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

by Jasper Rees

  Victoria was at her happiest contributing in music and drama. ‘She already showed that huge verbal facility,’ says Lesley Fitton, ‘and because of that she was liked and admired and famous within that circle. That’s how she made friends.’ The circle of friends would find themselves written into the songs which Victoria had started to compose and would play in the sixth-form common room. One girl, who wore a lot of lip gloss, exuded a world-weariness that often sounded like plain moaning, resulting in a song which went, ‘She has been sitting there all day whining / Poking out her bottom lip, it’s shining’.

  From writing songs, Victoria graduated to writing an entire show to be performed by the Lower Sixth. She titled it Pearl: A Melodrama. Inspired by the fact that soap operas were originally sponsored by soap manufacturers, she invented a sponsor called Cupid’s Kiss Cornplasters, and during the performance the action was suspended while the cast sang advertisements hymning the product:

  We’re the Cupid’s Kiss Cornplaster,

  You can run much faster,

  You can live a life of bliss

  With a Cupid’s Kiss.

  With Cupid’s Kiss Cornplaster,

  You’ll have feet of alabaster.

  Be a missus, not a miss

  With a Cupid’s Kiss.

  She also wrote a short play to raise money for charity which she called Malice in Sunderland. It came by its title at the last minute when Victoria scrawled an M on the poster as it was being designed. There was a larger audience for the school pantomime, a subversive Cinderella written and composed by Victoria in which she made winking references to the sexuality of Prince Charming – he has the hots for Dandini in a pink bikini. The censorious deputy head was horrified all over again, but the production was allowed to proceed uncut, with Victoria dashing between the stage and the Steinway. ‘It was quite good actually,’ she allowed. ‘It was all in rhyming couplets. We only had about four people, so we made big cardboard figures on sticks and poked them in and out like a threepenny theatre.’6 Victoria was so much in her element that she assumed everyone else would love acting too. Anne Sweeney, who played Buttons, surprised her by not relishing the prospect: ‘She didn’t seem to understand that would be a nightmare to me.’ ‘As usual,’ reported Cygnus, ‘Victoria Wood rallied support for the Upper VI’s hilarious version of “Cinderella”.’7

  These opportunities fed Victoria’s craving, formed as a small child, for celebrity and acclaim. She even switched her allegiance from one character to another in The Swish of the Curtain. Lesley Fitton asked her friend if she identified with Maddy, the funny and much-loved young character in Pamela Brown’s story. The answer would once have been yes. ‘No,’ Victoria replied, ‘I identify with Lynette, who ends up with her dream of kissing her hand to the box while the audience all applauds.’ In an instant Lesley saw her friend with new clarity. ‘I thought, of course that’s who you are.’

  Increasingly, Victoria was aware that this was who she wished to be: ‘Everything was going fine for me. I was very happy. I had a boyfriend and I had all the things you would ever want.’8 In the privacy of a school exercise book she made a note of this satisfactory state of affairs. ‘1970 is a good year for Victoria Wood,’ she wrote in her very tidiest handwriting. ‘Only a few things make me laugh. Not true,’ she added on the same page. In the rest of the exercise book she jotted cartoons in blue biro, bits and pieces of maths, and gags she was trying on for size: ‘he wears a leather jacket in his hair’; ‘I haven’t laughed so much since Ma caught her tits in the mangle’. Like the girls in The Swish of the Curtain, Victoria used the first half of the book to write out her earliest surviving script, an untitled short play in two acts. Her dramatis personae, as she listed them at the start, include Mr and Mrs Bacon and Mr and Mrs Bones, but also ‘Jack (of Beanstalk fame)’. Their seemingly humdrum existence is spiced up by a mail-order catalogue which enables fantasies. Mrs Bones awaits the delivery of the crown jewels, while Mr Bacon hankers for Miss Bognor Regis 1953 (the year of Victoria’s birth). There are cameos for Dracula pushing a coffin on a trolley, and Noddy, who becomes a wary object of lust. ‘You might rust my bells,’ he cautions. Victoria sprinkled the dialogue with references to the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and ‘Ramsbottom’s answer to the Tiller Girls’. And she had fun deconstructing the mechanics of theatre. ‘Unproductive pause,’ says one stage direction. The offstage prompter goes on strike. A policeman cuts two pages of dialogue, before being ejected for being in the wrong play. The mash-up of kitchen-sink drama and capering surrealism was ‘nicked,’ she later suggested, ‘off Joe Orton. He was about the only person I’d ever read.’9 But already she was playing with words and images in a way that would come to be characteristic. Mrs Bones is ‘expecting two new clichés for the kitchen this afternoon’, but worries about unreliable delivery men: ‘last time we had something new (an apostrophe for the back bedroom, it was) they clumped about dropping their aitches all over the carpet and they split two of my best infinitives’.10

  Nineteen seventy was indeed a very good year. Victoria passed Grade VII piano, with much stress on Bach, for which she had an aptitude. ‘Her playing is quite musicianly at times,’ trilled Miss Collins. But she was ever the rebel. Lesley Fitton felt ‘vaguely aware of it being “daring”, and faintly disapproved of, to go off and hang round with Vic”. Victoria later remembered a four-day school trip to Stratford-upon-Avon because ‘someone bet me 50p I wouldn’t kiss the coach driver, which of course I promptly did’.11

  It was audacity which fuelled Victoria’s growing desire to be a comic performer. She had heard about Libby Morris, an actress from Canada, performing at the Liverpool Everyman. ‘She had a thing called a one-woman show and I thought, what on earth is that?’12 Whatever it was, she knew that she ‘wanted to go on stage and be incredibly funny. I didn’t think of it beyond that.’13 There was a chance to hone her comic abilities when she was cast as Autolycus, the clown in The Winter’s Tale, which she remembered for ‘these really horrible brown tights that hadn’t been washed for about a million years and looked like Ryvita’.14 Her entertaining turn as the play’s only comic relief stunned Anne Sweeney: ‘It was a great surprise, as she normally disliked being the centre of attention. She just threw herself into it. It was a very physical performance – she rolled and cavorted around the stage and enjoyed herself. Everybody else was standing there like a piece of wood.’ She also wrote some of the music. Then in the summer of 1970 came the big production at Rochdale Theatre Youth Workshop. In Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Victoria played the vulnerable servant girl Grusha, a non-comic role which ‘she played with convincing pathos and touching poignancy,’ says Joe Dawson. Thus, as her final year loomed, Victoria was emboldened to dream of becoming an actress despite opposition from Miss Lester, while the careers adviser suggested she harness her writing skills in journalism or advertising. At a Bury careers fair the drama desk was run by ‘just a very miserable man with dandruff. I said I wanted to be an actress and he just said, “Don’t, that’s my advice.”’15

  Emboldened by Workshop, Victoria could not be dissuaded, though her confidence went only so far, and she avoided applying to the prestigious schools: ‘I didn’t feel worthy. I thought you can’t go to Central if you’re fat. You can’t go to RADA if you’re fat.’16 In fact, she sent off to only two places because ‘it was five quid every time you applied to drama school and I only had about ten quid’.17 She went down to London to try for New College, a teacher-training establishment in Swiss Cottage, where she delivered Juliet’s deathbed speech. ‘The trouble with you,’ she was told, ‘is you’ve got a deformed jaw. You can’t say S properly.’18 She didn’t get in. She also applied to Manchester Polytechnic, which had a drama course: ‘My mother, not knowing me terribly well, knowing that I never wear green, had bought me a green cardigan. I had a flowery blouse that she’d made me and a long midi-skirt of all the unflattering things to give anybody with milk bottle legs.’19 A debilitating attack of nerves cause
d her to vomit: ‘We’d do a bit of an audition and then I’d have to go away and throw up and then I’d come back again. And at one point I had to do a mirror exercise with somebody else and the room started to go black and I just started to lose it altogether and I had to go out. And then about halfway through the afternoon I suddenly felt OK.’

  Her recovery coincided with the presence of an English and drama student who was showing everyone around and reminiscing about her time as a nurse wheeling a commode around the ward. She was a small young woman with ‘lots and lots of shoulder-length brown hair but very, very thick with a great big fringe and lots of eye make-up, very small eyes and lots of blue liner underneath. And just keeping the whole room completely entertained walking around the room. She said, “I used to go around the wards at night with this trolley.” And I didn’t know her name, but I used to wonder.’20 This was Victoria Wood’s first encounter with Julie Walters. Julie remembers that Victoria ‘was very frightened and shy, and she had glasses and was shrinking from everyone else in the room’. The image of Victoria lodged in her memory thanks partly to the wastepaper bin she was clutching. Her application was unsuccessful.

  Victoria was vouchsafed a quirky glimpse of life in professional theatre when she visited Bob Mason, who had a job with Century Theatre, a mobile company performing in the Lake District during the summer of 1971. He rented a flat in an eccentric house with purple clapperboards in a remote valley five miles from Keswick. Victoria was still working towards her A levels when she first visited, and afterwards came up for weeks at a time throughout the summer. ‘They laughed a lot,’ says Jack Chissick, an actor who was also renting in the house. ‘Bob was a blunt northerner and very bright. Victoria was a ray of light who was quite shy but interesting when you got talking to her.’ They were back in Lancashire by early September. ‘They are much together,’ Stanley recorded in his diary, ‘and observed through windows and in the garden, V shrieking as she rides on B’s shoulder down side path. In other words, much canoodling, snogging, or spooning.’21

  In her A levels, Victoria secured an A in English, a C in religious knowledge and general studies, and – because of her aversion to theory – a D in music. Lesley Schatzberger won the music prize. Lesley Fitton won three awards. Victoria won nothing. Six years later, reflecting on her years at school, Victoria wrote a song imagining a headmistress under the stained-glass windows at her leavers’ last school prayers ‘with tears running over her wart’. The song foretold disappointment for her fellow schoolgirls; they were destined to be sad, hairy-legged teachers, or teenage mothers, or mistaken for men. Victoria ended the song with a triumphant self-portrait:

  But I backed the girl in the filthy blazer,

  The one who’s burned her school report.

  5

  THE GREEN ROOM

  ‘I was at Birmingham University, but I feel better now.’

  Interview, 1980

  There is a spoof documentary in Victoria Wood As Seen on TV called ‘On Campus’. In it Victoria cast herself as a gawky fresher who is studying religious knowledge, learns the guitar and is self-conscious about her weight. Bullied and ostracised, she attempts suicide. ‘I think going away to university for the first time puts a strain on anybody,’ reasons her thin friend. ‘If you’re fat and ugly with a hopeless personality you’re probably better off taking an overdose or something.’

  Having failed to get into a drama college, Victoria made a successful application to study drama and theatre arts at Birmingham. While the course purported to be academic, it also offered practical training for aspiring actors. ‘It was the only university that offered me a place,’ she said, ‘because I only had two O levels and a diving certificate so you can’t really blame them.’1 Lancashire Education Committee made her a county award of £320 for the academic year.

  It soon seemed she’d chosen to study in some hermetic underworld. The drama department was in a basement reached via a spiral staircase. The main area where students milled was a glorified corridor filled with sofas and chairs, with a hatch for a coffee bar at one end. The students called it the green room, which, in defiance of theatrical superstition, had been painted green. On one of the sofas Victoria sat in silence and, quite often, sucked her thumb. Her fellow drama students had no idea what to make of her. ‘She sat in a heap in the corner for weeks,’ says Bill Lloyd, who was in the year above. ‘It was all Afghan coats and loons and she was literally wearing a crumply old jumper or cardigan and huge baggy trousers. She looked like a fifteen-year-old unpopular girl in the class. A weird oddball. She used to roll her eyes a lot.’ According to John Carnegie, a third-year student, she ‘stuck out like a sore thumb. I hadn’t seen anybody who wasn’t a three-year-old child wear dungarees.’ Other students began to worry about this voiceless girl in the corner and deputed George Irving, a Geordie in the year above, to coax her out of her shell: ‘I said, “She’ll speak to people in her own time.”’

  Her silence was the product of shyness, but also a kind of toxic shock: ‘I felt everybody was taller, blonder, better-looking, thinner, more southern,’ she recalled, ‘and I thought I can’t be bothered with this.’2 Two of the first people she met were Catherine Ashmore and Jane Wymark, who knew each other from Camden School for Girls and were both the daughters of famous actors. This underpinned Victoria’s dread that everyone else had some kind of coded connection with one another. ‘My first memory was in that green room,’ says Jane. ‘She was wearing a sweater decorated with pixies collaged on, made by one of her sisters, with very bright colours. Her hair was shoulder length, with red circular barrettes. And she demonstrated how to do a forward roll. She was a deeply shy person, but she was always a performer.’ To those she did dare to address she introduced herself as Vic.

  The drama department was housed in the Allardyce Nicoll Tower, a brutalist new building named after the founder of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. (In ‘On Campus’ there’s a tower which, according to the university prospectus, ‘is where everyone commits suicide’.) The department acted as a sealed environment, caused partly by the geography of Birmingham. The campus fanned out across a hilly redoubt in Edgbaston. Victoria, who chose not to live in a hall of residence, had rented a bedsit at the top of a three-storey house in Harborne, a forty-minute walk from campus. There was little choice but to stick around all day with everyone else.

  With no more than a dozen students in each intake, there was much interaction between the years. The small group was overseen by a quartet of male lecturers occupying glass-fronted offices on the floor above. Clive Barker, who had a dark beard, rangy hair and horn-rimmed glasses, had a strong association with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in east London and also taught at the Drama Centre in London, whose reputation as a psychological torture chamber for vulnerable students earned it the moniker the Trauma Centre. Barker imported its tenets to Birmingham. ‘It was all about intense finding yourself, and somewhat confrontational criticism of whatever you did,’ says Jane Wymark. ‘Clive didn’t keep that divide clear enough, so a lot of criticism felt very personal.’ Before lectures began at ten o’clock, he instituted the daily morning workout, featuring Laban technique and modern dance, to which Victoria gave a wide berth. ‘You have to wear a leotard,’ she told Bill Lloyd. ‘I’m not going to wear a leotard.’ Barker belonged to that generation of male directors who allowed their hands to wander and had a reputation for taking young women into his office for private study after hours, ‘which we all suspected was sex of some kind,’ says Fidelis Morgan, a charismatic figure from Liverpool who was in the year above. Some years later when Victoria joined a keep-fit class she described the exercises as easy ‘for anybody who has had their groin felt by C. Barker’.3 In retaliation to his unkind comments about her physique, she’d pepper his seminars with sarky one-liners and loud undermining sighs. Victoria much preferred the laissez-faire approach of Jocelyn Powell, a towering intellectual who lectured in Renaissance and Greek theatre.

&nbs
p; The first-year reading list featured canonical text books: World Theatre, The Development of Theatre, Seven Ages of the Theatre. Lectures reverberated with the names of Slavic eminences such as Jerzy Grotowski and Konstantin Stanislavski. ‘It was like hearing people sneeze,’ Victoria would joke, although she had certainly come across these theatrical thinkers at Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop.

  In this bewildering environment Victoria could think of only one way to make her mark. About four weeks into the course she chose her moment and approached George Irving in an empty green room: ‘Suddenly she was standing next to me. She said, “You’re George, aren’t you?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “They say that you’re the one that’s got it all taped.” She looked at me over her National Health glasses and there was a little twinkle and I thought, you’re not quite as shy as you think you are.’ She told him she’d found a piano in the students’ union building and wondered if he wanted to hear her play a couple of songs. ‘When?’ he said. ‘Could we go now?’ she replied. They trooped across campus and Victoria led him to the top of the building where behind high stacks of chairs was an upright piano with the front missing: ‘It was falling apart and out of tune. She played me three songs. I didn’t go, “Whoopee! A star is born.” But they were very plaintive. They had an “Eleanor Rigby” quality about them, a northern melancholy.’ She used the same confronting tactic on his girlfriend Fidelis Morgan. ‘Another student said you were a zany madcap,’ Victoria told her, ‘so I am avoiding you.’ They were soon sloping off to play their songs to one another. A deeper bond was cemented when they discovered that, unlike everyone else in the department, they were allergic to Monty Python.

  Uncomfortable in groups, Victoria would isolate individuals in order to befriend them. Another student she played her songs to was Steve Trow, who was from West Bromwich and the first in his family to study at university. They’d go to the union and eat a lunch of bangers, beans and chips. One untitled song she played him was in the voice of a girl with low self-esteem writing to Jackie magazine’s agony aunt.