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

by Jasper Rees

  In Victoria’s modest explanation, ‘I walked away with the reviews because nobody had seen me before.’ More precisely, nobody had seen anyone like her before – a young woman who could glide with astonishing facility between melancholy and ribaldry. The raves helped her finally to secure an agent. At Geoffrey’s behest – she didn’t dare ring him herself – Richard Stone read the reviews, came to a performance and promptly took her on. Nearing sixty, he was a larger-than-life figure who wore silk suits and had a squint. ‘I’m never really sure if he’s talking to you,’ Victoria confided to Stone’s assistant Vivienne Clore. He wasted no time in asking her to write a sitcom for Barbara Windsor and the bit-part comedian John Junkin. When Victoria asked why those two, he replied, ‘Because they’re out of work, darling.’ She had a stab at it but was soon waylaid by another job.

  The Crucible Theatre in Sheffield was suddenly awash with money from hosting the World Snooker Championship, and its artistic director Peter James asked his associate David Leland to spend some of the windfall on new writing. An inaugural season was rapidly mounted in 1977. Leland was now scouting around for more new plays and approached Ron Hutchinson, who recommended Victoria. With time running out, Leland asked her for an idea by the following morning: ‘So I sat up all night in Highgate and come six o’clock in the morning I had thought of this idea about a talent contest, seeing as I had been in one. And I drove down to Tufnell Park … and put it through his letter box.’18 ‘I heard the letterbox go,’ says Leland. ‘The plot of Talent was written on the back of this brown envelope.’

  David Leland never made it to In at the Death, so it was solely on the basis of this synopsis that he commissioned Victoria to write a play with songs. When she visited for further discussions, he stipulated how many actors she must write for, gave her a deadline of only three weeks and asked for a title so they could print the posters: ‘You could see it going in. I was pretty sure she would come up with something. She went away and I didn’t hear a dicky bird from her.’ There was no payment up front.

  After the run at the Bush, Victoria drove straight back to Morecambe and fell into a rhythm of writing deep into the night. ‘I’ve no idea whether it’s any good or not but I’ll keep struggling on,’ she wrote to Robert Howie at half past five one morning.19 She would ask Geoffrey, ‘Is this a play?’ He had a daily chance to consider the question, as once she went to bed he would type up the latest pages. This was a labour of love, his two-fingered typing skills being barely superior to hers. The result was that ‘he was able to persuade me that Talent wasn’t as bad as I thought it was’.20 Victoria would think of the play’s creation with sentimental fondness: ‘It was like a real adventure that we were doing it together in this little flat in Morecambe.’21

  The plot of Talent could easily fit onto the back of an envelope. Set in a sleazy northern cabaret club called Bunter’s, it sprang from Victoria’s knowledge of ‘the creeps that hang around talent contests’.22 Instead of writing directly about herself, Victoria created an aspiring singer who is desperate to escape a future of marital drudgery. She was so overwhelmingly inspired by Julie Walters that she couldn’t imagine giving her any other name: ‘It was very influenced by meeting her. She was a very extraordinary person. I was trying to capture things that she did when she acted that I knew only she would be able to do.’23 The fictional Julie, as Victoria had discovered with the real one, could blast out a powerful impersonation of Shirley Bassey. The song written for her to sing in character was ‘Fourteen Again’, about a girl’s bittersweet ache for her youth ‘When sex was just called number ten / And I was up to seven and a half’. In fictional Julie’s case, going back in time would wipe out her teenage pregnancy and the baby she had to give up for adoption. It was Victoria’s most painterly composition yet, which conjured up a world of innocence in glinting detail:

  I want to be fourteen again

  Free rides on the waltzer off the fairground men

  For a promise of a snog the last night of the fair

  French kissing as the kiosks shut

  Behind the generators with your coconut

  The coloured lights reflected in the Brylcreem on his hair.

  For moral support Julie brings along Maureen, a prudish sidekick who is ‘on the chubby side’ and still a virgin. ‘I wouldn’t know what to do,’ she tells Julie. ‘You don’t do anything,’ Julie assures her. ‘Men do all the work.’ Victoria didn’t see these girls as a straight double portrait of herself and Julie, but she did draw on memories of being the shy girl who hated parties. ‘There’s the sort of person that lives under a stone until they’re eighteen, which is me,’ she explained, ‘and the sort of person who is at it from the age of twelve, which is not me. But I knew those girls and I remember what they were like.’24 Later she came to recognise that in each woman she was exploring aspects of herself: ‘I was both. I put a lot of my own feelings of being uncomfortable in the world into Maureen and a lot of my excitement about being in show business into Julie.’25

  She packed the dialogue with autobiographical references. Some were overt: bingo in Morecambe, addiction to chocolate, the clapometer, being in Shakespeare at school, Leslie Crowther, New Faces. Others were encrypted: Adam and the Ants, Pam Ayres, her mother’s Irish roots. She channelled a recent memory of the Bush Theatre: the Bunter’s loo doesn’t lock or flush so Julie urinates (offstage) into a plastic straw boater then places it on the windowsill. Victoria even borrowed a joke from ‘Sex’. ‘I don’t think I’ve got any hobbies, have I?’ says Julie. ‘Shoplifting,’ says Maureen.

  Victoria used her new knowledge of conjuring to create a retired factory worker called George who does comic magic. He was partly inspired by the Great Soprendo but also based on the pensioners she met when Geoffrey judged a magic competition in Lancaster. She gave George an assistant called Arthur, and for both gents she wrote a duet in the style of Flanagan and Allen and long speeches which proved her ear was as attuned to old men as to young women.

  As for the younger men, the commission gave Victoria a chance to settle scores with bus-shelter pests and bedroom braggarts. The talent show organist turns out to be the callous ex-boyfriend who impregnated Julie. The compère offers Julie a place on a TV talent show in exchange for sex. ‘Tonight’s out, unfortunately,’ he tells her. ‘But my wife’s away tomorrow, brass rubbing. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed … old John Thomas has put a smile on a lot of girls’ faces.’ He also tries his luck on Maureen, who is invited to his Cortina and instructed to remove her underwear in advance. ‘And bring a tissue,’ he adds. The line was greeted by shocked groans from women in the audience. The compère, Victoria revealed, was a ‘conglomeration of a few nasty people’.26 ‘You’ve got a mediocre voice,’ Julie is told, ‘a terrible Lancashire accent, no experience and no act. On your own, you’re going to get nowhere fast. But with me – I know more big producers than you’ve had hot dinners.’ The girls scarper when they discover the talent contest is rigged.

  Although the play was conceived as a vehicle for Julie, her friend was committed to a Shakespeare season at the Bristol Old Vic and, even if she had been free, David Leland already had a company under contract, although he did insist that Victoria play Maureen. ‘I thought I could sit on my bum for a few weeks,’ she said, ‘so everybody else did the hard work and I got all the money, but they said, “Well, we won’t do it unless you’re in it. And you play the piano as well because that’s a lot cheaper than getting somebody else in.”’27 The role of Julie was taken by Hazel Clyne, who needed a bit of coaxing from Victoria to capture the speech rhythms that played in her head. Geoffrey was hired as a magic consultant.

  Talent was the final new play of the season. When the opening night in the studio theatre came round in November, from the moment Maureen and Julie fumbled onstage in the dark, the dialogue’s zingers – ‘My father says that girls with perms look like barmy sheep’, ‘she looks at me like I’m something spat out by their mynah bird’, ‘I thought coq a
u vin was a fuck in a lorry’ – were met by waves of laughter. ‘The first and last thing to be said about Talent,’ enthused the Guardian, ‘is that it is very funny – at times, too near the knicker-wetting degree.’28 Because the play was only eighty minutes long, the audience was encouraged to come back at 10 p.m. for an hour-long double bill. First on was the Great Soprendo, announced as ‘that Slick Spick with the Spanish Vanish’. Then came Victoria in ‘Tickling My Ivories, an evening of singing, talking, standing up, sitting down again and “possibly” one card trick’. The promise that she might stand up was more of an aspiration than a reality – her monologue about living in Morecambe was delivered from her piano stool. A new opening song called ‘I Only Hope to God It Goes All Right’ contained advice for anyone confusing her with anyone else:

  In case you’re wondering I am not Pam Ayres

  She wears dresses and sits in chairs.

  (I like the chairs better.)

  And I am not Jake Thackray, he is taller

  He plays guitar and his tits are smaller.

  (When Victoria eventually met Thackray, both had the same story to tell about each always being compared with the other.) Talent and its after-show continued into December. ‘She absolutely loved every second,’ says Geoffrey. ‘It was what she’d always wanted to do.’

  Victoria’s mother, who after seven years had finished her master’s dissertation on Victorian religious tract novels, found herself ‘consenting to go having heard that Vicky has actually invited us’.29 There was a more important visitor to the Crucible in the shape of Peter Eckersley, the head of drama at Granada. Victoria was chuffed to learn he was married to Anne Reid – the couple had met while he was writing for Coronation Street and she was playing Valerie Barlow. ‘I’ve seen this amazing girl,’ he told Anne when he went home. ‘She’s just hilarious.’ Eckersley, a burly bald man with thick-rimmed glasses, was an erudite wit with an earthy northern sensibility who had a strong record of spotting writers such as Jack Rosenthal, Arthur Hopcraft and Brian Clark. He was excited enough by Talent to consider buying the television rights but informed Victoria that ‘he couldn’t make head nor tail of it’ and sent Baz Taylor, a young director he knew, for a second opinion.30 ‘There are bits you can’t have, like peeing in the pot,’ he reported. ‘But she is very funny. She’s got something.’

  The drama was duly commissioned. At a meeting in Manchester Victoria stipulated that she wanted Julie to play Julie. When Eckersley insisted she audition, Victoria joked to Julie that she’d play badly for the forty other actresses up for the role. Julie sang ‘Isn’t She Lovely?’ ‘because I knew I could hit the notes and I loved singing it in an echoey room’ but what clinched it was ‘Fourteen Again’. As she sang she undid a couple of buttons on her blouse and mimed popping acne on her chest. ‘That’s what sold us,’ says Taylor. ‘Pete said, “In for a penny in for a pound.” It was clearly going to make Vic’s day to do it and we took the risk. It stood or fell as a two-hander.’ The fee was £2,500.

  Peter Eckersley was to become Victoria’s guiding light as she took her first steps as a writer for television. While acknowledging her talent, his skill was in urging her to pare down dialogue and not mourn the losses. ‘I used really to enjoy coming to his office with a play I’d just finished,’ she later said, ‘and we’d whip through it to-

  gether, and by the time we’d finished it was half an hour shorter and a lot funnier.’31 Thus Talent lost twenty minutes in its transfer to television. As she adapted it in the first weeks of 1979, Victoria was conscious of learning a new craft. She joked to a friend, ‘At the top of the script do I just write “turn the camera on”?’

  There was little time to write it because suddenly, after years of drought, Victoria was deluged with work. After the Sheffield run Talent found a London home at the ICA in February, requiring further rehearsals. Victoria was also still notionally writing the sitcom suggested by her agent and had a commission to produce material for The Marti Caine Show, which she dashed off at pace – it was never used. Meanwhile, there was radio work. For The Scenery Is So Much Better, broadcast on Radio 4 on Boxing Day, Victoria wrote and performed two new songs. One of them, ‘Music and Movement’, was a charming comic ditty ‘about the wireless programmes that little children used to listen to from the BBC in 1959,’ she explained.32 Sung in the character of a little boy in mixed infants, it was inspired by her memory of primary school:

  And now we’re in the hall with wireless on

  With this woman saying what we have to do

  Be as tall as a house, be as tiny as a mouse –

  I’m knackered, it’s only half past two.

  As her name started to resonate Victoria received ever more frequent invitations from Start the Week. For the first nine months of 1979 she appeared roughly once a month, despite her deepening unease with topical songwriting. Its producer Ian Gardhouse would give her the list of guests and ask her to write something related. She would bring it in to be recorded at seven o’clock on Monday morning. Before breakfast television, Start the Week could have the pick of stars as grand as Lauren Bacall or Sophia Loren, supplemented by a pool of confident media performers – Kenneth Robinson, Esther Rantzen, Mavis Nicholson. ‘She would sit at the piano, play the song, play it again,’ says Gardhouse. ‘She was a joy in that respect to work with. We then had a cup of tea and the guests would arrive. I invited Victoria to go into the studio and sit at the table and she never would. She was too shy. Sometimes she might leave before the piece came up.’ The presenter Richard Baker, he adds, ‘was always very pleased when I told him she’d been booked. I booked her as often as I could, but she wasn’t always available.’ Victoria took a different story home with her. ‘Vic found Richard Baker deeply patronising,’ says Geoffrey. ‘She was very sensitive about the casual way women were ignored by men in the media, while the men who were doing the ignoring could see nothing wrong with their behaviour at all. That in turn made her defensive, angry, stand-offish and unwilling to participate. Hence the view that she was shy – which she often also was.’ She compressed these frustrations into a single belittling gag: ‘I suppose a little song in the middle gave Richard Baker a chance to nip out to the doings.’33

  Such was the pressure on her time that Victoria started to take in songs she’d performed elsewhere – ‘Guy the Gorilla’, ‘Leaning on a Convent Wall’. Her attitude to the show perked up in May when Russell Harty guested as a presenter. They bonded in an instant and he took her under his wing. ‘She has a northern way with words, just like Alan,’ Harty told Nicholas Barrett, his producer at LWT. By Alan he meant his friend Alan Bennett. Barrett, who would work with her years later, soon met Victoria himself when they all drove to a restaurant near Harty’s home in the Dales: ‘She was disturbingly taciturn until the music that had been playing softly on the car radio upped the tempo. Suddenly the headrest of my seat became a drum upon which she began to furiously accompany the unexpected rhythm. Head shaking and hair flying, Vic appeared to be in a self-induced trance.’ Over the dinner she reverted to shy silence.

  When Talent opened in London, the country was in the biting grip of a grim winter in early 1979. Victoria’s parents were snowed in, and theatres were suffering. Not the ICA. ‘Shows were closing because nobody was going out,’ says David Leland, ‘and we had queues of people trying to get in to see Talent. It had a phenomenal buzz about it.’ The role of the compère was now taken by Jim Broadbent, a member of the Crucible company who brought extra sleaze to the moment he grabbed Julie’s then Maureen’s breasts. ‘Curiously it wasn’t the standout moment of the play,’ he says. ‘It was taken for granted – fringe-theatre nudity was almost de rigueur. It certainly wasn’t a big hurdle that we felt we had to get over.’ It was certainly a turn-off for Kaleidoscope’s male reviewer on Radio 4 – it ‘gave an unpleasant taste to what, up until then, had been a very positive, warm, subtle evening’.34 Theatregoers were drawn by more glowing reviews which homed in on Victoria’s portrait of y
oung women and their punctured dreams: ‘the arrival of a natural writer’;35 ‘she may have it in her to be our best female playwright’.36 Richard Stone lured along Michael Codron, the preeminent West End impresario, who proved reluctant to transfer Talent partly because it was too short but instead encouraged Victoria to write a new play. But it would have to wait.

  Soon after Talent’s short run at the ICA, Victoria reported to Granada, where ten days were earmarked to rehearse and record the television version. She did not regard the play as set in stone and accepted it when ‘bring a tissue’ was cut, as was one of the two breast gropes. ‘The TV producer said we could only get away with it once on the telly,’ she explained.37 ‘A fuck in a lorry’ was toned down to ‘love in a lorry’.

  Julie, inheriting the lead role, recognised herself in her namesake. ‘The girl was very like me in many ways in a parallel universe,’ she says, ‘except she was crueller. “You shouldn’t eat so many chocolates” – I wouldn’t say things like that to Vic ever!’ Together she and Victoria made an impact at the studio. One day the boom operator, wearing his cans, overheard them on their radio mics in the ladies chatting about the clitoris and men with big long poles. ‘They were pretending they didn’t know the sound boys were listening in on it,’ says Baz Taylor. ‘It went round like wildfire that these girls were real rebels. They took Granada by storm. Nobody had seen anything like them in operation before.’

  Work had to stop at ten o’clock, owing to union rules, and they would start drinking – in the Granada bar with Peter Eckersley, or the Midland Hotel on their own, where anything could happen. One night they both ended up falling asleep in Victoria’s room when a fire alarm sounded. ‘It went on for ages,’ said Victoria, ‘and we were dashing about putting on bras and contact lenses and didn’t have time to get our shoes on. We were right at the top of the hotel and ran down, a bit dazed, and out into the street, to find it was broad daylight and they were testing the fire bells.’38 Julie was in her pyjamas: ‘Oh my God, we used to get pissed. We woke up on the floor [of the Midland bar] one time, just asleep, and someone hoovering around us.’39