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

by Jasper Rees

  One of the things Victoria didn’t do at home much was homework. She would come up with ruses to explain its absence: ‘When we used to give our essays in, I used to steal the last eight from about Sutcliffe through to Wilson and throw them away. The teacher would say, “Oh, I see there are a few missing.” I’d say, “Mine was in there.” It wasn’t.’26 (In truth she pulled off this stunt only once.) There was other chaotic behaviour. She pocketed money raised from a charity walk, pinched books from Bury Library, tied a girl in a cupboard. More innocently she rejoiced in mischief. In one lunch hour, when it was strictly out of bounds, she lured two girls into the main hall and played them ‘The Stripper’ on the Steinway. The deputy head appeared and asked Victoria to identify the tune. She fobbed her off with a made-up composer and opus number.

  Her rebellious instincts meant she was not an easy girl to teach. ‘She’d sit at the back in the Lower Fifth,’ says Janet Davies, who taught Victoria music for O level, ‘and she’d be very quietly disruptive. But nice. I couldn’t help laughing when she said things you were sort of not meant to hear. She had something about her; there was a bit of spark. Some teachers would simply find her annoying for not fulfilling her potential because she was lazy and didn’t get on with anything she’d been told to do.’ She certainly didn’t knuckle down in music O level: ‘She didn’t shine because she found it a bit boring. You had to follow rules. That was the way to be able to get good marks. She liked to write as she wanted to write.’ Her English teacher Leonie Welch found her compositions ‘were always strikingly original – although not necessarily what I asked for. On one occasion I asked for a one-minute talk on any subject, and Victoria proceeded to speak for two minutes about elastic bands. It was quite brilliant.’27

  Victoria took the chance to write what she wanted in Cygnus, the school magazine whose editorial committee she joined in the Upper Fifth. As the only trumpeter, she reported on the activities of the school orchestra, signing her name Vicky Wood. Unusually for Cygnus, another piece of hers had no byline. She titled it ‘Pardon?’ and into its few unpunctuated lines condensed a prophecy of her future path:

  I was born with a warped sense of humour and when I was carried home from being born it was Coronation Day and so I was called Victoria but you are not supposed to know who wrote this anyway it is about time I unleashed my pent-up emotions in a bitter comment on the state of our society but it’s not quite me so I think I shall write a heart-warming story with laughter behind the tears and tears behind the laughter which means hysterics to you Philistines …28

  She had just turned fourteen. Her facility with words prompted her to write to Willie Rushton, the satirical humourist who co-founded Private Eye: ‘I wrote what I thought was the funniest letter imaginable. I never got a reply. I hated him for that.’29

  Bursting with a desire to be noticed, Victoria did not yet have access to the means. Her best opportunities for self-expression came outside the school. At thirteen she joined the Bury Military Brass Band, which also had room for woodwind, so the repertoire expanded beyond marches to the likes of Duke Ellington, a taste for which she had inherited from Stanley. She loved her time in the band, which rehearsed in Tottington Road: ‘I would be in the middle – and if I got there a bit late I’d have to squeeze along the row with my trumpet case and music stands are never very stable and I would knock them over with my breasts as I went past.’30 Even in jest she was conscious, for the first time, of being a young woman in a masculine environment – there were forty males and three girls, who had to wear knee-high socks: ‘I wasn’t bad at playing, but I wasn’t good at marching. I couldn’t get the two together. You’ve got a little card stuck on your trumpet. If you play second trumpet, all the notes are the same because it’s a harmony part. It all looks the same; you lose your place because you’re wobbling along the cobbles. And my socks used to fall down. They used to shout at me from the back, “Tell that bloody girl to pull her socks up.”’31 She reported one exchange at rehearsal to Penelope: ‘I was sitting next to these two old blokes. One said, “Do you like my new tie?” And his friend said, “Oh, I thought it was your tongue hanging out.”’ ‘Older men were attracted to her,’ says Lesley Fitton, another lifelong friend she made at school, ‘and she had a horrible fascination with them. She used to snog unsuitable bandists behind the UCP in Bury.’ (The UCP was a restaurant run by United Cattle Products.) There was less desirable attention from older strangers in the cinema, or at the bus stop: ‘Even if you looked like the back of a pickle factory if you’d got breasts … you’d be in a bus queue and you’d think, is that somebody’s briefcase? Oh no it’s not. Somebody would give you a lift home and go, “Shall we just pull in for bit?” “No, get off!”’32

  But she didn’t seem to be interested in boys of her own age and, perhaps fearful that it wouldn’t be reciprocated, made no effort to flirt with them. In her mid-teens she was ‘a slightly awkward person physically,’ says Lesley Fitton, ‘slightly gawky, a bit shy and self-conscious. She wasn’t actually a fat schoolgirl, but she was a bit top-heavy, but always had really good legs and also uncompromisingly straight hair cut like a paintbrush.’ Lesley once persuaded Victoria to come along to a school disco at Gigg Lane, Bury FC’s ground. The girl who by now always wore jeans and was fixated on baseball boots was lent a little green dress: ‘She completely hated it. She was just completely like a fish out of water. The rest of us were typical teenage Sixties girls in pastel short things and frosted pink lipstick. That was absolutely not her scene.’ Only later would she come to regard these agonies as an advantage. By staying outside of things, and not making herself available for any form of social interaction, she was able to watch instead. ‘If I’d been thin as a teenager and gone out with boys,’ she reasoned, ‘I wouldn’t have had anything to write about.’33 But then she did meet a boy.

  4

  WORKSHOP

  ‘Rochdale was hugely liberal compared with Bury. Rochdale had the sculpture festival, it had sculpture in the streets, it had the poetry festival, it had public speaking. Bury had an abattoir.’

  Parkinson, 2000

  Victoria was fifteen when an opportunity came up to take part in an enlightened experiment in arts education in Rochdale. The previous year Rosalind was invited to join a new initiative called the Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop. It was founded by David Morton, a graduate of Central School of Speech and Drama. The council’s education committee, chaired by the (posthumously disgraced) Liberal MP Cyril Smith, briefed him to set up a youth theatre. Morton was a visionary who developed the workshop into a pioneering forum where young people were encouraged to explore, experiment and create. Local teenagers would attend two or three evenings a week, and there were daily workshops during the summer holidays. In September 1967 Rosalind was in the cast of the inaugural production, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, for which she also designed the set. Morton was, in her estimation, ‘a uniquely inspiring man who was able to get the balance between being your mate and showing leadership. And he was ahead of his time in treating girls and women as equals.’

  Rosalind’s previous efforts to lure Victoria to group activities – the Brownies, Girl Guides, ballroom dancing, rambling – had all failed: ‘She had an absolute horror of anything organised. I took her along and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like being bossed about. Anything that was like school she didn’t like. She didn’t do things where she was part of a team. She could be very stubborn.’ In an unguarded moment she admitted she couldn’t see herself ever getting a boyfriend: ‘I said, “You should come to the theatre workshop.”’ It took a while to overcome her usual objections, but she caved in the third time Rosalind mentioned it, agreeing ‘on the grounds that she could meet boys’.

  Victoria started attending the evening sessions in 1968, joining a group of forty teenagers. By then Morton had taken over the top storey of a large Victorian school building at the far end of Rochdale, where he installed lighting, sound rigs and tiered flexible seating. Barring a lo
ne physics teacher, Victoria had barely ever encountered a male authority figure before. Morton was a tall, bearded, smartly dressed man with a resonant baritone voice who gently exuded authority. He diligently corresponded with each and every participant, advising them by letter of rehearsal times and summer schedules. The ethos of the youth theatre workshop was based on improvisation and experiment, and designed to empower the creative instincts of young performers. It could not have been better tailored to Victoria’s needs. Yet even now her social awkwardness imposed a barrier. ‘Outside the impro sessions she was incredibly shy in the early days,’ says Joe Dawson, who was a couple of years older. ‘She was often to be seen sitting in a corner nursing her trumpet. During the impro work she would come alive, often throwing inspired curve balls of observed northern life into the mix. She flourished and was soon an integral and popular member.’

  At first Victoria travelled on the bus to Rochdale with her sister but, once working on different productions, she started going on her own. ‘So she made her own friends,’ says Rosalind. ‘Shortly after I introduced her, I didn’t see much of her.’ (One of her new friends was Mary Jo Randle, who would play Kelly Marie Tunstall’s friend at the bus stop in Victoria Wood As Seen on TV.) The sisters also had quite different interests. Rosalind was drawn to the mind-and-body sessions, featuring much meditative lying on the floor or stretching and strengthening, while Victoria, wary of leotards, preferred the music, poetry, design and script workshops.

  That summer she had a small role in Ann Jellicoe’s The Rising Generation, premiered at the Royal Court only the year before, and painted the set. She was credited as Vikki Wood. In November she looked after the props on Arnold Wesker’s Chips with Everything. Both plays, requiring big casts and shaking a fist at the status quo, were a Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop signature. In a vacuum, with no template to go on, Morton laid on a remarkably complete introduction to drama in all its forms. In Victoria’s first summer school there were three resident tutors, one from Columbia University, and a dozen guest tutors, experts who covered every aspect of theatre craft – stage fights and masks, lighting and costume design, voice and speech. There was even advice on dramatic criticism, plus a session with the Olympic fencing coach. Free performances were laid on. ‘I hope for excellent attendance,’ Morton said of one entertainment he’d brought in, ‘in order to justify the expense involved. Bring your friends.’ One of them was a reading by the poets Adrian Henri and Adrian Mitchell. Peter James, who co-founded the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, came to Rochdale to give a three-day course in directing in 1969. When an outing took Victoria to Liverpool nine months later to see Beckett’s Endgame, she looked him up and he gave her a tour of the theatre. James remembers her ‘with her school uniform and satchel, looking extremely inquisitive’.

  What Victoria thrived on was taking part: ‘It was my complete transformation. I found there was something I could do. After being told constantly I had terrible handwriting and I was grubby and no good at hockey, always being told you’re no good at this, suddenly there were things I could do. And I was good at them and I got laughs. I thought, oh yeah. And that feeds you if you feel that you’ve not been quite adequate up until then.’1 Whenever she talked about the Workshop in later life, she spoke of it in similar terms: it was her ‘salvation’,2 the moment she was ‘for the first time feeling comfortable about doing anything’.3 Morton offered pupils four levels of participation, ranging from casual attendance to full time. Victoria followed her sister and chose full time. The three three-hour sessions a day started at ten o’clock and ended twelve hours later, and people had to keep an eye on which they were required to attend. Punctuality and reliability, not hitherto Victoria’s forte, were insisted upon.

  During breaks she and Joe Dawson would sometimes slip off to play piano duets. By the late 1960s, having spent so much time at home practising, Victoria had developed into a highly competent sight reader. Her own taste was for the rich harmonies of the American songbook and the English wit of Coward or Flanders and Swann, but she also loved to customise classical repertoire – when they played Grieg’s Norwegian Dances together, she would scat along over the top. She was also writing songs for the Workshop, playing the trumpet and, back at home, composing a duet for piano and flute in the style of an English pastoral, to be performed with Lesley Fitton. Asked for a title by her music teacher, at the last minute she called it ‘Serenade to a Cuckoo’.

  Victoria’s witty persona and zest for participation caught the eye of the Theatre Workshop’s rising star. Bob Mason was two years older. In the year they met he won first prize in the Daily Mirror’s national verse-writing competition with a poem called ‘Loughrigg Autumn’, which traded in doomy romance (‘I touch the sodden rug of her life / And kiss the tears of love / From her cold face’). He was a serious young man but also, according to Joe Dawson, ‘a strong character with a Bohemian offbeat view of the world and a great sense of humour’. Victoria later joked that, being a poet, ‘he would have his photograph taken in front of mill chimneys’.4 His writing was encouraged by Morton. He had already had two plays staged at the Workshop when, the month Victoria turned sixteen, his third appeared in a trilogy alongside Beckett and Ionesco. That summer Rosalind played his daughter in Hobson’s Choice, which Morton chose as a vehicle for his performing talent, while Victoria acted with him in a programme of short plays by the likes of Pinter and Albee. ‘He wasn’t a great actor,’ says Rosalind. ‘He was adequate. He was a bit fat and had a wry northern humour.’ He was just right for Victoria and soon joined the minuscule inner circle of people she trusted enough to bring home to Birtle. They would canoodle, and doodle on the piano. ‘She was in her very awkward, not very forthcoming way obviously deeply fond of him,’ says Lesley Fitton. He became an important prop in Victoria’s life, although their relationship was, she conceded, ‘full of rows and screaming and him leaving me at the bus stop and him coming back because I had his cigarettes in my pocket’.5 His main gripe about her was her addiction to reading. ‘You shouldn’t read in polite company!’ he’d tell her. She ignored him.

  In September 1969 Rosalind left for university, making Victoria even more isolated at home. She started on her A levels (in English, music and religious knowledge) on the back of disappointed sighs from her teachers after indifferent O levels. And yet thanks to ‘Workshop’, as she called it, she entered the sixth form with a greater sense of self-worth. She imported her new-found knowledge of acting and improvisation to run a lunchtime drama club – ‘a most helpful member of the group,’ purred her form tutor. ‘Victoria deserves this generally pleasing report,’ concurred Miss Lester. She even earned a ‘quite good’ for PE. ‘In the sixth form we were treated in a different way,’ says Anne Sweeney, ‘which suited Vic much more.’

  In this more relaxed atmosphere, some teachers admired Victoria’s rapier wit and took to her, especially those who taught her English and could see how widely read she was. Others saw her as maverick with the potential to disrupt. One even warned Lesley Fitton that Victoria might be a bad influence. Lesley passed this on: ‘I thought she would find it funny – but she was actually very hurt. I was quite as capable as everyone else of falling for her adopted persona as the funny and slightly naughty one. That was far from the whole story. She really didn’t like the teachers, and at the time I wasn’t completely aware of that.’

  In their final year Lesley became head girl, and Victoria showed what she thought of her badge of office by making an imprint of it in the mashed potatoes at lunch. They were both thrown out of the dining hall. Her insurrection took on a subtler form in school assembly. Victoria was one of the very few girls deemed good enough to play the Steinway as girls filed in. Her party trick was to impart a twist of swing to Bach or, when the heavy-set Miss Lester approached, breaking into the ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ from the Nutcracker. She also mimicked the headmistress with merciless accuracy, and the brisk manly stride of the scripture teacher who whisked off her cardi
gan and hung it on the back of her chair. The deputy head spoke with a quavery, lamb-like bleat which, after she complained of a homosexual subtext in a production of Coriolanus, became a standing joke for years. Not all teachers were targeted. When the very young Miss Eastwood left at the end of 1969 to become Mrs Davies, her music class gave her a present with an inscription written by Victoria, who had somehow discovered the name of her teacher’s fiancé. ‘To Miss Eastwood and Steve,’ she wrote, ‘with love and kisses from the A-level group.’ She added the first four notes of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.