and less. In Lucky Bag for example, there were eleven songs, but the number had been more than halved by her 1996 show. She opened with ‘Baby Boom’, an autobiographical overview with pithy portraits of the periods she lived through. Musically similar to ‘Northerners’, it featured familiar preoccupations with unsatisfactory sex, garments (tie-dyed granddad vests, elasticated slacks), brand names (Ex-lax, Doctor Scholl) and celebrity name-dropping (Sue Lawley, Elton John). She also continued to portray herself as disorganised and off-kilter; a ‘barmy sod’ who feels like a thirteen-year-old. There was a shaft of honesty, however, when she sang: ‘Can’t win, I never fitted in / never was a Sixties child’ and asked ‘Why am I so insecure?’

  ‘Alternative Tango’ was Victoria’s most robust attack on political correctness. She gleefully used the word ‘wanker’, enjoying the effect it had on her surprised audience, and she delighted in coming up with graphic euphemisms for masturbation. By including terms like ‘arsehole’, ‘Paki’ and ‘nig-nog’ it was as if she was deliberately trying to shock the public out of regarding her as safe and cosy, but her fans would accept most anything from her and, anyway, the effect was diluted by mentions of IKEA, Rolo and polyester ties.

  It was only fitting that a name used over and over again by Victoria should be honoured eponymously in song, ‘Pam’ (whose middle name is Pat – another of Victoria’s most-used monikers) is an archetypal Wood character. She is anti-slingbacks but pro gardening trews; she calls the toilet ‘the smallest room’ and is totally nonplussed by whatever life throws at her. She prefers a game of rummy, an Ovaltine, a cup of cocoa, a Ruth Rendell, a bit of ironing or a slice of toast to sex. After Pam’s divorce, lesbian Joan moves into her maisonette and disinterested Pam only agrees to a sapphic liaison if it finishes before an Alan Bennett television play starts. Mussolini got a mention in the course of this song, as did Babycham, Custard Cream, a golfing hat, a mauve string vest and a rainhood.

  Although Victoria denied any autobiographical elements, ‘Andrea’ was a song that perfectly captured the essence of her seventeen-year-old self. Factually it does not correspond: Andrea in the song lives in a terraced house, works in a dead-end job and socialises regularly with a big group of teenage mates. But the sense of her yearning; the urge to escape to ‘a better day’ was very Victoria. The driving, relentless rhythm of the song (whose message was similar to ‘Go With It’) echoed the pursuit of ambition. ‘I’m really looking forward to when I won’t be here / when I fly, fly away’ sang Victoria/Andrea. ‘The day I break away … will be the start of a better day’. Of course Victoria did not reach her better day as soon as she left Bury – or Birmingham for that matter – but like Andrea, she was kept going by a central belief that her ship would come in. The shows ended with the by now traditional ‘Ballad of Barry and Freda’.

  The souvenir programme produced for the tour included a set of photographs of Victoria that captured her beauty. Typically, she did not take it seriously and on the back there was a mock advert for Suzy and Janey’s makeover photos (‘Don’t just be ugly, be a liar as well’). In the ‘before’ photograph we see a lumpen Victoria with greasy hair, a triple chin and unflattering expression. The ‘after’ photograph showed a soft focus Victoria bearing an uncanny resemblance to Princess Diana. Even a back-cover joke in a theatre programme was used by Victoria to illustrate a recurrent point; the discrepancy between appearance and reality.

  The critical opinion of the show was mixed. Reviewing the show in the Observer Sam Taylor described Victoria – the ‘voice of Middle England’ – as a ‘clever, sweetly savage critic of British society’ beneath her veneer of smugness and conventionality. But he added that the material was ‘more like a career reprise than a new show’. In the Mail on Sunday William Cook wrote: ‘The tension between her nationwide fame and her don’t-mind-me stage persona stretches her provincial observations into taut stand-up routines’, and said Victoria described the suburban hinterland ‘with the a
cute ear and eye of a world champion gossip’. And the Independent’s Mark Wareham compared Victoria’s ‘dazzling wordplay’ to that of Alan Bennett in its pacing and dryness (not the best way of winning favour with Victoria, who resented being regarded as Bennett’s ‘Siamese twin’).

  The Independent on Sunday’s Ben Thompson was one of the few dissenters. He wrote: ‘There is an uncomfortable suspicion that Wood’s much-vaunted flair for the everyday might actually be rooted in contempt rather than sympathy. And the objects of her scorn … are easier targets than she pretends … there can be an unsavoury hint of small-mindedness about her, and it would be refreshing if, just occasionally, her comic standpoint could be other than one of aggressive common sense.’

  Victoria would have loomed large in the public consciousness even without the show, which won her the Top Female Comedy Performer title at the 1996 British Comedy Awards. In September her Great Railway Journey was broadcast (‘One of the best on record. Every minute was full of real wit and original observation,’ wrote the Daily Telegraph’s Stephen Pile), and later that month she was the subject of a revealing one hour South Bank Show documentary. The following month she appeared on cinema screens for the first time in Terry Jones’s version of The Wind In The Willows, which, despite being crammed with such British comic talent as Steve Coogan, Michael Palin, Stephen Fry and John Cleese, was not a success. Unimaginative and low budget it still managed to limp into ninth position in the cinema charts, but that was mainly due to its opening coinciding with school half term. In light of its dismal performance it was fortunate for Victoria that she should have had such a tiny cameo in the venture. She played the Tea Lady as a comic northerner.

  She went from working with the Pythons to competing against them in November when the BBC celebrated its 60th birthday with a televised awards ceremony, Auntie’s All Time Greats. As Seen On TV beat Monty Python’s Flying Circus as the favourite comedy series, and Victoria herself defeated John Cleese as the favourite comedy performer. A highlight of the occasion was a special one-off episode of ‘Acorn Antiques’ in which Mrs Overall came out as a lesbian and the show, now sponsored by a stairlift company, was clumsily updated for the 1990s with an Internet sushi bar backdrop.