by Jasper Rees
Victoria spent the summer in Birmingham. Though she feared being lonely, she decided to move into a single room in the same building in Edgbaston. She got a summer job as a barmaid in the Sportsman, a pub in Harborne where, as she pulled pints for 30p an hour, she cocked an ear to the conversation. ‘The pub is v. interesting as far as listening to the people and writing about them is concerned,’ she told Bill Lloyd, although she was demoralised that the men talked about ‘cars, booze and “chicks”’ and the women about ‘getting engaged, drinks and clothes’.15 She later reckoned that it helped her deal with her shyness – ‘it’s a very theatrical job: you’re on stage, on show’ – and towards the end of one night she overcame her diffidence enough to sit at the piano and perform some of her songs.16 A BBC producer called Gerry Hynes who regularly drank there heard her and the next day told John Clarke, an established director at Pebble Mill, the BBC’s studios in Birmingham, who was always on the hunt for new young performers: ‘Gerry came in and said, “I’ve seen a girl performing at the Sportman and I think she’s a knockout. I’ll get her to come in if you like.” He got a contact number for her and we arranged a time for her to come in.’
When Victoria reconstructed this event in later years, she mined it for comedy. In one version she was invited to a party ‘and I was such a show-off I played the piano and sang’.17 In another, she laughed at the BBC producer and said, ‘Ha ha ha, get yer ’and off my bosoms, will you please?’18 At Pebble Mill she was met by Clarke, Hynes and another producer, who led her into a storeroom where they kept a grand piano: ‘She seemed to be perfectly at ease the moment she sat down at the piano and started to play. A light went on in all our minds. This girl has got it. She had the spark; she had the talent. We’ve got to have her. It’s rare to get a BBC producer to laugh out loud at an audition but certain turns of phrase made us fall about laughing.’ The song that had this effect was ‘Lorraine’, a deftly worded postcard about young female anxiety in which Lorraine has ‘gone and got engaged again’ and dreads sex with her looming husband Dick.
He must have some good points
Hang on a minute I’ll check
I don’t think I’ve seen a cleaner Cortina
He washes it more than his neck.
She sang half a dozen songs, including ‘You’re Going Home Again’. ‘I was sold after the first one,’ says Clarke. ‘I wanted to know how long it took her to cook up a new song. She said, “How long have you got?” “Can you write a song by this evening?” She said, “No problem.” She had an extraordinary sense of her own ability, which was strange because her manner was of a very shy person.’
‘They quite liked me at the BBC,’ Victoria neutrally told Rosalind, ‘so I’ll see what comes of that.’19 To friends who had now left Birmingham, she mentioned that she was in contact with a BBC television producer. ‘I’ve got a feeling you’re destined for fame ducks, but you’ll cope,’ wrote Jane Wymark.20 She was soon on the radio again, introduced as ‘a young lady trying to make a name for herself’. When she listened back to the interview, she thought she ‘sounded like a depressed clog’.21
These successes ignited a desire to prove to Bob Mason what he was missing, so that summer Victoria entered a cabaret contest: ‘I wanted to show him that I could get on without him … I’ll win and he’ll come and see me being terribly famous and be hurt and wounded.’22 She passed an audition and met the drummer who was to play with all the contestants. ‘He says they’ll all be awful,’ she told Bill Lloyd hopefully, ‘so I might win.’23 In August she sang in a late-night heat at a club called Barbarella’s. The piano was bolted to the floor, which meant she had to play with her back to the audience. Judgement was said to be by clapometer. Though she never heard it in operation, she was back for the semi-final two weeks later, where she finished runner-up: ‘They wanted men with wobbly voices too near the mike singing ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ so I wasn’t too disappointed.’24 By now she was optimistic that a career path was opening up. She told Rosalind, whose artwork she admired enough to decorate her walls with it, that she’d like her to design her LP covers ‘when I get that going’.25
Victoria spent one week back at Birtle in September. Given how infrequently her parents now saw her, it may have been during this week – years later she recalled that she was twenty at the time – that she had an awkward exchange with Stanley in his car: ‘My dad said there was a lady he would like me to meet. I knew instantly this was someone he was having an affair with and with huge sophistication stared out of the window and didn’t reply. He never mentioned her again.’26
Over the summer Victoria had a commission from the drama department to come up with music for a production of John Arden’s play The Island of the Mighty. The Arthurian epic had been in the news the year before when the playwright picketed the RSC’s stage door. Victoria dubbed it ‘Island of the Boring’.27 Her contribution resulted in another argument with a faculty member, this time the director Graham Woodruff, who had to pester her for the music. Her ego bolstered by her summer triumphs, she played hard to get: ‘Saw Graham the bum on Thurs. Told him I could only spare 10 minutes and kept glancing at my watch in an executive manner which annoyed him.’28 When the music did finally arrive Woodruff dismissed it as not good enough. During rehearsals Victoria sat ‘on a bandstand pinging on triangles and banging on drums for tedious dramatic effect’.29 When it was performed in October she defiantly added ‘Louisville Lou’, a sultry, swinging Tin Pan Alley song from the 1920s in praise of a vamp – ‘the most heart-breakin’est, shimmy shakin’est that the world ever knew’. She noted that ‘endless people have told me how bad the music was except for the last song. So I’ve determined never to do my worst on anything like that again.’30
Victoria would come to view her final year at Birmingham as a period in which she ‘ducked out of the system again completely. I didn’t go to lectures and I didn’t do any of the work.’31 Rather than sleep in her bedsit, Victoria half-moved into Harrods, and only went back to her digs once a week to collect her post. Fidelis Morgan was her one friend from the year above not to be have left the city. They spent their spare time boning up on cheap television – Crown Court, General Hospital, Emmerdale Farm and the Welsh-language soap Pobol y Cwm, which they renamed ‘Pobbly Quim’. The other lure of Harrods was the presence of a piano, which she and Fidelis found next to a skip and wheeled back along the main road, enlisting help from passers-by. ‘Life in the Dept. is v. strange,’ she told Bill Lloyd, ‘not at all as it used to be. The 1st year fill the green room playing guitars singing, and talking about awareness (probably singing about it too) … BRIGHT SIDE THOUGH [and here she drew a smiling self-portrait] – Words are pounding thro’ my head so some plays should be forthcoming.’32
Fidelis encouraged her to enter a Radio Times competition for writers with a prize of £2,000. Instead she aimed higher, submitting a short untitled play to Pebble Mill, which was becoming a source of powerful television drama. Drawing on her experiences of school, this was the first of her many scripts to explore the dynamic between two young women, one an extrovert, the other an introvert. The main protagonists were two sixth-form girls. Barney is socially successful and popular; Christine is slovenly, chaotic and a loner. Victoria clearly identified with Christine, while putting something of herself into Barney, who steals essays from the teacher’s pile to conceal the absence of her own. ‘I’ll put them in her locker and take away the bottom seven,’ she says, ‘that’s me, Stevenson, Taylor, Turtem, you, Wilkinson and Wood.’ The play also expressed conflicted feelings of longing and embarrassment about the attentions of older men. It was rejected in October, but Victoria was undaunted. ‘I am trying to write a play about Cabaret,’ she revealed later the same term, ‘because a woman at the BBC said I was good.’33
In her final year Victoria enrolled on a newly created course in television. It was taught by a producer called Paul Morby whose most recent credit had been for a single episode of Gardener’s World in 1968. Sh
e enjoyed it. ‘TV is v good,’ she told Bill Lloyd.34 One assignment was to write a song to accompany Catherine Ashmore’s experimental film about a huge statue of King Kong, which had been commissioned by Birmingham city council to stand in the Bull Ring. When they rejected it, the statue was sold to a second-hand car dealership. Sticking to a formula she developed on other songs in this period, Victoria favoured a melancholy verse and a hectic chorus: ‘Ding dong King Kong / Loved you from the minute I saw you / You caught my eye, I don’t know why / I thought everybody would adore you’. She was genuinely surprised to fail the course after getting a low grade for a five-minute script filleted from her rejected BBC play.
Victoria was sufficiently disillusioned by her final year to apply to E15, the influential drama school which was seen as a radical working-class alternative to RADA and Central, and she travelled to east London for more than one callback. It’s unclear whether she or the school eventually decided they were not a good fit but a decade later, after a grim evening watching third years do performance pieces, she would refer to it as ‘E.15 School of Wanking and Ejected Semen’.35 ‘I’m not a very good actress,’ she rationalised in an early interview. ‘I think if I’d wanted to do it, I could’ve done it but there are about a million people that are as good as me so it didn’t seem worth it.’36 On a deeper level she suspected that she didn’t look like an actress: ‘I thought I’ll have to do so many things to change. If I want to get into rep, I’ll have to lose my accent and look more normal, and I thought this isn’t going to work, so it did put me off the idea … at the time it was rather depressing.’37
Another lure in London was still Bob Mason – she went down to see him in a play. They were definitely not together any more – Christmas 1973 was ‘my 1st Bobless Christmas in 4 years’ – but she seemed unable to flush him out of her system. Meanwhile she could not get excited about the romantic attentions of other men who, she wearily explained to Bill Lloyd, ‘expect a running comedy act before during and after – or they expect to find the “real me”.’38 She complained that ‘there are very few people here that I like and sometimes I get slumped in an armchair in my pink cardy staring at my blue fluffy slippers with a little smile on my face, and then it means I am feeling a bit unattached and surrounded by people who think I am funny bless their boring old sox’.39 Balancing out this introspective streak was a growing awareness that to be an entertainer she had to look the part. She experimented with fake tan and tried making her own clothes but more often offered to pay Rosalind to do it for her. ‘I’ve lost weight again,’ she wrote, requesting ‘a pair of zoomy jeans’.40 The following term she reported that she hadn’t ‘eaten anything for 3 days except lemon juice with saccharin in it. I go about with a permanently crinkled mouth.’41
This new focus coincided with her television debut in March 1974 on a folk programme called Springs to Mind. ‘I hit the headlines at last,’ she wrote alongside a TV listing glued into her scrapbook. ‘Not a very good title,’ she later suggested, ‘and the show went downhill from there.’42 But it earned her an elusive Equity card, conferring membership of the actors’ union and enabling her to work – it arrived in the month she turned twenty-one. There was soon more exposure on a four-part series, for which she had a black velvet jacket made. ‘V flash. I hate it really but it looked OK on TV.’43 The cheaply assembled show she appeared in was broadcast in the opt-out slot for regional programming. St John on … was presented by St John Howell, who introduced items on various themes (food, money, etc.) to do with life in the Midlands. John Clarke, who directed it, asked Victoria to submit four songs to fit the theme, and advised that the perfect length was exactly two minutes and ten seconds. The edict was absorbed to the point that she ‘found it very difficult to write a longer song than that for years’.44 Victoria behaved like a practised entertainer from the start. ‘There was never any problem with her,’ says Clarke. ‘I would cue her and it was like starting a musical box. She’d play it note and word perfect every time, totally professional.’ As for the first show, Victoria was not a fan: ‘It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. All the items were stupid, like a kid’s essay … I didn’t know when I was on and was cringing for half an hour.’45 It didn’t stop her staying up one night before to see if an episode would be plugged at the closedown by BBC Birmingham’s continuity announcer. She was rewarded: ‘Also appearing Virginia Wood.’46 In a couple of the programmes she sang alongside cartoons by ‘Larry’, whose work had been appearing in Punch since Victoria was a small girl. She was chuffed to meet him. ‘He’s v nice,’ she intimated to Rosalind.47 He gave her an original cartoon which she proudly hung on the wall. Another consolation was her first review, which savaged the programme but exempted her: ‘There was one saving grace. Victoria Wood is a remarkable lady vocalist and piano-player who sounds like a cross between Jake Thackray and Blossom Dearie. More please.’48 She would have to get used to these comparisons – in particular to Thackray, an observational singer-songwriter from Yorkshire. The series, for which she was paid ‘£33.75 per programme, less 71p insurance,’ she told Lesley Fitton, was recorded as she revised.49 One even fell in the middle of four days of exams: ‘Whoopee that’s going to be a great week.’50
Years later, reminiscing onstage about these early appearances in regional television, she would joke about how few people saw them: ‘I might as well have been playing in the snug of the Bermuda Triangle for all the good it did me.’51 In fact, Victoria had no idea of the big break that awaited. The pilot of an ATV talent show produced in Birmingham called New Faces had aired the previous summer, followed by an autumn series and another in the new year. The show positioned itself as the professional alternative to the BBC’s more established Opportunity Knocks. ‘Artistes new to network television are cordially invited to write for an audition at one of the centres covering their area,’ went the announcement. The first person to urge Victoria to try for the show was Louise Fisher, a make-up artist working at ATV who helped on drama department productions: ‘I told her, “There’s this new show and you’ve really got to do it, Vic.” I told her I would help sort her costume and look after her coming into the world of TV. I was shy too, so I understood how the TV experience would be intimidating for her. I had to persuade her quite heavily.’ Victoria dragged her heels for so long that eventually Fidelis Morgan put her up for New Faces without her knowing. She did it for the same reason she simultaneously entered her sister in an ATV beauty contest – ‘both of them were so depressed!’
In April Victoria showed up to an all-day open audition at La Dolce Vita nightclub and found a long line of hopefuls that looked, in her colourful recollection, ‘like something by Fellini – naked people playing the spoons, dogs with hats on’.52 Louise Fisher went along with her as, in effect, her chaperone. ‘I knew the floor manager and I had to go back to work by a certain time and I just said, “Can I put Victoria’s name at the top?”’ Victoria would credit this intervention as the stroke of luck that would land her on national television: ‘Otherwise I’d have been at the back of the queue and not been seen.’53 The audition was not filmed, but there was an audience. When silver-maned producer Les Cocks wanted to cut off an audition he’d theatrically slash his hand across his neck. Victoria’s song impressed him. As she told Rosalind, ‘He came in, sat down, and said, “Right, make me laugh.” So I did.’54 He even planned to rush her straight into the spring series which was still running. She wrote to all her friends. ‘Do you get lots of money for doing TV things? If not why not?’ replied Lesley Fitton.55 ‘Is this the Break Vicki was always waiting for?’ asked Alison Sabourin. ‘Will V Wood soar to stardom?’56 ‘I would wish you luck,’ said Anne Sweeney, ‘but it seems stars don’t need it.’57 It was then decided to hold Victoria back for the autumn series.
Meanwhile, her student years were about to end. ‘No one ever gets a first,’ she predicted before her exams, ‘so it’s no use trying for that.’58 She was right to arm herself against disappointment. In part thanks
to her fail in the television course, Victoria was awarded a pass degree without honours. Her name was listed at the very bottom of the page in the Birmingham Post on 13 July 1974. On the same day there was a graduation ceremony. Victoria did not attend.
6
NEW FACE
‘I think it was the only TV talent show to have its own stomach pump.’
Lucky Bag, 1983
Victoria’s plan upon graduating was to make a living as an entertainer, but the first thing she did in the summer of 1974 was to start claiming the dole. Resolving to stay on in Birmingham, she packed up in Richmond Hill Road and moved less than a mile down the hill to a ground-floor bedsit in a mid-Victorian mansion in Priory Road, close to the main road into the city. At last she had room for a piano, bought on the cheap. It was in such poor nick that eventually she invested in a second upright. Birtle-style, she fashioned shelves from bricks stacked on planks. At the side was a kitchen conservatory which was bitterly cold in winter. She heated food on a Baby Belling and warmed the place up with bold blues and purples. On a chair she kept a stack of women’s magazines – ‘where I get my ideas from,’ she told Louise Fisher. To get around she bought a second-hand bicycle for a tenner.
At her New Faces audition, Victoria found herself drawn to half a dozen middle-aged men competing as the Eagle Jazz Band. Scenting her interest in traditional jazz, the clarinettist Bob Smith invited her to his home in Walsall to sift through his collection of sheet music from the 1920s. ‘She was fascinated by it and went through it piece by piece,’ he says. ‘She played a bit on the piano. She could not believe there was a tune called “I Fell Down and Went Ow”.’ Over the summer she made the twenty-five-mile round trip several times, and also turned up at the Eagle Jazz Band’s pub gigs – the Wheatsheaf in Walsall, the Old Crown in Digbeth, the Golden Eagle in the city centre. One night the band suggested she play during an interval: ‘She wasn’t in the slightest bit pushy. We invited her. We saw it as an addition to the entertainment of the evening.’ She didn’t always persuade the audience to stop talking as she played.