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

by Jasper Rees

  They say I ought to smile at him and ask him round to tea

  They don’t know how difficult a simple thing can be

  And if I did I know what he’d do sure as eggs is eggs

  He’d ask my sister out cos she’s got sexy legs.

  In due course Victoria found a common bond with the southerners too. She and Jane Wymark discovered they were both avid readers. Slowly Victoria overcame her shyness in the green room to make witty observations that drew an audience. She sat at the piano and sang songs about her fellow students. Catherine Ashmore’s ears pricked up at the phrase ‘stomping past with flat feet’: ‘She would just be playing away and singing and suddenly you’d walk past and think, ‘that’s me she’s singing about. She would sum everybody up in a flash.’ Alison Sabourin, in the year above, even asked for a song: ‘Two days later she came up with it. It was very perceptive.’ Its raucous chorus correctly predicted a rural future for her friend: ‘Ali’s got her wellies on, Ali’s got her mac / Ali’s gone out farming and she ain’t coming back’. Victoria impishly rhymed Sabourin with ‘so boring’. She was sufficiently proud of the composition to play it to another second-year student. Jane Wynn Owen was an aspiring opera singer from Rhyl in north Wales. They met one day by the soundproofed practice booths at the back of the Elgar concert room in the Department of Music. Victoria offered to be her accompanist, and so found herself playing along to Italian arias and German lieder. One day she played her ‘Alison’s Song’: ‘It was not only very well observed, it was musically so deft. I thought, blimey, you’re a dark horse. She wanted people to know that she could do this.’

  Music, like reading, could be a place of refuge for Victoria. Sometimes she combined the two – Bill Lloyd once found her devouring a novel while practising her scales. Her other refuge was Bob Mason, who was studying at Central School of Speech and Drama. Victoria took the coach to London to stay with him in Finsbury Park, where he shared a bedroom with his brother: ‘If we wanted to sleep together, we had to pay him to sleep on the living room floor.’4 She was so unfamiliar with London that when Bob didn’t meet her off the coach once at Victoria Station she fled straight back to Birmingham. On another visit at the end of her first term he informed her that he had fallen for a student at Central. Victoria returned distraught and, not wanting to be alone all weekend in her bedsit, latched onto George Irving, who had a rehearsal but gave her a key to his flat in Kings Heath. When he got back there that evening she was sitting on the floor of the bathroom, drinking his Scotch: ‘She was obviously very unhappy. I put her into my bed and slept next door. I got up the following morning and she was sitting up with the curtains open and reading a paperback. There was one by the side of the bed that she’d already finished. She said, “Do you mind if I just stay here for a bit?” She was there for three days altogether and by the time she left there were eight paperbacks by the side of the bed. At the end of it she was fine. She was still very sad, but she dealt with it.’ Despite being dumped, Victoria was midway through sewing a triangle of cloth into the ankles of Bob Mason’s loonpants to turn them into flares. She finished the job and sent them in the post: ‘I thought, well, he’ll be so touched and moved that he’ll chuck old actress-face out the window and come back to me.’ When he next wrote to her he said, ‘Jeans v. poor.’5

  Romantic sorrow soon inspired her to write a song called ‘It’s Not Easy’ in which self-pity was leavened by her urge to see the funny side:

  What will the man in the next flat think?

  He used to hear us making love

  What will he do when we’ve stopped it?

  He’ll have to listen to the flat above.

  The earliest surviving recording of a Victoria Wood composition is from her second term. In January 1972 the drama department staged All’s Well That Ends Well. A series of alarums and fanfares for a pair of trumpets were written by Victoria, who well knew how the instrument worked. Mixed in among the traditional bugle calls were some striking blasts of mournful dissonance. But academically the year was a failure. Offered barely any opportunities to act, as early as her second term she confided to Steve Trow that she was depressed and was thinking she should try for drama school instead. For her practical exam piece at the end of the year, Victoria wrote and performed three monologues. Her lecturers were unimpressed. David Hirst, who was one of them, said as much to Steve Trow: ‘She was just the same person in all three … and what on earth did it have to do with the course?’ Victoria was one of a trio of students who decided to break into a lecturer’s office to rummage through the assessments. Clive Barker had written one line about her: ‘How do you teach a Christmas pudding?’

  She got her own back more than a decade later in As Seen on TV. ‘To Be an Actress’ was another mock documentary featuring Sarah Wells, a naive actress who auditions to join a new company. Victoria hid autobiographical clues in the script, naming the other actors after her drama department friends – Bill, Steve, Jane. The pretentious director asks one of them to improvise in the character of Marie Lloyd – the Edwardian music hall star’s real name was Victoria Wood. He doesn’t want Sarah to do Juliet’s death scene, which had been so fruitless for Victoria, instead asking her to improvise as Lady Godiva. As she prepares to strip, the older goateed actor leering at her looks uncannily like Clive Barker.

  Victoria went home in the summer to resume friendly relations with Bob Mason as David Morton encouraged old protégés to return and help out with the Rochdale Theatre Workshop. Together they supplied the songs for an improvised piece about a cotton mill town, which they composed at Birtle Edge House. ‘The evening air along the passage between the den and my office is filled with harmonious howling hour after hour,’6 recorded Stanley Wood. The on-off relationship would rumble on. (Stanley was also being productive. While he continued in insurance, his first script for Coronation Street was aired in October 1972.)

  Back in Birmingham, Victoria moved into a terraced house in Witton far on the other side of the city from the university. The arrangement didn’t last long, as she was too dependent on housemates for lifts. She spent much of the year kipping at the two-up two-down terraced house in Selly Oak which Fidelis Morgan had bought with a small windfall and named Harrods. Bedecked with mattresses, Harrods became a stopover for drama students who had missed the last bus. Victoria dropped in during the day to watch daytime television, an obsession she shared with the landlady. A favourite drama of theirs was Kate, about an agony aunt in which Penelope Keith supplied them with a highly adaptable catchphrase: ‘I’m absolutely fuming, Kate!’ One programme above all they devoured with religious fervour at half past five every afternoon in vacations. ‘We heard gales of laughter coming up the stairs,’ says George Irving. ‘One of us said, “What possible good can come out of Victoria coming round here and watching Crossroads?”’

  There was also a musical connection with Fidelis Morgan. In November 1972 drama students were invited by Jocelyn Powell to take part in what he called ‘an environmental sound spectacular’: the British premiere at the Great Hall on the university campus of John Cage’s Musicircus, a democratic epic in which all musical styles and sounds were performed at once. It was a prestigious event to be part of. Victoria on piano and Fidelis on drums were to perform songs by Noël Coward, only for Victoria not to turn up. Days later Fidelis discovered she had been ill. ‘Vic got rather cross with me for making a fuss,’ she says.

  In her second year Victoria’s status as a misfit solidified. Later she characterised the syllabus as a BA in ‘groping’ for students who ‘feel each other up with the lights out’;7 alternatively, it was ‘a course in lounging about drinking coffee’8 with a training in tying ropes onto cleats and operating a revolve. For all the degree’s apparent breadth, the faculty seemed to find no means of accommodating her talents. ‘They didn’t know what do with Vic,’ says Jane Wymark. ‘They handled her really, really badly. Vic was always totally herself; she was not really malleable. The staff could only keep trying t
o force her into something that she didn’t want to be.’ She found herself confined to backstage roles in which she proved negligent. As stage manager for a play in which George Irving had to suck food through a tube stored in a fish tank, for one performance she didn’t change the food and he nearly vomited mid-performance. ‘She was sort of on strike,’ says Fidelis.

  Theoretically the second year was meant to provide students with the chance to act in front of paying audiences and even local critics. There was a majority of women on the course, but a minority of roles for them. They would wait nervously in the green room for casts to be announced. ‘I never got to do the acting,’ Victoria said. ‘That was all done by the very tall blonde girls.’9 Her best shot was a production of Joe Orton’s Loot, to be staged in February 1973. The play has only one female part and Victoria was ideal for it. She learned before Christmas that she hadn’t got it, which plunged her in gloom. ‘Everyone was outraged,’ says Steve Trow, ‘so we went to Fid’s house for some sympathy and commiseration, and the general opinion was that it must have been other senior staff sticking their oar in again.’ Fidelis, whose mother was a professional reader of Tarot cards, did a reading for Victoria. It told her that she had ‘great talent’ and would one day be ‘very famous’. The next day was a reprise of the Musicircus performance at the Roundhouse in London. Fidelis drove down and remembers ‘a vague sense of inevitability when, once again, Victoria didn’t turn up’.

  The director of Loot offered Victoria an olive branch in the shape of an invitation to top and tail the production with music. The brief was to play hymns, but Victoria ignored it and seized the chance to parade her own growing repertoire of songs. One, called ‘Going Home Again’, was a pointed commentary on middle-class students pretending to be proletarian:

  In the lies about your father

  I think that you have rather

  Strayed from the path

  He’s not a crippled miner

  He’s a winer and diner

  More at home in a sauna than an old zinc bath.

  There was no egress other than through an upstage door, so she sat stage left at an upright piano, somewhat pulling focus in red and blue boots with silver sprayed in her hair. She had also just started wearing contacts, so the National Health glasses had gone. To top off her act she ate a salad sandwich onstage and ad-libbed the odd gag: of the Coke bottle on the piano top she said, ‘People sniff this stuff, you know. I don’t know how they get the bottle up their noses.’ At the end, as the audience got up to leave, Victoria asked them to hang on and sang a song which pointedly referred to the fact that she should have been in the play.

  Did you like the play?

  Time to get your coats on

  We know we’d like to see you again some day

  You never know it might be me.

  ‘I have just been a great success starring in the Department’s production of Loot,’ Victoria reported to Rosalind. ‘They should have cast me in it, but they didn’t. So I played the piano before, in the interval and after. I stole the show.’10

  News of her performance reached the ears of an influential student on campus who organised concerts. ‘More than one friend came up to me,’ says Sahlan Diver, ‘and said they’d heard this fantastic girl singing a medley of songs with piano. I was warned she was extremely shy.’ One morning they met in the student union and then moved on to a soundproofed piano room in his hall of residence: ‘And I was treated to a fifteen-minute private concert of pure genius. The sheer musicality and inventiveness of her piano playing was immediately clear to me. She told me she’d written her first song to cope with the trauma of a boyfriend leaving her. She sang me the very song.’ Another was a protest song called ‘We’re Having a Party for the End of the World’. Channelling anxiety about the prospect of a nuclear doomsday, Victoria gloomily depicted the downbeat celebrations (‘We’ll stand in the cold / And say at least we’ll never grow old’). They agreed to put together a concert that would take place at the end of the academic year.

  By now Victoria had moved closer to the university, to the garret flat of a detached Victorian house on Richmond Hill Road in a leafy part of well-heeled Edgbaston. She slept in the sitting room on a put-me-up while ceding the double bed to her flatmate Jane Wynn Owen: ‘Her idea of a put-me-up bed was one of those garden loungers that folds up in three. So in the night you’d suddenly hear, bang, “Fuck!”, and silence. I’d have to unfold her.’ Sahlan Diver was round at the flat when the BBC announced Princess Anne’s engagement to Captain Mark Phillips. Victoria looked forward to sending the horse-mad couple a card ‘congratulating them on the birth of their first foal’.

  Victoria turned twenty on 19 May 1973. Inviting friends to a children’s afternoon tea party, she asked them to suggest a favourite sandwich. While assembling these she drank a couple of glasses of wine and muddled the ingredients. A notice for the guests cited the famous Morecambe and Wise sketch with André Previn: ‘Dear folks, here are the sandwiches you asked for but not necessarily in that order. PS do not eat the grey sandwich.’ There were children’s party games. As requested, her flatmate gave her roller skates. She strapped on her new second-hand pair. ‘Meals on wheels,’ she quipped as she ate jelly and custard.

  Victoria was not a habitual drinker. When alcohol got the better of her, it would loosen her tongue. ‘She would get completely paralytic and then she would start telling people home truths and it was quite frightening,’ says Alison Sabourin, who was once advised by Victoria that she was far too good for her boyfriend Bill Lloyd and should forget about him. Yet her fondness for both was not in doubt. That term she composed ‘A Song for Bill Ill’ after he was hospitalised with stress before finals. It concluded, ‘Don’t be forlorn / The day will dawn / On a less sick William Lloyd’. It was written in a ‘tempo di convalesco’, and she signed it ‘affec rgds VW’. She wrote a solo speech for Alison to perform in her final assessment. It was a despondent piece with barely a joke, channelling her own feelings about Bob Mason, in which a young woman in a bedsit explains how her boyfriend has abandoned her for a student with platform shoes and uncombed hair. In the end Alison felt more comfortable doing something with other actors.

  Bluntness was a side of Victoria that all her friends had to get used to. She thrived on gossip, which is partly why she favoured the intimate exchange of one-on-one conversation. ‘When you got her on your own, that’s when she blossomed,’ says Robert Howie, who was in the year below and for several years would become an intimate friend with whom she caught ropey matinees at the Alexandra Theatre. On these outings Victoria would insist on going to Woolworths for egg and chips, and often they’d slip into a passport photo booth and gurn for the camera.

  At the end of June the concert took place in the common room of University House, a hall of residence. Also on the bill was Hettie Pipe & Her Jug Band Experience, featuring Bill Lloyd and Sahlan Diver and an array of cider jugs which produced a boomy bass sound. To promote the gig they did a photoshoot: Victoria, wearing flared jeans and sneakers, brandished a ukulele which she was attempting to learn. Tickets cost 20p. For the concert itself she sewed the letters VW onto the back of her denim jacket in plastic mother-of-pearl stars which flashed under the lights. She sang three sets of songs, two on her own and one with a scratch band led by Sahlan Diver. Opening with ‘Alison’s Song’, she treated it as a showcase for the songs she had amassed. The strongest composition, that would have the longest life, she introduced as ‘Sad Salad Sunday’ ‘because it’s about those three things’. With a wistful verse and a sprightly chorus, she pictured a couple sagging into the emptiness of middle age while their teenage daughter rolls her eyes.

  Children be nice to your father

  He is still alive at thirty-five

  While your eyes get brighter

  His trousers get tighter

  His wife’s hair is as hard as her voice

  And his freedom of choice is blown out through the window

  That cost him
so much to put in.

  Punctuating her songs were tunes from between the wars, including an obscurity called ‘When a Woman Loves a Man’, which she introduced as the work of ‘a male chauvinist pig’. Her drummer smugly whistled the tune in an instrumental break as if he was the chauvinist, while Victoria cast disdainful looks that brought the house down.

  Sahlan Diver arranged for the concert to be recorded, thus capturing on tape Victoria’s first gig. In twelve songs she exuded a confidence which undermines her later claims that at this stage she had no idea how to perform to an audience. The songs, even those tinged with sadness, provoked explosions of laughter. It ‘went v. well,’ she reported to Rosalind. So buoyed did she feel by the performance that she sent off a tape of demos to Dick James Music in Oxford Street. ‘Dick James is the one that does Elton John,’ she unflappably added.11 The swift reply was discouraging. ‘I am afraid that there is nothing on the tape that really interests me as songs,’ wrote the music publisher Leslie Lowe, who recommended she stick to ‘known standard material as does Blossom Dearie … rather than trying to sell yourself as an artist and a composer’.12 Victoria pasted the letter into the first page of her scrapbook and under it wrote ‘thank you Leslie’. There was better news from BBC Radio Birmingham, who had someone in the University House audience among her throng of friends. ‘Radio Brum asked me to do 15 mins in their half-hour student programme,’ she proudly announced.13 Two weeks later, Victoria stayed in, turned on the radio and listened on her own to her broadcasting debut. ‘It is 6pm and I’m waiting to hear myself in an hour,’ she told Robert Howie. ‘At the moment there’s a Jamaican steel band playing the Hallelujah Chorus & an announcer who keeps saying Ooops … sorry.’14