Ultimately, Victoria saw and wrote it as a love story and she deliberately chose a title to reflect that.
Loving Miss Hatto was broadcast on BBC1 on 23 December at 8.30 p.m. Rory Kinnear and Maimie McCoy played the couple in their younger days, with Alfred Molina and Francesca Annis earning equal acclaim as the aged Barrie and Joyce.
As with the pre-publicity for Eric & Ernie, Victoria was quick to thank the BBC, saying, ‘It’s taken a long time to bring it to the screen but I’ve been lucky in that top-quality people have been involved. It feels like it’s been really well put together by a great team. I’m proud of it.’
The Telegraph’s Michael Hogan felt the film was ‘a quietly compelling, moving drama,’ and the Independent’s Arifa Akbar described it as ‘gently moving’ even though ‘Wood’s distinctive voice could at times be heard being spoken through her characters, and for these few moments, they lost their solidity.’ A more critical note was struck by the Guardian, with Andrew Anthony writing, ‘while the script and art direction summoned the pinched dreams of post-war Britain, neither was capable of doing much with the dramatic inertia of the source material. Instead there was that familiar sense of a small story inflated to a size that its characters, despite several strong performances, simply couldn’t sustain.’
Promotional duties for Loving Miss Hatto meant Victoria had been in Edinburgh in the summer of 2012 for the International Television Festival. While there, she made a guest appearance for the BBC Scotland drama series Case Histories. The film, which was adapted from Kate Atkinson’s novel Started Early, Took My Dog, was the first of three stand-alone dramas in the series. In it, Victoria played Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police officer and lonely security guard who, impulsively, buys a child who is being mistreated by her mother.
As a fan of Atkinson’s work, the role appealed to Victoria, as did the idea of wearing comfortable footwear and not having to carry the whole film. In discussing the part, she reflected on how her years as a comic had helped her with serious dramatic roles. ‘I just think it’s so hard to be a comedian,’ she said. ‘If you can do that, you’ve got all the muscles to do the other stuff. Most comedians have got a really good understanding of how people behave.’
Case Histories was another example of how much in demand Victoria was. During the same period she guest-starred in sketch show Ruddy Hell! It’s Harry and Paul as a ‘minor royal’ whose encounters with the public comically revealed how gloriously out of touch her character was (recommending pigeon to a starving beggar, she tells him: ‘It’s rather a bony bird, but with a wonderful deep gamey flavour’). Victoria could afford to be choosy and these offers to appear in other people’s work were only accepted if she deemed the quality to be of a high enough standard.
It would be a challenge for any presenter to make an engaging two-hour documentary about a leaf, but Victoria achieved it with Victoria Wood’s Nice Cup of Tea, where one English icon explored another.
‘It’s a story of rivers, mountains, history, politics, imperialism, espionage and addiction,’ she said of the two hour-long programmes shown on BBC1 in 2013. The documentary was partly inspired by her earlier documentary about the British Empire where she had visited a Darjeeling tea plantation. Nice Cup of Tea was an investigation into the history and culture of tea and it took Victoria to China, India, America, New York, Blackpool and Harrogate. Along the way she visited an opium den and also interviewed celebrity tea fans Matt Smith, Graham Norton and Morrissey. The affectionate banter between the singer and Victoria came from decades of mutual admiration. She presented him with a tea cosy and when he visited Victoria at her Highgate home, she made him chips before taking him to the local pub, which earned Victoria a lot of kudos from her songwriter son.
The logistics of That Day We Sang meant it was too expensive to ever take on tour, so when Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre sought permission to stage the musical as its Christmas 2013 production Victoria gladly gave her blessing. She was already involved in making a film version of it for television and so declined the offer to co-produce it at the Exchange. Instead, she did some rewrites, added a couple of new songs and sat in on auditions.
The investment and effort that Victoria had put into the 2011 stage production of That Day We Sang, and the fact that it only ran for 10 days, made it unthinkable that she would not want to share it with a wider audience, and the BBC was receptive when she broached the idea of turning it into a film.
Although Victoria had only had one previous experience of directing for television – her 15-minute Christmas drama for Sky – it was a sign of her confidence that she took on the 90-minute musical spectacular.
‘I didn’t want to direct the first few things that I had written as I didn’t feel I had the capability,’ she said. ‘But over the years as I’ve done more things, more and more people have said I should direct and it started to feel like the right next step to take.’ She knew it was a huge undertaking but she felt that her relative inexperience was actually an advantage as it helped dim awareness of the enormity of the task. ‘I lived in a blissful state of ignorance,’ she said.
Initially, Victoria found the advantages of filming extremely liberating. Apart from making it easier to cut from different scenes and time periods, it also meant Tubby and Enid could be shown singing live in real locations. ‘It gives a spontaneity and freshness and reality you don’t get when actors are lip-syncing to something they recorded,’ explained Victoria.
What she particularly enjoyed about film musicals was that they were not ‘real life’. One minute characters would be talking and then suddenly bursting into song and dancing. This worked particularly well for Tubby and Enid as it allowed them to sing things they could not say.
One drawback to filming was the problem of finding suitable locations for those places mentioned in the script. Manchester’s modernistic Piccadilly Gardens is unrecognisable from its original appearance, and a hotel now stands on the site of the Free Trade Hall, which was why Huddersfield Town Hall was used instead.
The film included an additional song for Enid and it allowed Victoria to weave in extra elements of the story, such as an expansion of the role of Mr Kirkby, the gruff choir organiser played by Eric & Ernie’s Daniel Rigby. Some of the musical’s references to the internal workings of Granada TV in the 1960s were removed for the film, as was mention of the new Asda store that had caused much excitement in the 1960s when it opened down the road from the teenage Victoria’s Bury home.
None of the original stage cast reprised their roles for the film and the leads were taken by West End stars Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton. The award-winning pair already had the necessary chemistry having appeared together in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Ball, who had been Victoria’s first choice to play Tubby in the stage musical, was a self-confessed Victoria Wood obsessive and was delighted to be working with his idol. ‘Victoria knows the technical side, but really understands actors,’ he said. ‘She knows what we need and is really articulate and able to share that information with you … I didn’t know what Victoria would be like, but she’s just brilliant. We didn’t stop laughing.’
Imelda Staunton was already a friend of Victoria’s having worked alongside her in a very lucrative job in Kenya on Millennium Night. She had also appeared in her 2009 Christmas special.
‘I think she [Victoria] always recognises, although dressed up in comedy, people’s vulnerabilities and weaknesses,’ she said. ‘Victoria writes so well for northern people … she writes for these people where she comes from. This is what she knows, she recognises it, her ear for the tune and of the way they speak is phenomenal.’
Staunton, nicknamed ‘the Pocket Rocket’ by Victoria, was also impressed by her skills as a director. ‘She’s given great notes and she knows what she wants. It doesn’t always work when writers direct but because her ear is so acute, and she has been so involved in all the shows that she’s done, she knows what works, how it works an
d what’s needed to make a gag work.’
Fittingly for a film that included a number of fantasy song and dance sequences which were pastiches of classic Hollywood musicals, That Day We Sang was given a cinema premiere. The red carpets were rolled out for Victoria and the cast when they attended the preview screening at Salford’s Vue Cinema in November 2014. As the end credits rolled, she must have derived great satisfaction at seeing the logo for her production company, Blue Door Adventures.
Being a musical love story about the middle-aged meant That Day We Sang had limited appeal to a younger generation of television viewers. Perhaps that was why the film was screened on BBC2 rather than BBC1. It was given the prime-time Boxing Day slot of 9 p.m., though, and appetites were whetted by the one-hour documentary, That Musical We Made, earlier on in the day, with a repeat of Victoria’s 2009 Christmas special immediately preceding the film.
Surprisingly, the film was not even nominated for a BAFTA Television Award although it was entered into the sound and production design categories for BAFTA’s Television Craft Awards.
In what would turn out to be her final appearance on terrestrial television, Victoria showed she was a woman totally at ease with herself.
‘I was always planning ahead, saying “When I’m 50, I shall do this or that”,’ she said. ‘I have learnt not to do that and I am much happier. Living in the present, you actually experience things, rather than always thinking or worrying about the next thing. I used to be perpetually anxious … I have been too perfectionist about lots and lots of things, too rigid. It doesn’t work, it just rebounds on you. You are constantly fighting a losing battle if you say that life only works if you do this and this and this. Then the minute one piece falls away, you feel that you’ve failed. That’s the terrible snare of perfectionism. You can never be perfect, so you’re always struggling.’
It was therefore a spontaneous and relaxed Victoria who appeared on The Great Comic Relief Bake Off in March 2015. She thoroughly enjoyed the experience and even won the competition with her ‘Mrs Overall Two Soups Cake’.
A little later on in 2015 she filmed scenes for another adaptation of a classic children’s book. Fungus the Bogeyman, based on Raymond Briggs’ celebrated story, was the centrepiece of Sky 1’s Christmas programming. Set in a world where good hygiene was regarded as abnormal, Victoria played the part of the eccentric Eve, who takes in the runaway teenage son of Fungus.
But while her co-stars Timothy Spall, Joanna Scanlan and Keeley Hawes all attended the launch at the Charlotte Street Hotel in London on 23 November, Victoria was unaccountably absent.
20
VICTORIA DIED ON the morning of 20 April 2016. The news of her death was not revealed until the afternoon. In a brief statement her publicist, Neil Reading, announced to a shocked nation that she had died after ‘a short but brave battle with cancer’.
The outpouring of grief began almost immediately. Up and down the country those who had never even met Victoria felt compelled to share the sad news with each other. Within half an hour of the announcement being made, Prime Minister David Cameron declared that Victoria had been a ‘national treasure loved by millions’, and celebrities such as J.K. Rowling and John Cleese lined up to pay tribute.
There was a sense that it was not just the unexpectedness of her death that triggered such an overwhelming reaction, but the fact that it was Victoria Wood who had died. With such an intimate understanding of their lives, people felt she knew them and they knew her. It was almost as if a close friend or relative had passed away.
There was a reminder of this unique bond and Victoria’s allegiance with her public later on in the day when her family posted a quote of hers: ‘Life’s not fair is it? Some of us drink champagne in the fast lane, and some of us eat our sandwiches by the loose chippings on the A597’.
A devastated Julie Walters was only able to write: ‘Too heart sore to comment. The loss of her is incalculable’. Victoria’s brother, Chris, revealed the news came as a great shock to him.
Victoria, who as a baby left her maternity home on Coronation Day and was consequently given a regal name, died on the eve of the Queen’s 90th birthday. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the two women are among the most admired in the land. But it was the additional love and affection that Victoria inspired that meant it was she, not the monarch, who was at the forefront of people’s minds on 21 April and news of her death dominated the front page of every national newspaper.
It emerged that she had been ill for six months. A friend said: ‘At first doctors didn’t know what the problem was. It was very small and they couldn’t find it. After her diagnosis her decline was very, very quick.’
Michael Ball was one of a very small group of friends who knew about Victoria’s condition. He visited her until she became too frail, and revealed: ‘It was a real shock and a blow to her and she never stopped fighting. I’ve never known anyone to be so brave and so stoic and so upbeat and positive.’
Although hospitalised in her final weeks, Victoria insisted that she be allowed to spend her final days at home. The evening before her death she was reportedly sitting up in bed laughing and joking with Grace and Henry. They were with her, as was Geoffrey, when she died the following morning.
Throughout Victoria’s life the disproportionate amount of attention given to her weight meant it became firmly tied in with her identity. Even in later years, it was a rare interviewer who failed to mention her past struggles with food or her present, more slimmer, figure. It was therefore horribly ironic when, in the aftermath of her death, it was reported that a fellow hospital patient failed to recognise her because of the dramatic weight loss her illness had caused.
Sue Spinks, who met Victoria in the cafe of the Finchley Memorial Hospital, was not being insensitive when she spoke of her shock. But it was a detail that was immediately picked up on.
‘Victoria was on her own at the time, and just started chatting to me,’ said Spinks, who was at the hospital for blood tests. ‘We were both waiting in a cafe area ahead of going in to see a doctor, and she was asking lots about me. But it wasn’t until she got up and left that I even realised who she was.
‘She looked so different. She had lost a lot of weight. I remembered her being a little chubby before, but she was very thin and her hair looked much darker.’
Victoria had made it plain that she wanted her funeral to be a low-key event, so only family members and very close friends attended the small and intimate service in Golders Green on 4 May. The crematorium was where the funerals of Joyce Grenfell and Joe Orton – whose work had inspired and influenced Victoria – had also taken place. It was reported that a strong element of humour ran through the ceremony and the tone was light-hearted and celebratory with much laughter.
Among Victoria’s fans there was a desire for a more public way of commemorating her and a campaign was launched for a statue of Victoria in the guise of ‘Kimberley’s Friend’ to be erected in the centre of Manchester.
‘There’s still so much more I want to do,’ Victoria said when she turned 60. She felt, she said, like she was in her full stride. She had not ruled out a return to stand-up and, in the last year of her life, she began writing a film. As well as the loss of Victoria herself, it was the loss of all this potential that was mourned. Future years might have seen her reach even greater heights of creativity, brilliance and success, delighting theatre, television and cinema audiences with her unique gifts.
Loved and admired in equal measure, Victoria has left an unfillable void.
INDEX
The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.
Abracawhat? 90
‘Acorn Antiques’ 13, 168, 173–5, 185, 198, 233, 234, 270, 313, 315, 322, 324–5, 337, 338, 341
Acorn Antiques: The Musical! 315, 317, 318–23, 324–7, 331, 334
&nb
sp; ‘Alternative Tango’ (song) 268
‘Andrea’ (song) 268–9, 302
Angina Monologues, The 340–1
Archers, The 179, 295
At It Again 311–14, 333
Audience With Victoria Wood, An 200–2, 203
‘Baby Boom’ (song) 267
BAFTA 60th anniversary celebration, 2007 333–4
Ballet Shoes 332–3
Barmy 196
‘Ballad of Barry and Freda’ (‘Let’s Do It’) (song) 180, 187, 189, 269, 338, 341
‘Bastards’ (song) 159, 188, 241
Bennett, Alan 93, 102, 110, 141, 142, 171, 219, 228, 255, 268, 269
Best of British 292
Blake, Susie 166, 167, 168, 171–2, 231, 233, 338
‘Bored With This’ (song) 102–3, 241
Borrowers, The 352–3
‘Boutique, The’ (sketch) 144
Bowker, Peter 344, 345, 347, 352
Branch, Gail (née Melling) 28, 29–30, 32, 34, 35, 39, 40, 46, 47, 49, 58, 62, 125
Broadbent, Jim 108, 167, 196, 214, 261
Caine, Marti 82, 83, 84, 107, 142
Case Histories 357
Codron, Michael 109–10, 112, 116, 122, 148
Comedians, The 136–7
Comic Relief 199–200, 223–4, 260–1, 262, 271, 295, 337, 362
Coronation Street 69, 81, 107, 113, 130, 132, 135, 153, 187, 197–8, 215, 220, 280, 287, 295, 297, 347
Dad’s Army 301, 307, 314
Desert Island Discs 189, 343–4
dinnerladies 247, 271–5, 278–93, 294–5, 298, 299–304, 306, 307, 325
‘Don’t Do It’ (song) 144–5, 152, 159, 172, 188, 193, 241
‘Don’t Get Cocky Baby’ (song) 128–9, 241
Durham, Geoffrey (husband) 89–90, 93–4, 101, 106, 107, 114, 116, 117–19, 133, 135, 137, 141, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 154–5, 163, 165, 169, 173, 178, 179, 182–3, 190, 199, 200, 202–3, 204, 205, 218–19, 225, 230, 237, 238, 243, 244, 258, 260, 263, 264, 271, 276, 298–9, 315–17, 343, 364
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