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

by Jasper Rees

  ‘They were uncontrollable sometimes,’ says Jim Parker, who arranged Victoria’s songs for the drama. ‘Once Peter was going to take us to an Indian restaurant and the waiters wore turbans. He said, “I don’t think so with Vic and Jules.”’ Parker was hired at Victoria’s behest – she knew his delicate and witty work on Banana Blush, the 1974 album of John Betjeman’s poems set to music played by a quirky wind sextet. Victoria visited his house in Barnes to introduce him to the songs, and he set to arranging them. For the recording, Eckersley insisted on the best London session musicians, joined by Victoria on the piano. One guitarist arrived so blind drunk in a taxi he had to have his guitar attached to him. ‘He gazed blankly at the music,’ says Baz Taylor, ‘then he nodded and did it in one take. Vic said, “How the hell did he do that?”’

  While in Manchester Victoria had a visit from Robert Howie but felt the need to apologise for seeming to snub him. ‘I was in a bit of a muddle as we were right in the middle of filming etc at Granada and there were lots of people around who wanted to talk about jobs. I didn’t mean to be rude however …’40 This was an early sign that her gathering success might make things awkward with friends in the business. She urged him and other pals to visit Morecambe, where guests were accommodated in the bedroom while the hosts slept with the piano and books downstairs. David Leland came but, according to Geoffrey, ‘didn’t get it. He said to Vic, “You have an insatiable appetite for the third rate.” He meant bingo on the front.’ John Dowie arrived with his wife. Looking round Morecambe’s waxwork museum, the four of them tried to identify the exhibits without referring to the guide, only to discover that a label which formerly identified Muhammad Ali had been changed to Lenny Henry.

  Though associated with Granada, Victoria now caught the attention of the BBC in the shape of David Rose, the esteemed producer who had nursed the talents of Mike Leigh and Alan Bleasdale. From English Regions Drama based in Pebble Mill, she accepted a commission to write a fifty-minute play with songs to be called Amusements. Inspired by Morecambe, it was to portray characters she’d met in the amusement arcades of a seaside town. Despite the fee of £1,750, a couple of months later Victoria asked for a postponement – it eventually became a cancellation – while she concentrated on the commission from Michael Codron. Stanley, jumping the gun, described this prospective play as ‘a West End musical … I think the theatre is already fixed and the impresario wants her to act in it as well as write it.’41 In fact, it was destined initially for the Crucible. Having mined her own experience for Talent, Victoria cast around for something else she could write about and alighted on the world of community arts, of which she claimed some hands-on knowledge, having joined her student friends on The Tipton Slasher Show. She called the play Howard’s Anorak, then changed it to Pals, and set it in the flat of Liz, a well-meaning but disorganised community-arts administrator. Liz is mounting a festival which is to feature a Punch and Judy show presented as a feminist story about battered women and a women’s group called Left Bosom, who perform in launderettes and are dramatising the repeal of the Corn Laws. A mass meeting of cystitis sufferers is also programmed. Victoria peopled the play with women – Liz’s school friend Elsie, an Avon lady called Betty. There was a strong focus on women’s hatred of their own bodies (‘He can’t always get an erection because of her stretch marks’), and crude gags about sexual organs and bodily functions. The only male character was Mike, a married geography teacher who takes advantage of the infatuated Liz. Victoria gave Elsie, whom she would play herself, a malfunctioning Mini Van, a strong knowledge of yesteryear’s female comics and most of the best lines. ‘Let’s just say I prefer to go straight from the foreplay to the cigarette,’ she says. Taurus was once again a punchline, and there were more jokes about lentils, punks, the Crossroads motel and macaroons.

  She found it hard going. ‘I’ve been writing a play for 20 years,’ she told Lesley Fitton, ‘and am envying that woman who only had to spin straw into gold.’42 She even advised the Mail that ‘it is a total disaster so far’.43 Pals was typed up by Geoffrey and sent to Michael Codron, whose silence told its own story. Victoria itched to ask if his office had received it. Eventually he described it as ‘very enjoyable’ but said it needed surgery. ‘I felt very pressured and anxious and rather too aware of the pitfalls of writing a second play (especially as Talent had been well reviewed),’ Victoria admitted to Robert Howie, ‘and it didn’t turn out very well.’44 She explained that, even though she ‘based it’ on a mutual university friend of theirs, she couldn’t get to the bottom of Liz’s motivation: ‘I don’t really understand her well enough to explain her to an audience. Anyway, after a few weeks’ discussion, I decided not to patch it up here and there but to start again. I wrote a reasonably plotty scenario, sent it off to Codders and off we went again.’45

  While she steeped herself in writing, over the summer of 1979 Victoria received what might have been a life-changing offer. John Lloyd and Sean Hardie were working on a topical news spoof destined for BBC Two called Not the Nine O’Clock News. ‘We were complete nobodies and we thought she was an emerging superstar,’ says Lloyd. ‘I can see that it wasn’t a very good idea. Vic was her own person and what we needed was a tabula rasa.’ They eventually picked the unknown Pamela Stephenson. ‘She knew it wasn’t for her,’ says Geoffrey, to whom she mentioned the offer only after rejecting it. ‘She was very calculating and there were times when she didn’t want any advice. Her reason was that she didn’t read the papers and wasn’t interested in the news. The thought that it could have been a golden opportunity never seemed to occur to her.’

  Meanwhile the Start-Rite kids continued to struggle for money. In her letters Victoria often mentioned being broke. Geoffrey had even less income. The season he’d programmed in Morecambe was called off, while he was unable to accept some gigs as he couldn’t afford the fare. One trick that required glue had to be put on hold because he didn’t have the money for Copydex. Their landlord called them the Houdinis.

  By the summer of 1979 Victoria had not appeared on television for two years, since Pandora’s Box. Then, while in London to record Start the Week, she performed ‘Fourteen Again’ on a cheap BBC Two show called It’s a Great Life – If You Don’t Weaken, presented by Nicky Martyn, the Lancashire comic who got her name wrong on New Faces. Viewers were not informed that the song belonged to a drama to be shown on the other side, but there were enough opportunities to promote Talent. The week before broadcast Victoria nervously watched it in a roomful of journalists, after which her story was written up in every tabloid. Other interviewers made the pilgrimage to Morecambe. She got into trouble when one from TV Times referred to the sauce bottles in the window of the boarding house next door: ‘The landlady was furious and refused to believe I hadn’t written the piece myself to show her up.’46 Her unguarded habit in these encounters was to talk up forthcoming projects – a revue for women for ATV, an album of songs from Talent – even if they were destined not to happen. One proposal she dismissed outright was a life swap with the journalist Vicki Woods. Victoria listened to the pitch over the phone then asked, ‘Can you write songs?’47

  Talent was shown in Granada’s Screenplay slot. Victoria and Geoffrey watched the broadcast on a Sunday night in early August on their black-and-white portable. The next morning she took the phone off the hook in order to write, and, down to her last 40p, she didn’t have money to buy the papers. So she was initially unaware of the overnight applause. ‘Victoria Wood is exuberantly good on the façade of being female,’ wrote Nancy Banks-Smith in the Guardian. ‘[Her] own talent … is a rising and a shining thing.’48 ‘The best television musical since Pennies from Heaven,’ reckoned Sheridan Morley in the Evening Standard.49 ‘If she isn’t immediately offered a series of her own,’ said the Listener’s critic, ‘television executives are even sillier than I thought them.’50 On BBC Radio Blackburn there were complaints about the bad language. A woman wrote to Victoria to point out that ‘Lancashire people never, n
ever talk as fast as June Walters [sic] talked.’51 Without correcting the name, Victoria wrote back that Julie was from Manchester.

  Having craved fame from childhood, at first Victoria was alarmed that it had finally happened and for two weeks stayed indoors. She took to not answering the phone when Geoffrey was out ‘cos so many funny people ring up, and it really puts me off my work,’ she told Chrissie Poulter.52 ‘I don’t even like being a little bit famous,’ she confided to Robert Howie, ‘and there are lots of shops I won’t go into because they know I write plays.’53 Her sudden celebrity was such that she was recognised by Eric Morecambe when they found themselves in a lift at the Midland Hotel. It was a brief encounter. ‘Oh, it’s Eric Morecambe,’ she said. ‘You’re that girl from Morecambe,’ he replied. ‘I’m not, I’m from Bury,’ she countered. He got out at the next floor and they never met again.

  Michael Codron now took Victoria under his wing: ‘I am his little pet writer and he is very nice to me – sends me funny letters and takes me to lunch et cetera.’54 Giving her an October deadline, he forbade her from doing further interviews until her new play opened at the Crucible. She had September all to herself while Geoffrey did a bumpy month-long residency in Haifa. Before his departure she had attempted day shifts, ‘having breakfast at 8.30 like real people but I couldn’t do it, mornings are so dreary, especially with the blinds down and earplugs in’,55 so she reverted to writing in the small hours from ‘9.30 till God knows when’.56 She nipped to London three weeks running to appear on Start the Week. Thanks to Talent she made a fan in Alan Plater, who included her in a Radio 3 documentary on musicals. Her final radio appearance of the autumn was a written piece for Radio 4 addressed ‘to the people who hate her flat’. ‘Our flat’s a bit bright and jolly for some people’s tastes, but I happen to like living in a tube of Smarties,’ she started, before attacking the craze for technological kitchens where ‘you don’t know whether to have a cup of coffee or a hysterectomy’.57

  Victoria called her play Good Fun and finished it in mid-November. Owing to a professional debacle Geoffrey had ample time to type it up. Fame was supposed to beckon for him too after he successfully auditioned for a new BBC talent show called Rising Stars. The Daily Mail, catching wind that the Great Soprendo was married to the author of Talent, asked to photograph them together. Neither fancied it and Victoria cited a back injury and a chest infection to get out of it: ‘They said they would take photos of me in bed but I couldn’t bear the thought – said no.’58 Instead she agreed, as an expert on such contests, to write an article about it. When she turned up for the show in Blackpool, she was too shy to tell anyone who she was and was racked by nerves, justifiably, as Geoffrey finished last but one, and the next day his agent took a flow of calls cancelling several months’ work.

  Meanwhile Victoria raced to her next commission: ‘I’ve just finished my play for M Codron and now have to start one for Granada straight away so I am broke and preoccupied.’59 Thrilled by Victoria’s screen chemistry with Julie Walters, Peter Eckersley had suggested two sequels and even proposed giving Julie and Maureen a series. ‘I don’t want them to end up like a rehash of The Liver Birds,’ Victoria said warily.60 She thought of sending them on a caravan holiday before deciding to keep them closer to home.

  In Nearly a Happy Ending Julie is at a low ebb. Her mother is in psychiatric care, while her fiancé has been killed in a car crash alongside another woman. She’s depressed enough to be listening to Radio 4 (Victoria had no qualms about biting the hand that fed her). As for Maureen, things are looking up. She arrives in her new Mini Van, having passed her driving test at the fifth go, and has shed more than three stone. Counting calories is now her main topic of conversation, but at least she can wear jeans without looking ‘like something out of a biology textbook’.

  The two women stop off at the slimmers’ club, where Maureen hits her target weight and decides to celebrate by losing her virginity. So they head to a hotel where the bar is full of flirts in suits looking for extramarital fun. Maureen talks her way into the room of a tedious young divorcee called Tony, but he is turned off by her impersonal determination to skip the foreplay. ‘We could always do it afterwards,’ she says, ‘if there’s time.’ Back downstairs Tony hits on Julie and they leave in Maureen’s Mini Van while Maureen goes home drunk in a cab clutching a box of Black Magic. ‘Hey, you’ll get fat eating them,’ warns the cabbie. ‘I know!’ she replies testily.

  Victoria’s decision to confront the issue of weight in ever greater depth coincided with her own weight loss through dieting and swimming. ‘I didn’t write the part in order that I would have to diet,’ she clarified. ‘I just wanted to write a part about somebody who was fat and boring and then became thinner and boring. So I had to lose weight for the part.’61 She was goaded into action by ubiquitous references to her size in articles she pasted into her scrapbook. ‘Victoria Wood plumply accompanies some dry rhymes of her own composition.’62 She was ‘plump and blonde’,63 ‘more than plump’64 and ‘not unplump’.65 ‘Victoria plumps for quiet fame,’ went one headline.66 ‘I was never anybody’s plump chum,’ she said defiantly, but the barrage got under her skin.67 ‘One of the things that I hate about being fat,’ she told Mavis Nicholson, ‘is … they look at you as if you’re a criminal if you ask for anything above a fourteen.’68 She vented her frustration in a letter to Rosalind when trying to make a pinafore she’d seen in Woman’s Own. ‘All the pattern books are either no bosom model or teacher’s model,’ she complained, biroing sketches by way of illustration.69

  For Nearly a Happy Ending Victoria wrote no fewer than three songs which dwelled on body image. The catchiest was ‘Don’t Get Cocky’, composed for the ladies of the slimmers’ club to perform, complete with rough and ready choreography. The cheerful up tempo tune issued weight watchers with a motivational warning: ‘We congratulate / You on losing weight / Don’t get cocky, baby / You’re gonna be back next month’. The verses ran through a list of women and their reasons for being there:

  Just take Valerie, wouldn’t know a calorie

  If it came and bit her on the leg,

  Starves all day and then gives way

  Has eighty bacon butties and a large fried egg …

  After it was broadcast, a slimming-club secretary asked the Granada press office for a copy of the song.

  The 1980s began with morale-boosting endorsements from London theatreland. In January Victoria was named most promising new playwright at the Plays and Players Awards. At the start of February, in heels and a long smock-like gown she bought for the occasion, she was at the National Theatre for the Evening Standard Theatre Awards, where she was joint winner. Ian McKellen, who ‘came up beforehand and said what he was going to say – no kissing or anything like that’,70 presented her with the award before Victoria nervously thanked the Crucible, the ICA and ‘my director David Leland, who directed a play properly’ – this was greeted with laughter and applause – ‘and also let me write it. I just hope I get better at it.’

  Having devoted nine months of 1979 to writing scripts, Victoria spent the first half of 1980 acting in them. She hadn’t told anyone at Granada about her weight loss, so they were surprised when she turned up to make Nearly a Happy Ending in February. She continued to swim lengths of Salford baths every morning before filming – the publicity stills for the drama were even shot in the pool. The crew at Granada was queuing up to work with Victoria and Julie again. So was Peter Eckersley. ‘He was like a big avuncular warm northern person you felt loved by,’ says Julie. ‘You never felt that he was tense about anything. Just he really appreciated you. Vic used to call him Peter Eckerslike.’ His easy rapport with Victoria was captured in a memorandum sent on the last day of filming after some clothes were pinched from her car and she had to leave in her costume: ‘In partial recompense for the stolen knickers Granada Television Limited would like you to take home and accept with their compliments the clothes are you currently standing up in.’71

>   The short shoot overran, requiring everyone to stay on for an extra day. Victoria told no one, but this thwarted a plan she and Geoffrey had hatched to get married on Friday 29 February. ‘We kept it completely secret because Vic was secret about everything,’ says Geoffrey, who had been asking her to marry him for a while. She had a wobble the night before, but on the morning of 1 March Victoria and Geoffrey made their vows at the registry office in Lancaster. The only witnesses were her drama department friends Bill and Alison Lloyd (née Sabourin), who drove down from the Lake District. They brought their newborn daughter, presented the newlyweds with a pair of kites and took photographs in a garden. Between neoclassical pillars Geoffrey grinned in a canary-yellow jersey, standing behind Victoria with a hand on her shoulder. She wore a double-breasted light-grey jacket, blue trousers and pink trainers in which she balanced coyly on the outsides of her feet. It was ‘a laugh,’ she told Chrissie Poulter. ‘Five minute job then spaghetti on toast and knickerbocker glory.’72 The press would not catch wind of the event for another three months. ‘We’ve been married for some time now,’ said a tight-lipped Victoria when the Daily Mail rang the flat.73 She was disinclined to play the gushing bride: ‘I think we had the 59th row about why we weren’t married, and decided we might as well be.’74 (Victoria’s nonchalance about her marriage was nothing compared to her mother’s. After they’d told their parents, Geoffrey’s mother wrote to Helen Wood and didn’t receive a reply. The two sets of parents would never meet.)

  The honeymoon consisted of a day and a half in Wharfedale in the village of Grassington, which the newly-weds spent in bed eating sweets and watching television. Then on the Monday morning Victoria reported to the Crucible to reconvene with Julie, whom she’d last seen on the Friday in Manchester, and begin rehearsing Good Fun. The play which eventually reached the stage had much in common with Pals. It was still about community arts and featured a cystitis rally, a feminist Punch and Judy show and four women: drippy arts coordinator Liz, her sarky pal Elsie, gloomy pregnant teenager Lynne and batty cosmetics saleswoman Betty. Victoria added more male hangers-on. ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of rehearsing with just women,’ she confessed to Robert Howie.75 The action moved out of Liz’s flat and into a community arts centre which, inspired by Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop, Victoria stipulated should be ‘the top floor of an old neglected building’. In a chaotic plot crammed with loopy twists and soapy revelations, the characters all find themselves somehow enlisted to run the weekend art festival.