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

by Jasper Rees

  At one pub Bob Smith was surprised to spot her at the bar with John Clarke, whom he’d known since school, and who now invited Victoria and the Eagle Jazz Band to perform on a one-off regional show called Mother Muffin’s Music Stand. Although it wouldn’t be broadcast until early December, it was recorded in September, giving Victoria some practice in performing to an audience and a camera at the same time. Over a plaid shirt, she wore a Wrangler jacket with rainbow colours which she had chain-stitched along the shoulders and round the wrists. She would embroider further embellishments: richly coloured panels on the front and back, flowers in pots, her name and initials. The Eagle Jazz Band were local television regulars, whereas Victoria was so nervous beforehand that she could be clearly seen by the audience lying flat on her back stage right. She played two new compositions. In ‘Fashion’ she described a young typist called Dorothy who yearns to break free of her controlling mother and dress according to magazine style tips.

  She sees herself in black satin

  With no back and no sides and no top

  The sort sexy ladies pop out of

  ’Cept Dorothy’s got nothing to pop.

  She explored similar territory in ‘Nice Girl’, which told of a polite young wife who plots breakout fantasies of nailing her father to the railings and escaping her marriage to become a stripper (‘I’ll be introduced as Sadie / A rather evil lady’). For this stomper the Eagle Jazz Band provided Dixieland backing, while she peppered the camera with beaming grins.

  Her heat of New Faces beckoned in October, and Victoria encouraged Rosalind, who was expecting a baby, to tune in: ‘Maybe you’ll have your own “new face” by then hee hee.’1 While excited to be making her debut on national television, she watchfully guarded against failure: ‘I bet I get hammered on “New Faces” – they award points for “Star Quality”. Won’t win. Never mind.’2 She prepared by putting herself on a lemon-juice diet (‘I’m back on the PLJ shrivel shrivel’), while Louise Fisher introduced her to a designer friend called Pru McEwen who created flamboyant outfits.3 For Victoria she made denim dungarees and a wide-lapelled blue satin blouse, and gave her a necklace of multicoloured beads.

  Her heat was filmed at the ATV studios on a weekday before the Saturday night broadcast. Beforehand there were rehearsals when she and the other contestants spent most of the day doing soundchecks and a dress rehearsal. ‘I can remember her in my make-up chair,’ says Louise, ‘trying out what we should do for hair and make-up and then testing how it looked on camera. She was in unknown territory. I’d get her on, get her off. I stuck with her the whole time like glue.’ The staff in the control room were so taken by her that the set designer took it upon himself to tell her how they all felt. For support Victoria took along Robert Howie, who sensed his friend needed morale-boosting compliments and ‘kept telling her how marvellous she was that evening’. She also had a claque in the audience whom she supplied with huge VW badges, prompting the compère Derek Hobson to joke about a Volkswagen owners’ club. Backstage Victoria stayed quietly within her shell until the moment came for her to perform.

  The other contestants, including a unicycling ventriloquist known as Davy Wanda, would all sink without trace. Career death was also predicted for Victoria. The show had a rotating cast of male judges in velvet tuxedos and floppy bow ties – Les Cocks had decided that female viewers didn’t warm to female judges. On that episode’s panel were venerable comedian Ted Ray, the prolific record producer Mickie Most, Birmingham nightclub owner John Smith and the Daily Mirror television critic Clifford Davis, the show’s pantomime villain whose damning verdicts provoked boos. When she performed ‘Fashion’, they awarded her very high marks for presentation, content and star quality, but Davis added a caveat that her act belonged to a bygone age, which he attempted to clarify with her in post-show drinks. The message Victoria took away was that, while she had won the episode and would go through to the next round, ‘she’ll never work because she’s a sophisticated cabaret act and there’s no places for her to work’.4 While downcast at the suggestion she was in a stylistic cul-de-sac, she felt validated by the praise: ‘I was very excited that people like Ted Ray and Mickie Most said, “She’s fantastic.” I thought, ooh-eh! I am good. I am good.’5 And she enjoyed observing these celebrities backstage. She told Rosalind about meeting Ted Ray: ‘I’ve never seen anyone that pissed before that was still standing. He kept saying, “Wouldn’t mind a bit of that” gesturing drunkenly towards me, while everyone smiled indulgently.’6

  That week she was showered with enquiries from potential agents. ‘I just cannot believe all this is happening to me,’ she told the Birmingham Evening Mail, who sent a photographer to Priory Road to snap her at her piano. ‘This is my major breakthrough.’ The reporter referred to her as Christine, but there was no misrepresenting her sunny enthusiasm. ‘My eventual ambition,’ she said, ‘is to do a one-woman show on television or on the stage. I have a trunkful of songs I have written for when the time comes. I am just keeping my fingers crossed that my luck holds.’7

  At the recording there was one agent in particular, a thickset man in his middle years, who pledged to make her a star. Later in life Victoria avoided identifying her manager, whom she took to describing as ‘certifiably insane’.8 His real name was Handel Huckridge, but he was better known as the bandleader Jack Dorsey, who had also worked in A&R. He swiftly typed up a contract in front of her and naively she signed it. ‘Am having v exciting time signing my life away to a big band leader (the band’s big, he’s quite small),’ she told Rosalind, adding anxiously, ‘I wish I could understand contracts.’9 Later she claimed never to have read the contract: ‘I thought, it’ll look so rude; it’ll look like I don’t trust him. God knows what it said. “I give all my money to Jack Dorsey.”’10 The contract, she soon discovered, meant that he took 50 per cent of her royalties. He also signed London Management to act as her agents.

  During these developments, Victoria prepared to go forward to a winners’ final a month later. The prize was a place in the grand final at the London Palladium, where the victor would earn a gig in Las Vegas. For this episode Victoria wore a fresh pair of dungarees by Pru McEwen: ‘I’d asked for them to be made in red, yellow and blue patchwork corduroy. When she brought them, she said, “Oh, I couldn’t face making them in red, yellow and blue so I made them in green and brown.” Absolutely loathed them. And also either she’d made them too small or more likely I’d done a lot of nervous overeating the weeks preceding the show and I couldn’t get into them.’11

  As the contestants were introduced on camera, Victoria sat nonchalantly smoking next to an eight-year-old contestant called Malandra Newman. The other finalists included two hirsute all-male bands, a light soprano and a couple of mimics. One of them was Les Dennis, to whom Victoria introduced herself as a university friend of his school friend Jude Kelly. They bonded throughout the day while sizing each other up: ‘After the rehearsal Victoria came up to me and said, “It’s either going to be me or you.” I said, “I think you’re going to win.”’

  For one night only Derek Hobson joined the judging panel and handed presenting duties to Nicky Martyn, a Lancashire stand-up who had been a runner-up in a previous programme. He puffed Victoria up as the owner of an honours degree whom viewers might imagine better suited to the Old Vic or ‘somewhere very Shakespearean’. He then introduced her as ‘Joanna Wood’, twice. Victoria sang ‘Lorraine’; in her own estimation it was not as accomplished as ‘Fashion’, though it too was a cleverly worded snapshot of young womanhood.

  I don’t think his mother likes me,

  I can tell by the look in her eyes

  As she sips her port and lemon

  Says ‘I’ve got a little premon-

  ition you’re in for a surprise.’

  I know what she’s trying to tell me

  I’ve heard about marital rites

  It sounds like ’ell so it’s just as well

  It only happens on Saturday nights.


  The audience laughed cheerfully at this grim portent. When Hobson urged her not to think of losing two stone as Lorraine does in the song – ‘You’re lovely the way you are,’ he said – Victoria blew him a kiss which turned into a sardonic side-eye as he likened her to Jake Thackray. She finished sixth out of eight. ‘I think she was gutted,’ says Les Dennis, who was fourth. The other mimic won.

  Victoria’s consolation as a heat winner was to be named Midlands Musical Entertainer of the Year, the prize for which was a residency at the New Cresta Club in Solihull owned by the New Faces judge John Smith. It was a demoralising week: ‘I had to wear a dress and the audience were eating scampi in a basket and that was just terrible. The only laugh I knew how to get was “I’ve got to go now because I’ve got to have a wee”. And I used to say that earlier and earlier.’12 To amuse himself the emcee used to hold the curtains together to prevent her coming off.

  Such experiences suggested Clifford Davis’s prophecy might have been right after all. Jack Dorsey had no idea what to do with her, and it didn’t help that he lived in Hove. If she wanted to see him, she had to pay for her own travel. His default tendency was to reject gig bookings. ‘My girl doesn’t do anything like that,’ he’d say. ‘I don’t know why he wanted to sign me. He had no interest really in doing any work for me at all. It was just weird and I was so stupid to do it.’13 At the time, she submitted to Dorsey’s plan, telling a local reporter that her manager rationed her bookings to those that he felt were right for her. ‘If you’re confident you’re going to make it anyway,’ she said, ‘you can afford to take time.’14 His strategy, such as it was, was to hold out for television offers and secure a recording contract. ‘I’ll speak for Fatty,’ he’d say as he took her to meetings: ‘I should have said “Don’t call me Fatty, Baldy” but I didn’t, I just took it – I suppose because I thought it was my fault that I was overweight.’15 An album, notionally titled Cameos, never came to pass.

  Victoria’s own contacts were a steadier source of employment. Steve Trow formed a strolling theatre company called Jubilee Arts who introduced themselves with a pub entertainment called The Tipton Slasher Show about a Black Country prize fighter which toured West Bromwich pubs in late 1974. Victoria wrote the songs and joined the band. Her introductory number included a dig at greedy agents, and perhaps at her own credulity: ‘This boy is heaven sent, / He’s so bloody stupid, / I’m on 99 per cent.’ The rambunctious show was performed on tiny cramped stages with everyone mucking in – Victoria even turned her hand to drumming. Her pay was not forthcoming and she had to write, crossly, to demand her £5 fee.

  Meanwhile she continued to rely on John Clarke. In early December he brought her in to Pebble Mill to record songs for a programme he called Good Heavens, Look at This! Not for broadcast, it was a training day for BBC staff learning to call the shots in a television studio. There were twelve trainees and so twelve short programmes to film. Cued in at the same place each time, Victoria recorded a dozen songs from her repertoire built up over the previous two years. (‘I had one good song and eleven hopeless songs,’ she would later say, ‘and I used to do that in my act.’)16 This mix of jolly patter songs, wistful ballads and bluesy torch songs reflected the preoccupations which would be with her for the next forty years: love, sex, class and body image. In the determinedly unfunny ‘Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Fat’ she explored the psychology of comfort eating:

  People can be very cruel

  There’s no use denying

  Inside every jolly fat girl

  Is another one crying

  So get thin or keeping smiling

  And that’s that.

  Twenty years her senior, John Clarke was a significant figure in Victoria’s life as she stepped onto the lowest rungs as a professional entertainer. She dropped in for coffee or a drink at Pebble Mill, introduced him to a clutch of her friends and would invite him to Priory Road. A snap of a thickset middle-aged figure with dark curly hair and a leather jacket survives in an early photo album. ‘John Clark’, she captioned it, misspelling his surname. It was in her bedsit that he told her there was only so much he could do to help her career. ‘We had a conversation in Priory Road about what she was going to do,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t going to be able to provide her with work from here on in. She said, “That’s all right, I’m going to be a star anyway.” I said, “What makes you think that?” She said, “I know it, I don’t think it.”’

  The last time John Clarke put Victoria’s face on television was to have a domino effect. He asked her to write a song for a regional review of 1974. One of the other contributors was Roger McGough, the Mersey poet who had known fleeting pop fame singing ‘Lily the Pink’ with the Scaffold. As part of the all-male performance collective known as GRIMMS, he was working on a film for a BBC Two series called The Camera and the Song, which married quirky filmmaking and folkish songwriting. Impressed and amused by Victoria, McGough recommended this unusual young singing wordsmith to the producer John Bird. She was commissioned instantly.

  ‘We have found our last performer,’ wrote Bird in an internal BBC memo, recommending she be paid £60.17 London Management negotiated the fee up to £100. All Victoria had to do was propose a topic to Bird. ‘I hope I’m awake before he rings,’ she told Roger McGough, ‘or I might say something embarrassing that I don’t mean like “Ramsbottom in Winter” or “What Men are Really Like.”’18 In fact, she suggested a song cycle about the dullness of suburbia. Thus she shivered in her bedsit and worked on threading together half a dozen songs on the same theme – she dubbed the show ‘The Camera and too much work’.19 ‘When I’ve written all these bloody songs I’ll let you know,’ she told Robert Howie, ‘and you can come round for tea and laugh at my new lampshade.’20

  The songs emerged quickly and were handed over to an arranger. After recording, they were given to a cinematographer who had free rein to produce the images to match them. It wasn’t conventional for the composer to appear in the films, but Victoria had a cameo as a barmaid clearing tankards during a song about men in pubs, inspired by her time at the Sportsman. There would be a frustrating wait before The Camera and the Song was broadcast.

  In the meantime, the new songs entered her repertoire. A couple of them – one called ‘Marriage’, the other ‘Divorce’ – had an airing in March at the Teddington Hockey Club Dance in south-west London, where Victoria was paired on the bill with Beetles and Buckman, a comedy duo who had met as junior doctors. Before the booking she visited Rob Buckman’s house in Islington and, with Chris Beetles, had a go at sketch-writing. ‘We were relentlessly extrovert and ridiculous and she very quickly got over her shyness,’ says Beetles. In the end the doctors did their own material and Victoria performed her songs. Her sad, fine-grained observations weren’t really hockey-club fare. ‘People in backless dresses and powder over their acne kept saying they’d seen me on the box,’ she told Rosalind, ‘and did I write those little songs myself?’21

  A month later Beetles and Buckman’s management booked them to perform a showcase at the Mermaid Theatre in London, and they asked Victoria to join them. The idea of the evening was to introduce the performers to a packed house of producers and impresarios. Chris Beetles noticed a competitive streak in Victoria: ‘If we were getting good jokes, then she would sulk. She was a bit of sulker. There had to be a winner.’ Bernard Miles, who ran the theatre, enthused to Beetles and Buckman: ‘You gave great pleasure last evening. It was also an inspiration to plant a plump and more leisurely figure at the grand piano to set off your vigorous tempi.’22 Victoria pasted the letter into her scrapbook with the words ‘Thank you Bernard’.23 In her estimation, the only exposure the evening brought was that she was ‘exposed for being a talentless prat’.24 In fact, she did earn a commission to write a song for Woman’s Week, a new show fronted by Joan Bakewell about how women are featured in the media.

  A bigger commission came from Thames TV, whose magazine programme Today sought songs on local places – Kew
Gardens, London Zoo. ‘The silly provincial looks at London,’ she snorted.25 She wrote one on Soho which involved poking around a sex shop for inspiration ‘and they wouldn’t let me do it because it was too rude’.26 She made no great claims for their artistic merit and had no intention of watching them when they were broadcast in May. ‘I was really diabolical,’ she would say later. ‘No one could grind out any words of praise at all for that.’27

  Through all this, funds remained scarce. ‘I keep signing contracts and not getting any money,’ Victoria told Roger McGough. ‘Is all show business like this?’28 Back in Birmingham, she spent a great deal of time scrimping and scavenging with Fidelis Morgan. Once they dug for spuds in Harrods’ abandoned vegetable patch and made mashed potatoes with butter bought from the butter tokens they were given with their dole money. If unable to pay Fidelis petrol money for taxiing her to hotel gigs in her orange Beetle, Victoria would pinch teapots and towels as payment in kind. These ended up with Oxfam.

  Having both stayed on in Birmingham, the two spent a lot of time together. In the front row at the Alexandra Theatre they saw the vast cue cards held up for Marlene Dietrich in the wings. At another play they got the giggles which were transmitted to the cast and the show ground to a halt for five minutes. Back at Harrods they consumed vast quantities of radio and television. They were obsessed with Julie Dawn, who in a curdling voice broadcast late-night inanities with a right-wing Christian tinge on Radio 2. Attempting to capitalise on their lack of work, they started writing a sitcom about two girls on the dole, inspired by their experience standing in the queue with alcoholics and addicts. They called it Take Two Nutters and mapped out a series. One episode was based on an incident when Fidelis was teaching Victoria to drive and a wasp flew in causing havoc. But they never submitted it to a broadcaster.