by Jasper Rees
For her final turn on That’s Life! a fortnight later, Victoria (back in denim) and the boys teamed up with Five Penny Piece, a folk band with whom she’d alternated on the show, to sing ‘That’s Life Is Over Now, My Friend’. In the middle section she mourned the prospect of returning to social security, where she’d be listed as ‘singer, slightly used’ with ‘three musicians and a piano to feed’. Perhaps her degree would help her to find work. ‘I’ve got one, it’s just a bit small,’ she confessed.
Think of me when you turn off your TV
It’s me you fade down to a dot.
My job ends at the end of this programme
I bet you’re all thinking, so what?
She would come to regard her run on the show as a missed chance: ‘I was very unenterprising. I could have used that as a launching pad but sadly didn’t have the nous to really capitalise on it.’60 After eight appearances in front of many millions of viewers – she cut out the ratings figures, ringing every mention of That’s Life! – Victoria was close to fulfilling that vision she’d had as a tot in the garden at Tottington Road. She was nearly famous. Yet she felt no further on or better off. The series wrapped with a party at a hotel. ‘Victoria had lots of friends there,’ says the show’s bassist Dave Richmond, who went along too. ‘At one point she came over and said, “Dave, can you lend me two quid?” I never got it back. Whenever I saw her on the television, I felt it quite an honour that she still owed me two quid.’
7
SOPRENDO
‘I don’t know if I would have done what I did without Geoff.’
Desert Island Discs, 2007
In the week her run in That’s Life! ended, Victoria turned twenty-three. The long heatwave of 1976 lay ahead. One sunny afternoon Fidelis Morgan threw a party in the back garden of Harrods. The theme, inspired by a rationing cookbook found in a second-hand bookshop, was wartime austerity. Taking the role of a land girl, the hostess cast her guests. Robert Howie came as a shirtless injured soldier, tended by Celia Imrie’s nurse. Victoria wore overalls and a top-knotted headscarf in the guise of a factory worker, with a ration card wedged in her top pocket.
She barely needed to imagine austerity. Her summer schedule included almost no bookings aside from a benefit gig for Birmingham Youth Theatre with an eccentric avant-garde local comedian billed as Mr John Dowie. But there was no cheque for that, even if a plan was formed to get a few dates together in the near future. With not much else on, one weekend in June Victoria visited her university friends Steve Trow and Jude Kelly. The latter was rehearsing for a show for the Phoenix Theatre Company in Leicester. Gunslinger was a goofball western romp with songs, commissioned by the artistic director Michael Bogdanov to mark the bicentenary of American independence. It starred a then unknown Alan Rickman as a character based on Sitting Bull. Victoria’s fame as Esther Rantzen’s songbird went before her and the rehearsal room was abuzz. The only person who drew a blank was an actor cast as the whip-cracking Buffalo Bill. ‘Everyone recognised her and I didn’t know why because I never watched telly,’ says Geoffrey Durham. ‘Her fame was lost on me. I said, “I’m ever so sorry, I don’t know who you are.” She said, “That’s all right.” She told me who she was and we started talking. And we got on very well.’
Victoria and her future husband might never have met again, but at short notice a week of performances in Southampton was announced for which the musical director was not available. At the suggestion of her friends in the company, Victoria was offered the job. It represented quite a comedown, but she was grateful for the income: ‘I said, “Well, yeah,” because it was twenty quid a week or something.’1 Once the show was in performance, she returned to Leicester to start learning a sophisticated accompaniment that tested her mettle as a pianist. One weekend she and Geoffrey spent a day and then a night together and didn’t tell a soul. The company moved to the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton where, dressed in a cowboy hat and checked shirt, Victoria performed as Wild Wilhelmina Fifty Fingers. ‘All theatrical fun and games here – wigs falling off, corpsing etc,’ she told Robert Howie.2 Before the show the cast wandered through the audience saying ‘howdee’. Victoria was far too embarrassed to join them.
Since the final break with Bob Mason, Victoria’s patchy romantic history had mainly consisted of liaisons with older men – one of them affectionately nicknamed Nobby – as she tended to reject advances from those her own age. ‘I met someone who fancied me last week,’ she told Roger McGough. She thought him ‘quite reasonable considering what emotional cripples are usually after me’ and invited him back to Priory Road only to be subjected to hours of boasting about his countless conquests. He had ‘more knots in his string than Hywel Bennett. Big deal. He then asked me if I wished to sample his irresistible technique but the thought of all those knots was making me cringe so I refrained.’3
When news of her relationship with Geoffrey seeped out, the person best acquainted with them both was puzzled. ‘I was quite surprised they got together knowing both of them so well,’ says Steve Trow. ‘She always was a very private person. Geoff was very extrovert and very much took centre stage socially. Vic would never do that. I couldn’t quite work out how this chemistry worked.’
Geoffrey Durham was four years older than Victoria and pleasingly steeped in theatre. He had been a flyman wielding curtains and scenery at the City Varieties Theatre in Leeds, worked in youth theatre at Glasgow Citizens, run a roadshow company in Liverpool and along the way he became an actor and director. He developed a street act in which he ate fire and swallowed razor blades, and read minds in art galleries at lunchtimes. In the autumn of 1975 he fetched up in Leicester where, for a forthcoming roadshow, he swiftly worked up an act lampooning conjurors. He called himself the Great Sorprendo, from the Spanish for ‘to astonish’, then for ease of pronunciation changed it to Soprendo.
Marking the end of a bleak romantic phase in her life, Victoria wrote a valedictory dirge called ‘No More Old Men’ – ‘No more old men, no more affairs / On my brown pillow case no more grey hairs’ – and included it in a dozen songs she recorded at Zella Records in Birmingham. It was among the songs she played to her new boyfriend to introduce him to her work. As far as Victoria was concerned it was ‘a fantastic stroke of luck’ meeting Geoffrey. ‘I couldn’t have met a better person for me.’4 His role in her career would evolve but initially it was to boost her morale. For the previous two years this job had fallen to Fidelis Morgan. There was a kind of handover in early August when she invited Victoria to join a group jaunt to the Isle of Wight. The rendezvous point on the Saturday night was the Old Vic. ‘You’ve got to meet Geoff,’ Victoria said, and brought him to the stage door before joining the small convoy heading south to catch the 2 a.m. ferry. ‘As I was driving,’ says Fidelis, ‘I thought she wants my approval and she’s passing the baton. He’s now the person who gets her out of bed.’
Getting Victoria out of bed in the early phase of their relationship was not always easy. ‘She just completely went into a depression,’ says Geoffrey. ‘I don’t think I recognised it as depression; I think I recognised it as laziness. That’s how she talked about it too. She used to lie in the dark most of the day. I wondered what I’d got into.’ The depression was triggered by the fear that she may never wrestle free of her chrysalis: ‘I was really anxious. I remember meeting him and saying, “I’m twenty-three and this is all over.” I had had about four lucky breaks and nothing had happened out of any of them.’5
Most of those breaks had been in television. Happily, as if on cue, another now presented itself, but in theatre: a commission to write a play. Jude Kelly had only just taken over the Solent People’s Theatre, a community company touring around Southampton and Portsmouth, and Victoria was an obvious port of call. Kelly requested a cheerful Christmas entertainment with songs, and Victoria set to work. She called it Sunny Intervals and drew on a scenario familiar from Cinderella which also echoed her own experience. The Wilkins family consist of Dad, a former
ping-pong champ, and his three daughters. Two are trendy glamour pusses who boast of leaving school ‘with CSE knitting and O Level Sex’. The youngest, Gail, is ‘dopy, plain, insignificant’. Victoria gave her all her own anxieties.
My dad says that I’m just a shy girl
I don’t know what life’s all about
He says ‘Gail come out of your shell more’
But it seems safer in than out.
For the first time Victoria approached the theme of parental neglect. Gail is so invisible her parents left her at the hospital after she was born and ‘didn’t think twice till she came knocking on the door five years later’. Her sisters think she looks like the back of a bus and sit on her as if she’s a sofa. Wondering what job she can possibly do, she sings, ‘I suppose being funny is all I’ve got’. And she knows that one day she will meet ‘someone who’s going to need me’. Sure enough, a swashbuckling former film star, who lives in a magic castle on the hill, needs a young female co-star for his comeback and announces a talent contest in the village hall. Everything ends to everyone’s satisfaction and the company all sing the final chorus: ‘Just remember to remember / Even in December / You can have a funny sunny day’.
There wasn’t much else on, and little job satisfaction to be had when in early August Victoria made a brief return to national television to write and perform a song on BBC One’s early evening current affairs show Nationwide – she dismissed it as ‘just a list set to rhyme’.6 Then a job cropped up at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. John Gorman had booked GRIMMS in for a fortnight at the festival and invited the singing Brummie comic Jasper Carrott to join the gang. But across the week of rehearsal GRIMMS somehow evaporated. Victoria, who a few months earlier had been writing a show for her and Gorman to perform, answered his summons to come and pad out the booking. A day before the trio were due to debut the act they’d hurriedly lashed together, Gorman disappeared, leaving the two non-members of GRIMMS to perform under that banner twice daily for a fortnight.
‘We just thought, we’re up here, we’ll just do the show between us and see what happens,’ says Jasper Carrott. ‘We cancelled the afternoon shows and we made a good fist of it.’ Each did their own thing, Victoria singing songs, Carrott flitting between observational humour and comedy folk songs that were modish thanks to the rise of Mike Harding and Billy Connolly. ‘J. Gorman has gone home to sort out his personal problems,’ Victoria reported, ‘and J. Carrott and I are gamely holding the fort – alternately he pooters, making announcements, offering money back, even smiling at the bloody audience.’7 She was also invited to join the bill of a late-night café show with Quentin Crisp, newly famous after the recent television version of his memoir The Naked Civil Servant. ‘Should be good for a laugh,’ she said.8 Victoria wasn’t always so buoyant at the festival. Depressed in a pub after one show, she broke down in front of Carrott: ‘I gave her a good talking to. I told her to have confidence in herself, along the lines of “you’re much better than you think you are and you might be a bit too concerned about your weight. You don’t have to worry. People will take you as you are.”’
The worry that she was stalling professionally was connected to the situation with Jack Dorsey. When Victoria returned from Edinburgh, she still hadn’t received her fee of £40 for the Nationwide song. The song was called ‘Since Last We Met’. She hadn’t met Dorsey in a while and wrote to the BBC to check that the money ‘has not been sent to Jack Dorsey, or London Management, neither of whom now represent me’.9 The BBC copyright department advised that she should apply to Dorsey, to whom the fee had indeed been sent. Jasper Carrott’s manager helpfully perused her contract with Dorsey, which still had a year to run. ‘He said, “I don’t think this contract is worth anything,”’ Victoria recalled. ‘“I don’t think you have to abide by its terms. I don’t think it’s a legal contract.” So after about two years he sort of faded away.’10
Carrott was sufficiently impressed in Edinburgh to invite Victoria to support him on his coming tour. His manager was not so generous when Victoria negotiated her modest fee directly – ‘a very measly sum,’ she grumbled.11 She mentioned too late that she’d need a piano, only to be advised that she would have to supply her own. She bought a second-hand Roland electric, which as a devotee of grand pianos she hated. It was ‘like a little typewriter. I sat there sort of typing away in front of all these people.’12 The cost, upwards of £350, ensured she made a loss across the autumn tour, though she sold the piano soon afterwards.
Before the tour began Victoria had a morale-boosting invitation. It came from Glenda Jackson via Fidelis Morgan, who had promoted her talented friend: ‘I was handing out the tape and saying she’s wonderful. Glenda said, “You know this friend that you go on and on about? Would she like to come and sing a song? We’ve got a two-minute slot.”’ Thus Victoria made her West End debut on a Sunday night in September 1976. The gala supported women’s right to choose, which brought a bevy of anti-abortionists to the pavement outside the Cambridge Theatre.
Then she set off with Carrott. ‘I did OK,’ Victoria reported after the first date in Worcester. She performed in leather boots and a dark sparkly blue jumper with rainbows hand-knitted in that she’d spotted in Leicester. It was so expensive Geoffrey paid for half of it: ‘The tour promoter informed me I looked like I’d just got out of the bloody car.’13 Her introduction as ‘a girl from Ramsbottom’ came at her behest because it sounded funnier than Bury. She soon began to feel sidelined. ‘Jasper’s manager, sound crew etc think he’s the funniest thing since Graham Woodruff [one of her Birmingham tutors],’ she wrote, ‘and they ignore me accordingly as befits my status as a humble support.’14 She grew increasingly despondent as the tour continued. Carrott was the main draw, especially in the Midlands, although further north ‘we were both on level footing,’ he says. ‘We had a good rapport. She was happy to get the work. I don’t know what she thought of me.’ ‘He is the most puerile of the New Wave of raconteur / folk singers / comedians,’ Victoria informed Rosalind, who was out of the loop having moved to the Bahamas.15 Often in the safe space of her letters, she allowed her competitive streak and frustration with her lot to be directed externally. Her unhappiness was vented less at Carrott, who gave her lifts to and from some gigs in his Daimler, than his audience, whom she described as ‘beer-swilling football fans, so any attempt to take the piss out of men was met with either blank stares or drunk heckling’.16 The repertoire of heckles at a late-night booking in Leeds included ‘Fuck off you cunt, we’ve come to see the Carrott etc etc.’17 Twenty minutes of subtle songs, some about overweight girls in failed relationships, coyly performed without any audience rapport, were not calculated to win them over. At a working men’s club in Leamington Spa she had support from her personal claque in the shape of Fidelis Morgan and Celia Imrie, who remembers ‘thinking this is clearly not what they want. They were talking behind us. I realised this wasn’t their humour, possibly because she was a woman. It wasn’t comfortable.’ Victoria moaned in the car on the way back to Birmingham.
Her parents drove the few miles from Bury to sit near the front of an audience of 800 in Middleton Civic Theatre. ‘She was very good,’ her mother told Rosalind.18 Her father agreed: ‘Vicky was super. Wonderful music and chords underneath and the usual wily lyrics.’19 Victoria couldn’t fall in with their supportive assessment. ‘I died on my arse,’ she told Robert Howie.20 Stanley Wood felt Carrott’s manager was exploiting her by making her pay her own travel expenses to promote the show on BBC Radio Leeds. The booking was a disaster – the train came in late and she arrived five minutes before the end of the programme: ‘The DJ insisted on playing a very long and tedious Swingle Singers record before welcoming me to the studio and bidding me farewell all in the same breath.’21 This humiliation would later be put to good use.
The last and most prestigious date on the tour was at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Victoria had often sat in the audience as a student. The nigh
t was a career-changing triumph for Carrott: Michael Grade signed him to do a pilot for LWT that became An Audience with Jasper Carrott. She was just as eager to impress such an influential figure, but Grade told Carrott that ‘she didn’t register at all’. This happened to be the only night on the tour that Geoffrey was able to catch: ‘She was glad to be working, but she knew it wasn’t what she wanted to do, and she wasn’t making any money. The worst thing was that she didn’t have an act. Jasper was storming the place every night, and she just felt like an amateur, sitting at the piano singing song after song after song.’ She didn’t receive her fee until three months after the end of the tour. ‘It was supposed to be my big break, but it was terrible,’ she reflected four years later. ‘I died on my arse wherever we went and people just sat tapping their watches and thinking “Uuuuhh … when’s Jasper coming on?”’22