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

by Jasper Rees

  With Victoria’s career as a cabaret performer refusing to ignite, ATV offered salvation. To maintain interest in New Faces, and parade its newly discovered talents, they created a vehicle called The Summer Show and asked Victoria to join the cast of seven. Rehearsals at Elstree Studios began in June. Vaguely modelled on the US revue Tune In, the concept was to race through sketches and songs, each episode organised around a theme. Victoria found herself working for men from an older generation. The producer Colin Clews was a dour-faced veteran of television vehicles for Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck who came to work in a blue safari suit. The writers included the American-born comedy trooper Dick Vosburgh, who had scripted material for David Frost, Tommy Cooper and The Two Ronnies. None had come across anyone like Victoria before. During every week’s rehearsals the same question was asked, says Trevor Chance, a crooner in his thirties who won the pilot episode of New Faces: ‘What shall we do with Victoria? Stick her in the corner on the piano? Make her a waitress? They were always stuck as to how to use her. The writers and directors couldn’t quite see where she was coming from.’

  The first show, on the theme of holidays, was compèred by the suave all-round entertainer Leslie Crowther, with whom Victoria sang a duet. The scripts, dashed off at speed, stuck firmly to the middle of the road. ‘It was all very bog-standard sketch material,’ says Lenny Henry, then a gangly sixteen year old. ‘You were very much within their structure and it was very strict. They didn’t like us pissing about.’ But piss about they did. The director tasked with keeping an excitable ensemble under control was Peter Harris, who would go on to direct The Muppet Show. The ringleader testing his patience was Marti Caine, the singing goofball from Sheffield who was lanky and manic with a voluminous shock of bright red hair. One day Harris, gentle by nature, got so frustrated he strategically hurled a chair across the rehearsal room. Victoria was deeply shocked, though she did a funny impression of him losing his cool and queenily snapping a pencil in two.

  Her status as a reclusive outsider was cemented at the Spider’s Web Motel in Watford, where the cast was put up for five weeks. ‘She’d have a laugh, but she was very private,’ says Lenny Henry. ‘There were no high jinks. You never saw Vic in the bar.’ The mimic Aiden J. Harvey, who gave her lifts to and from Elstree, found her assertive enough to ask him not to smoke in his own car. She could be forceful in re-

  hearsals too. When Colin Clews wanted her to wear a pastel-lemon frock exploding with frills for one item, she threw a tantrum and burst into tears. In the opening episode, with everyone else togged up in boas and tuxedos, Victoria wore denim. She was less fussy about costumes if a sketch called for it. For her duet with Crowther she consented to a voluminous dress and flowers in her hair. In other episodes she’d be got up as Maid Marion or a nurse or in heels and tights.

  Victoria would describe The Summer Show as ‘one of those really bad variety shows where they got the scripts out of other people’s dustbins. It was just dreadful.’29 But at the time, she ‘felt sort of an affirmation to be picked to be on a proper telly show. You got proper money, which for somebody who was on the dole at something like eleven quid a week was quite a hike.’30 The pay was an astronomical £125 a week and, unlike the others, she had the weekly freedom to perform her own work. One song took a swipe at the health industry. With the piano setting a frantic pace, she advised viewers to ‘Never spend a fortnight on a health farm / You’ll end up with fourteen days of health’. A couplet promised a salty rhyme for ‘mist’ then, after a gossamer-thin pause, opted for ‘drunk’ – this would become a regular trick in her skill set. For the ‘mystery and crime’ episode she wrote ‘If Only the Blood Matched My Dress’. Singing in a posh voice, she imagined reading a murder story set in a country house where the sudden death of each occupant is treated with frivolity. It concluded with the narrator’s own demise:

  I say, someone is cutting my head orf

  I’m halfway through my vodka and lime

  Good heavens it’s Mummy, how perfectly crummy

  Did you guess it was her all the time?

  ‘She was under major pressure to produce all these songs,’ says Lenny Henry. ‘It wasn’t just something that fell out of her. She was really working hard to find the right rhymes, the right structure, the right melodies. It wasn’t a full flaring, but you had an inkling this is something special.’ It was only once the series was ready for broadcast that Victoria started to suspect The Summer Show was a vehicle for Marti Caine: ‘We all had our photographs taken for the cover of the TV Times and her photograph was the only one that was used. People started to catch on.’31 Caine was the one member of the ensemble to take a pay cut – ‘The money’s rubbish, in’t it?’ she said to Victoria, who did not resent her higher status. There was even talk of her writing lyrics for Caine to sing in the New Faces grand final at the Palladium. Perhaps it was her competitive streak which pumped her full of bravado in interviews during rehearsals. ‘I would like my own television show,’ she declared, ‘and it’s only a matter of time before I get it.’ She was aware this might sound conceited. ‘No one sings like me,’ she informed the TV Times. ‘I’m unique. I think I’m wonderful, but I suppose I’ll have to wait a while until everyone else thinks so, too …’32

  Victoria later claimed never to have met anyone who had ever seen The Summer Show. She missed it too, as well as the ten songs she recorded for Music Through Midnight on Radio 2 (‘for which I received the grand total of £22’) because she was busy making her debut at the Edinburgh Fringe.33 The invitation came from Roger McGough, who was mounting a revue called Wordplay, alongside GRIMMS collaborators, the zany John Gorman and songwriter Andy Roberts. The company prepared at the latter’s home in north-west London, where Victoria cadged a bed. She threw herself into ensemble work. McGough saw her as ‘someone confident in her own work who fitted in with what we were trying to do’. Away from rehearsals she struck Andy Roberts as ‘a deeply unhappy individual. When the day’s work was done, she was pretty shy and withdrawn, even awkward.’ She never sat down to eat with her hosts, instead disappearing upstairs with a packet of biscuits.

  The sketches McGough had written on the theme of verbal miscommunication were much more to Victoria’s taste than the dross in The Summer Show. So were the white coats the cast all wore, as if in a language lab. In Edinburgh a newspaper rang to ask if there was a female cast member they could photograph. McGough put Victoria on the phone. ‘Imagine a cross between a schoolgirl and a lorry,’ she said. They didn’t send a photographer. During the run Victoria met the jazz-singing flâneur George Melly, who informed her that her taller, thinner co-star Lindsay Ingram ‘gave him an instant erection’ while he ‘told me to lose 2 stone’.34 In Edinburgh she bonded over weight worries with Nina Myskow, with whom she had a long conversation comparing notes on food addiction and anxieties about size. ‘She is v. jolly and fat and talks all the time about it so you won’t think it was your own idea,’ she told Rosalind.

  The atmosphere of Wordplay was ‘v boozey and rock-band-ish,’ she told Lesley Fitton. ‘It all felt like being an early Beatle,’ but it gave Victoria access to the wisdom of experienced performers.35 Andy Roberts introduced her to the songs of Randy Newman and encouraged her in the idea that she could be his English equivalent. He was impressed by ‘We’re Having a Party for the End of the World’, the doomsday song she performed in the show, and urged her to steer away from whimsy. She took up his suggestion and worked on ‘some songs that I think you might like better than my other ones – nicer music and no funny words’.36

  Back in Birmingham she found herself ‘suffering from a rash of Being Recognised’.37 ‘It’s that pianist,’ she overheard someone say in the laundrette. Nascent fame had its uses. Her university friend Claire Horrocks drove Victoria to Mansfield to see Aiden J. Harvey perform in a nightclub. ‘It was all very glam low-cut frocks and frilly shirts, and Vic and I rolled up in denim. However, because Vic was known from television and we had come to see Aiden
backstage we were excused and treated like minor royalty.’ But there were grim rites of passage too. One was at Catterick army camp. ‘As far as unrewarding creative experiences go,’ she reported to Roger McGough, ‘I nominate singing for 50 16-year-old recruits on Pernod for the first time who’d been deflected from the Disco by the Military Police.’38

  Much greater recognition beckoned. Although it had yet to be broadcast, Victoria’s edition of The Camera and the Song was circulated internally within the BBC, where it caught the eye of the makers of That’s Life!, the consumer-affairs juggernaut fronted by Esther Rantzen, watched at its peak by eighteen million viewers. The show had a slot for a topical songwriter – its most recent occupant had been Jake Thackray. The director Pieter Morpurgo and editor John Morrell went up to see Victoria perform in Birmingham. After she was summoned to audition for Rantzen, Victoria was incensed to learn that Jack Dorsey had somehow turned the job down for her. ‘When I found out I rang up and said it was all a dreadful mistake.’39 She eventually heard in December that she’d been hired for four episodes.

  Dorsey’s unhelpful influence was evident when, the same month, Wordplay was booked for a three-week run at Hampstead Theatre Club and Victoria had to persuade him it was worth doing. ‘I sorted out my manager,’ she assured Roger McGough.40 As a result, for the first time Victoria found herself performing before serious London critics such as Irving Wardle of The Times and B.A. Young of the Financial Times, who found her ‘particularly adept at socially-pointed songs at the piano’.41 ‘I got very good reviews for that,’ she later said, ‘and only had little bits to do, which was much better than trying to do a whole half hour on my own.’42 (The Evening Standard identified her as ‘Victoria Woods’, a misnomer she would gleefully exhume for the closing credits of Acorn Antiques.) She was offered £30 a week, although it proved difficult to extract her royalty, especially as her association with London Management had now fizzled out. ‘I guess I’ll get it in the end,’ she sighed.43 Meanwhile Hampstead Theatre Club commissioned her to write a show for her and John Gorman to take to Edinburgh in the summer. She was soon fretting as she made her first solo stab at sketch comedy. ‘I keep thinking I must have a serious bit here, and then a song etc which is stupid,’ she told Roger McGough. ‘Isn’t writing HARD? I can’t tell whether things are funny or not.’44

  At the very start of 1976, Victoria was phoned by Esther Rantzen, who asked her to write a song about the end of sexual discrimination, suggested by an advertisement in the Sunday Times. A few days later, one Sunday lunchtime, Victoria reported to the BBC Television Theatre on Shepherd’s Bush Green to make her first appearance on That’s Life! She was rewarded with gales of laughter from the audience as she imagined a man explaining that women were now free to fondle their thighs on the bus: ‘We’ll know we are winning if you pass a shop window / Denis gives massage and lessons in French’. She was worried the song was too saucy: ‘I thought after that my number’d be up, but they gave me a fortnight spot.’45

  Victoria’s topical songs made an impact. ‘And that’s the rather clever Victoria Wood who’s singing her own stuff,’46 purred the Sunday Times listing before her third appearance. Good news followed the episode. ‘Esther (Dentures) Rantzen has asked me to stay on for the rest of the series,’ she informed Roger McGough. ‘It’s nice to have a regular job.’47 The song that clinched her contract extension was ‘More Sex Please, We’re British’, inspired by a report that the UK was turning to the bedroom to combat the financial slump. Granted a national platform to mine the bedroom for comedy, Victoria looked impishly into the camera and sang, ‘You have to admire us, the great British nation / All popping upstairs just to combat inflation’. As these fortnightly appearances accrued, she had to fend off the suspicions of the people at Social Security, who couldn’t work out what someone on national television was doing claiming the dole. She was paid £35 per episode. ‘Television is nice,’ she said the following year, ‘but it doesn’t give you very much money. It meant I was quite well known, but I was sitting on my bottom for most of the time.’48 She did attempt to capitalise on her visibility. ‘Direct from That’s Life’ blared an ad for a gig in a Liverpool folk club after her third appearance.

  Her main point of contact on the show was Pieter Morpurgo, who noticed that ‘on camera she had this great spark which somehow wasn’t there when you just spoke to her about sorting out what we were going to do’. But it was Esther Rantzen who called to discuss topical issues that might provoke a song. According to Victoria, she ‘used to ring up on a Friday night and say, “Go and get Wednesday’s Guardian and look at page thirty-two and write something about that.” And I used to go round and borrow it from a friend because I don’t buy the papers.’49 Thanks to Victoria’s shyness, Esther Rantzen says she ‘always felt a bit concerned that I was talking too much. The best songs came out of her own experience and what she wanted to talk about so it was a two-way conversation.’ One was inspired by Victoria’s (possibly made up) experience of turning the clock back instead of forwards. She knocked off a song about the centenary of the first General Post Office telephone call (‘no heavy breather ever used a pigeon’, she sang, ‘as far as I know’). Among these impersonal commissions Victoria was able to smuggle in crafty references. She evoked memories of the school playing field in ‘the blushes on the shiny face / Of the girl who lumps in last on a skipping race’. One song she called ‘Thank Heavens I’m Taurus’. In general, the slot gave her an instant high more than long-term satisfaction: ‘It’s very easy to think you’ve written something brilliant in the heat of the moment. You rush in with great bags under your eyes and red rims and say, “Look, look, hot off the sticky old typewriter.” And then eight weeks later you find it’s no use to you at all.’50

  As usual much of Victoria’s discomfort was to do with her appearance: ‘I was still suffering from “fat equals frock” brainwashing. I went to Laura Ashley and poked about among all the size 16s with the fervent interest of someone unblocking a toilet and ended up with a huge blue thing that made me look like the unhappy victim of a fertility drug overdose.’51 Needing more than one dress, in a panic she asked Rosalind to knock up something at speed. ‘It suddenly struck me that even tho’ I’ve lost weight I won’t be able to get a decent size 16 cos nobody makes any.’52 Fans wrote in to praise her. ‘PS you’re not bad looking,’ said one. Another correspondent complimented her on her dresses before adding, ‘Victoria my only real problem is I wet my bed – every night my sheets are soaking and my pyjamas.’53 As it had a Liverpool postmark, she worried it might be a prank. ‘I’ll kill you if it was you,’ she told Roger McGough.54

  One dress was loaned by Celia Imrie, a new friend who lived in Hammersmith not far from the theatre. ‘It was rather a beautiful rust-coloured dress with a V neck,’ says Celia. ‘Actually not a good idea for people with big bosoms, as it had a sash that went underneath and emphasised it even more. It was quite a prized possession of mine and I was rather thrilled that she wanted to wear it.’ Celia had become fast friends with Fidelis Morgan on a world tour of Hedda Gabler starring Glenda Jackson and met Victoria when Fidelis brought her to Derby Playhouse, where she was hoofing in a pantomime: ‘I knew that Victoria was coming and I got so nervous – she’d been on telly and she was a winner – that I fell over. She thought that was hilarious.’ Over the following year Celia was subsumed into the Birmingham gang in which Fidelis was the leader and Victoria the intimidating court jester: ‘I had this rather childlike thing of feeling a bit stupid in their company. It occurred to me that they were very critical of everything. It made me a bit jumpy because I didn’t know what they were on about. I found it rather alarming. And Victoria was very witty.’

  The fortnightly routine of That’s Life! brought Victoria down to London on Saturdays. Because she composed at night – ‘I used to sit there writing, as white as a sheet’ – she would get little sleep before the trip south.55 She stayed with her former flatmate Jane Wynn Owen, who had a place in
Highgate with two grand pianos, on one of which Victoria would finetune the latest song. She strove to get them right partly because she was backed by a seasoned trio of leading session musicians. ‘We were more than capable of picking up a simple sequence,’ says Dave Richmond, who had played bass on ‘5-4-3-2-1’, ‘Je t’aime’ and ‘Your Song’. ‘And some of them were quite simple songs harmonically. There were no surprises within the music because everything was coming from the lyrics.’ Victoria saw the band as her allies. ‘We spend all day (me and the lads – the musicians) talking about tits and smoking,’ she reported, ‘and occasionally playing a bit of music. It’s great.’56 Their intimacy bore fruit musically. In one song she slipped in a cheeky bit of Haydn; another had a lively ragtime solo. Pastiching George Formby, she tapped into the guitarist Judd Proctor’s status as a prince of the ukulele with ‘You Don’t Need a Degree to Play the Ukulele’. In a lumberjack shirt and jeans, accentuating her Lancashire vowels and pulling doubtful faces, Victoria gave the fullest expression to her personality yet seen on television. With the band hollering refrains, she ended on another of her saucy non-rhymes:

  Forget the fancy piano bits!

  Just a banjo jammed against my …

  If George Formby can do it, why not me?

  Before her run in That’s Life! ended, viewers saw a more reflective side to Victoria when her episode of The Camera and the Song was finally broadcast in May 1976. It had been so delayed that she ‘got to the point where I kept writing to the BBC to ask them when, if ever, they were going to put the programme on’.57 Previewing it in the Radio Times, Sheridan Morley pronounced Victoria ‘our first genuinely funny female singer since Joyce Grenfell’, although humour was not the dominant mood in a barely veiled self-portrait which she titled As She Sees It.58 Into the cycle of half a dozen songs Victoria loaded everything she’d ever wanted to say about the constrictions she had endured as a teenager: a young girl’s eagerness to escape her parents, drab days and nights alone in her bedroom, the dread pall of body-consciousness. The strongest composition was ‘Sad Salad Sunday’, written in her second year at Birmingham. The cinematographer John Baker illustrated her songs by filming a party, a pub, a keep-fit class, a teenager’s bedroom, but the coup was getting permission to capture Radio 1’s Tony Blackburn at work, trading banal chat with expectant brides and elderly housewives. The film closed with an image of Victoria puffing moodily on a cigarette. ‘The plump, aggressively untrendy girl-composer is undoubtedly a major talent in a minor area,’ wrote a Sunday Times previewer, ‘disguising her sharp lyrics with sweet melodies. Would Tony Blackburn have larked about so co-operatively if he had realised she was cutting him into little strips?’59