Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood

by Jasper Rees

  To Emily

  Contents

  DEDICATION

  TITLE PAGE

  EPIGRAPH

  INTRODUCTION – VICTORIA WOODS

  1. FACES

  2. HOUSE ON THE EDGE

  3. BURIED

  4. WORKSHOP

  5. THE GREEN ROOM

  6. NEW FACE

  7. SOPRENDO

  8. TALENTS

  9. AND WALTERS

  10. FUNNY HOW THINGS TURN

  11. SEEN ON TV

  12. DOING IT

  13. AN AUDIENCE WITH GRACE

  14. STAYING IN

  15. UP WEST

  16. HENRY AND ALBERT, MARGARET AND PAT

  17. JOURNEYS

  18. DINNERLADY

  19. TRIMMING

  20. ACORNS

  21. HISTORIAN, 53394

  22. MID LIFE

  23. LOVING ERIC, ERNIE, EUNICE, TUBBY, ENID, JOYCE AND BARRIE

  24. THAT DAY SHE DIRECTED

  25. THE BOGEYMAN

  26. UNFORGOTTEN DREAMS

  SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PHOTO CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ‘Have just made myself laugh so much. I was sitting at my desk, and looked over at my tall shelf that my awards are on. I wondered idly what the nearest one was, a bronze round one, I couldn’t recall … I got up to look; it was a brass ceiling light the electrician had left there … I think I will just leave it there and tell people it’s my prize for best new sitcom from the Oslo television festival.’

  Victoria Wood, fax to Richenda Carey, 13 April 2001

  INTRODUCTION

  VICTORIA WOODS

  ‘My mother sent a note to say you must excuse me …’

  ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’, 1986

  ‘I feel like the luckiest person in the world to be able to do this job, to be able to live this life and just work in a job with other people who want to be there.’ It was the middle of the night when Victoria Wood spoke these words into a cassette recorder. ‘And not just write,’ she went on, ‘but to be able to sell what I write and be on television with what I do. I mean God, I couldn’t ask for more and I don’t. I don’t ask for more.’1

  This was in July 1998. Having spent the previous six months alone in her office writing the first series of dinnerladies, now she was doing the bit she loved best: joining up with talented friends to generate laughter. Uniquely for a British sitcom, every episode of dinnerladies was recorded in front of an audience twice: once on Friday night then, incorporating yet more rewrites from Victoria, again on Saturday night. It made for a gruelling schedule and she was living on adrenalin.

  At the age of forty-five, she had made barely any television in four years; indeed, her previous series – a set of half-hour comedies collected under the title Victoria Wood – was nearly a decade in the past. In the interim, in a succession of national tours each spanning the best part of a year, Victoria had established herself as the preeminent live comic of her generation. In between she had given birth to two children. The joy she felt at making dinnerladies, she confided to the tape, was her reward for taking the painful decision not to have a third.

  As Victoria returned to the BBC, it came to her that this might be the moment to prepare for a memoir. The audio diary is a patchwork in which reflections on the day’s work intermingle with stories from long ago – the time she first encountered Julie Walters, or competed on New Faces in dungarees she loathed. She would record her thoughts and memories early in the morning before she went to work, or late at night after an exhausting day in the rehearsal room or the studio. Often she makes herself laugh. In this particular entry, done so late on a Friday it was already Saturday, Victoria speaks intimately, seeming to let herself into her own secrets as she gives thanks for her good fortune: ‘I feel I’ve been given and given and given so much. I feel I’ve been given so much talent and I’ve somehow struggled to acquire the discipline to use it and it’s not been wasted.’

  At a quarter past one, she pressed stop and went off to tidy the house. In the morning she got up at seven to do a food shop, before heading to Television Centre. The tapes are punctuated with deep, shuddering yawns. They would not be heard by anyone until after her death.

  In the closing credits of Acorn Antiques, wobbling diagonally across the screen, it says the part of Berta is played by ‘Victoria Woods’. Has there ever been a truer typo? More than anyone on your television, Victoria Wood seemed to be plural. In her passport she listed her profession as ‘entertainer’. She was, more accurately, an entertainment industry in the body of one woman. She first appeared on national television winning a heat of a talent show. In her last appearance as herself, baking cakes for Comic Relief, she was still winning. The forty-one years between those two victories brought four stage musicals, four West End residencies, five major national tours, incorporating forty sold-out nights at the Royal Albert Hall, three sketch series, four Christmas specials, eight television dramas plus one short, thirteen documentaries and three appeals shot in fifteen countries, ten original contributions to Comic Relief, eight hours of sitcom, half a dozen half-hour plays, two scripts for children’s TV, more than 180 songs, countless awards, and innumerable gags. She wrote, acted, composed, sang, directed, produced, presented, joked. She played the piano, the trumpet and the ukulele. Once upon a time she even did magic tricks.

  Until Victoria, no comedian had attempted to tell a British audience how women really think and feel. She was the first to talk frankly about the disappointment they were liable to encounter in the bedroom, and the complex relationship they might have with their own bodies. In the early 1980s, as she began in stand-up, she was free to monopolise a field of human experience that was out of bounds to men. ‘They’re terrible things, bras,’ she said in her first solo tour. ‘I read this thing once in a magazine and it was a test to see whether you needed to wear one or not. And the test was if you could hold a pencil underneath. It was very depressing for me. I could hold a small branch of WH Smith.’ This was new. It had always been men who joked about breasts, but Victoria repossessed them. Over the years, onstage on her own, she would describe the journey of the female body as she had progressively experienced it – puberty and periods, conception, pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding to menopause and, finally, hysterectomy. The other subject she majored in was television. She spent a lifetime watching it then, with a savage love, surgically deconstructing it.

  And then there was northernness. ‘We’d like to apologise to viewers in the north,’ said her snooty southern continuity announcer. ‘It must be awful for them.’ Her ear for the gradations of class grew out of jostling tensions in her Mancunian family tree. The sensibility she inherited was Lancastrian, which conferred linguistic riches but also relentless stoicism. ‘They have a really good way of expressing themselves,’ she explained. ‘It’s very unemotional. You’d never say, “Oh darling, you were marvellous.” People in Lancashire would say, “Oh that’s not bad,” or “I didn’t mind it.”’2 Her innate aversion to gush was such that co-workers were often deprived of the praise some of them craved.

  These were her themes. Her turns of phrase were uniquely her own. She wallpapered her world with a vocabulary that made her laugh – macaroon and minestrone, balaclava and raffia, grouting and guttering and vinyl flooring. She adored and frequently used the surname Mottershead, deemed the letter K the alphabet’s funniest – hence Kidderminster, Kiri Te Kanawa, Kirkcudbright, Knutsford. Every word she selected had a weight and a value and a role, even when sometimes her dialogue amounted to a set of Dalíesque non-sequiturs: ‘
My daughter born Christmas Eve, so we called her Brenda.’

  ‘The lady’s credits gang up on you in a way that was once reserved for Orson Welles,’ wrote Clive James in 1980, when she’d barely begun.3 Years before the eruption of all-round brilliance she titled Victoria Wood As Seen on TV, one reviewer was referring to a type of comedy known as ‘Victoria Woodland’,4 another to ‘modern Victoriana’.5 Victoria could compress an essence of who she was through the lens of a television camera and telegraph it out to a theatre seating thousands. She would make audiences laugh till it hurt and could choke them up with sorrow. The widest pendulum swings between joy and pathos were to be found in her songs. They could be merry and oh-so-clever with rat-a-tat triple rhymes to rival the wit of Cole Porter and Noël Coward. Alternatively, they’d rip hearts in two.

  Thus Victoria Woods. The misnomer was a coded joke. One night in May 1974, the month she turned twenty-one, Victoria in her Birmingham student bedsit watched till the closedown of the day’s broadcasting in the hope of hearing her name spoken on television for the first time. ‘Also appearing,’ advised the regional announcer, ‘Virginia Wood.’ Later that year a nervous compère on New Faces announced her as ‘Joanna Wood’, and, after she won her heat, her first ever newspaper interview referred to her as ‘Christine Wood’. Once, doing a play in Sheffield, she was introduced to Hayley Mills, who called her ‘Veronica Wood’. In her act she enjoyed mixing herself up with two Virginias, Woolf and Wade.

  There were two Victorias in another sense. When they met her, people were looking for their friend Victoria, the one who always seemed to be bouncing for joy on the piano stool of life. One after another they were surprised to find her shy and guarded, not laughing and larking and yanking her sleeves up to unleash yet more jokes. That Victoria Wood, who bounded on stage to greet an audience with a glittering smile and a cheery hello, was an optical illusion, conjured up with the assistance of an actual conjuror who happened to be her husband Geoffrey Durham, better known to the public as the Great Soprendo. It was this mirage whom readers of the Independent voted the Briton they’d most like to have as a neighbour, over and above the Queen Mum.

  ‘People think I’m nice,’ she once told the Radio Times.6 People were right. Many friends and colleagues testify to Victoria’s kindness, her generosity, her loyalty. She was a good and wise person to know in a crisis. But an ambitious woman coming to light entertainment in the all-male 1970s required something else. Victoria knew with absolute conviction how she wished things to be done, and she would say so. She wanted her lines to be spoken as written, with the stress correctly placed to land the gag. Some of the cast of dinnerladies, recalling the strain of learning and relearning her dialogue, still appear to suffer from a sort of post-traumatic sitcom disorder. Later, when Victoria began to direct her own work for the stage, she deployed none of the coaxing diplomacy that traditionally goes with the role. It was a culture shock for her casts. But all concur that, in the matter of selling her comedy to an audience, she was always always right. On rare occasions when she found herself not in charge, she could grow frustrated. She was nearly sixty when, in Kolkata to front a documentary about tea, she vented to a friend back home: ‘Am writing this in hotel loo escaping from production meeting where I am repressing the cry “you are all fuckwits please just do as I say …”’7

  When the distance between the two Victorias became apparent, it could be a shock. A couple of months before dinnerladies was filmed, she went to a party hosted by the actress Richenda Carey, whom Victoria knew via her husband Geoffrey’s regular attendance at Quaker meetings. She cut an isolated figure among socially confident actors. Her hostess was so troubled to discover Victoria was no mingler that she rose in the night to fax an apology: ‘It was only after, when you left, that I thought, no, I’ve just been really thick about what it must be like to be you … I think it’s because you are in people’s sitting rooms, and being very Down Home and sort of Ordinary and Friendly, that it gives a weird impression of intimacy which is completely unfounded.’8 People felt that they knew Victoria, but this was because she knew them. She knew all about ordinary people living ordinary lives in ordinary bodies, and she used her knowledge to make extraordinary comedy.

  Her education in such things began when she was a teenager who watched and listened from the wings. She prowled guiltlessly, even ruthlessly, among her friends too. Celia Imrie accepted that the price of being in Victoria’s gang was to have her life and even her appearance mined for comedy. Julie Walters was warier. ‘It would be hard to be weak with her,’ she says. ‘Very hard. Early on it was a very immature jokey relationship, so there was no place for that. But generally to be weak with her was not a good idea. Because she would possibly use it.’ Mostly, though, Victoria scavenged for material in the rich seam of her own memories.

  She started a diary in her late twenties – coincidentally or not, the same sort of age as her father began his – and stuck to it for more than three decades. As for the idea of a biography, such a book was first proposed in 1986 by Geoffrey Strachan, her publisher at Methuen, soon after he’d brought out her first collection of sketches. Victoria herself mentioned it in the form of a joke on tour in 1993. ‘Maybe I should start having an affair,’ she would say onstage, ‘because somebody will want to write a biography of me one day and there’ll be nothing to put in it … Perhaps I’ll just settle for a very, very thin biography. Was born, lived, told a few jokes, knackered a few bras in the tumble drier, died.’ In 1997, by which time Victoria was so famous that the Post Office could deliver fanmail addressed ‘Victoria Wood, London’ to her door in Highgate, she was approached by a fellow old girl of Bury Grammar School about collaborating on such a project. She politely declined, but it helped prompt her to start keeping the audio diary. Then, when dinnerladies was being broadcast to millions, she was asked again by a leading publisher. ‘I keep thinking I could write a good book too!’ she replied.9 The arrival of an unauthorised biography in 2002 – she asked everyone she could think of not to talk to its author – focused her mind once again. She was an enthusiastic devourer of biographies and memoirs, including no fewer than three by the Scottish actress Molly Weir. But somehow, while publishers kept tempting her with ever-increasing offers, she always had something else that wanted doing more. Instead Victoria’s instinct was to pass personal truths through the prism of her imagination. She told her story by other means, filtering her childhood, her marriage and the loneliness that came after her divorce into songs, sketches and dramas. Meanwhile, on the walls of her home, framed covers of the Radio Times and TV Times measured out her life in carbon-dating haircuts. She once even had the idea of chopping up all the costumes she’d worn onstage and, with her sewing machine, fashioning them into a quilt: her CV would be draped across her bed in electric blue, canary yellow, rainbow Lycra and of course Kimberley orange, in and among the elegant crease-free suits and coats that Betty Jackson designed for her.

  I first met Victoria in 1999 when she was making the second series of dinnerladies. For the next decade we had many conversations in which she would talk of her current work but also offer detailed answers about her childhood and her earlier years. What was striking in someone so very famous, aside from her seriousness, was her honesty. Usually there’s a formality to such encounters – a consciousness that on some level an interview is a transaction. With Victoria I could detect no such distancing membrane. In 2007 I asked her if she might one day write an autobiography. ‘I could write a memoir,’ she said. ‘I’ve been offered a ton of money. I’m sort of interested. I just hate going into a bookshop and seeing all those books by people who can’t write with their big fat photograph on the cover, people who’ve done nothing and can’t string a sentence together, and I just think it devalues people who can put a sentence together and can write a book. I would like to write one about my first few years in show business.’10

  While that memoir was never written, our hours and hours of interviews have allowed me to place
Victoria’s voice at the heart of her own story. I have also been able to draw on her archive of correspondence, notebooks, scrapbooks, scripts, tapes, cuttings and photograph albums, as well as letters, faxes and emails which have been generously shared by many, above all a correspondence spanning more than forty years with Jane Wymark, whom she met at Birmingham University in 1971. Victoria, it goes without saying, was an inimitable letter writer. She could be dazzlingly witty and then frankly confessional or, in the best of times and the worst, both at once.

  The earliest sample of her handwriting is from a postcard written to her sister Rosalind in 1957, when she was four. ‘LOVE VICKI’, she inscribed above a couple of crosses, one vertical as a crucifix.11 The last letter written in her name was in fact composed by Cathy Edis, her personal assistant for nearly twenty years. Victoria had returned home after three months in hospital when yet another offer to write a memoir came in. Cathy ventriloquised a reply: ‘I have too many other things to work at and have not yet found the time or energy to devote to my memoirs! I shall let you know when that moment arrives.’12 Two weeks later the nation was mourning Victoria’s loss.

  While I have pieced together the jigsaw of Victoria’s life wherever possible using her own words, her story could not have been told without the guidance of many others: her children Grace Durham and Henry Durham, their father Geoffrey Durham, her sisters Rosalind Watson and Penelope Wood, her assistant Cathy Edis, her so-called ‘lady bodyguards’ Lucy Ansbro and Adele Fowler of Phil McIntyre Entertainment, her original gang Julie Walters, Celia Imrie and Duncan Preston, her long-standing enabler Geoff Posner, her directors and producers, tour managers and promoters, musical collaborators, friends from school and university and beyond, a large support network of women friends, Piers Wenger and the younger gang she gathered around her in later years as she tilted from comedy to drama, documentary and musicals.

  One of those newer friends was Daniel Rigby. In 2010 they played mother and son in Eric & Ernie, the BBC drama about the young Morecambe and Wise. After the shoot, Victoria invited him to be her lodger, and together on the sofa they became obsessive about MasterChef. Long after he’d moved out, he turned to her for advice when struggling with some writing. ‘If it was easy everyone would do it,’ she counselled by email. ‘And you are bothering because although it may not feel like it, you are happier bothering than not bothering.’13 Victoria was happier bothering. While the resulting work occupies the foreground of her story, in the background there are other constants: exercising, watching TV, reading, donating blood, doing charity fundraisers, baking spectacular birthday cakes, sticking snaps in albums, walking up and down fells, sorting cupboards and taking stuff to Oxfam, eating egg and chips in cafés, shopping in Brent Cross, going to films and shows, renovating homes, collecting teapots, hosting Christmas parties, curating her friendships.