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

by Jasper Rees

  At the recommendation of Peter James, the orchestration was put in the hands of David Firman, who had recently worked on Chicago and Cabaret at the Crucible and would be Victoria’s main musical arranger for the next twenty years. He straight away found out who he was dealing with when sent to meet Victoria in Morecambe. After hearing what she’d composed he suggested some more sophisticated settings: ‘Vic said, “No, I like them the way they are.” When we got into rehearsal, I thought, she’s dead right. This is her language.’

  The theatre was abuzz. ‘Vic had become our darling after Talent,’ says André Ptaszynski, an associate producer at the Crucible. ‘With this new play, it was an exciting time for everybody in the building.’ She was invited to open a new independent bookshop and was the subject of no fewer than three television profiles. Brian Glover, the actor famous for Kes, interviewed her for Yorkshire TV arts programme Calendar Carousel as they walked arm in arm through the streets. Granada filmed her in her flat in Morecambe for a programme called Celebration; she energetically leapt from a wicker chair over to the piano to demonstrate songs, which she also performed to a studio audience in Manchester. Among the new songs from Good Fun was ‘I’ve Had It Up to Here’, a languid assault on the sexual demands of men who ‘tend to feel a failure / If you don’t love their genitalia / Though why you should, Christ only knows’. ‘Nothing personal, boys,’ she said to the audience. ‘Just bitter experience.’ Celebration was broadcast the same night in March as a report on Victoria for Arena, the BBC arts strand. In both, her confidence occluded her coyness, but when booked to promote the play live on Radio Hallam she was too shy to go alone and dragged the rest of the cast along; she and Julie got into trouble for boldly using language that was not yet acceptable even in a late-night broadcast.

  There were two Victorias in the rehearsal room, inside which David Leland instigated a rule that she was to be seen as an actress, and only outside it could she be addressed as the writer. ‘That was open to having the piss ripped out of it,’ says Gregory Floy, who became her natural ally in the cast. ‘She’d say, “I can’t answer because I’m not Veronica Wood the writer. Why don’t you ask the writer?”’ It was not immediately apparent that the show would get any laughs, especially when Leland asked for quiet in rehearsal. ‘D. Leland is going off his nut,’ she reported. ‘We are not allowed to laugh at the jokes, which is a bit of a drag for me cos I am not convinced any of it is funny yet.’76

  She need not have worried. On the opening night in April the audience roared at gags about sex, class and community arts. Victoria smuggled in more personal jokes about magicians, That’s Life!, even her memories of being made by her mother to pick wool from hedgerows as a child. The most reliable source of comedy was Betty, the first of Julie’s many hunchbacks. She based her performance on a continuity woman they’d encountered at Granada, also called Betty. ‘She had a bit of a lisp,’ says Julie. ‘She was quite bossy.’ One day they wanted to visit the ladies and the lock wasn’t working so Betty stood outside and flung her arms across the doorway: ‘She said, “It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right, Victoria. I’m guarding!” Every time we saw one another: “I’m guarding.” “Are you guarding?” “Yes!” “We’re guarding.” Lots of my characters were her.’ Betty had a paralysing power over audiences and even the cast. ‘I had this speech – “never lay my hand on a strange knob”. There was one night the laughter was so intense, the whole place was vibrating and everybody was trying to hold it together onstage and in the end we couldn’t, it was just too infectious. Everybody roared.’

  It was in Good Fun that Victoria first used Julie as a mouthpiece for flyaway speeches that mocked middle-class smugness: ‘Today’s young, they don’t comprehend the meaning of home entertainment – they turn to each other’s private parts out of sheer boredom. In my day, it wasn’t remotely the same. I kept myself happy for years with a couple of bobbins and a crochet hook.’

  This was the cue for a frenetic tango showstopper called ‘Handicrafts’ in which a disco-dancing Betty sang of the joys of keeping yourself busy. Among those who had no choice but to laugh at Good Fun were the Birmingham University friends who had introduced Victoria to community arts. ‘We were squirming in our seats,’ says Steve Trow, who went with his wife. ‘It punctured all of our pretentions. The women against cystitis rally – that’s exactly what we were doing, protests and marches and demos with women involved. And she was just taking the piss out of it all.’ He duly told Chrissie Poulter than she was the model for Liz, prompting Victoria to write a long letter to her friend clarifying that ‘they seem to have got the wrong end of the stick … and decided it was all about you which I swear by God, coke and the East Yorkshire school of driving – it isn’t.’77

  Yet something wasn’t right about the play. At the recommendation of Michael Codron, the role of Liz went to Annabel Leventon, who had starred in the hippie musical Hair and formed the all-girl group Rock Bottom. She wasn’t Victoria’s type and they didn’t click. In an ending that confused the audience, she was left alone on the stage to sing the defiant title song. Her role as the butt of the joke was made more uncomfortable by the fact that the character mainly kicking her in the shins was played by the playwright. ‘Are these cloves?’ asks Liz, planning parsnip wine. ‘No,’ says Elsie, ‘they’re carpet tacks.’ When Richard Stone came up to see Good Fun with Michael Codron, he told his client, ‘But, darling, you’ve written yourself the soubrette.’ There was no dramatic function to Elsie. ‘They asked me to be in this play,’ Victoria told Arena, ‘and I said, “No, I don’t want to.’ They said, “Well, if you’re not in it, we’re not going to do it.” So I wrote myself a part which I thought I could manage, which is really me with all the horrible bits knocked out.’78 (In her foreword to the published text she said Elsie ‘is not really a part at all. It is some jokes and an anorak.’79) As for her performance, she was not quite a theatre animal. Sue Wallace, a fellow cast member, sensed that Victoria ‘wasn’t that confident as an actress. She tended to be slightly outside of it as well as inside. She was watching the reaction of the audience.’

  The critics laughed along heartily – ‘the conception of this anti-musical is monstrous and daring’80 – but one argued that ‘Miss Wood invents jokes better than situations, and Good Fun hasn’t much dramatic coherence.’81 Less attention had gone on structure and character. From his seat at the piano David Firman noticed that ‘the play became much smaller than the big punchlines. The audience didn’t really know how to take it.’ Only Irving Wardle in The Times seemed to think Good Fun was about anything: ‘Miss Wood’s meaning is stonily clear: ask to be exploited and you will be … I hope we see it in London.’

  Michael Codron was unpersuaded that Good Fun belonged in the West End, forcing the Crucible to rethink. One morning David Leland knocked on Peter James’s door: ‘I opened it and sitting in the office was Peter and Vic and whoever else. They all looked very sheepish and guilty. The upshot was that Vic was going to go away and rewrite.’ Leland and the production parted company, and James appointed himself to restage the play. ‘Play goes back to Sheffield in July to get it right,’ Victoria told Robert Howie.82

  When she returned to Sheffield in the summer she would have to do without Julie: ‘I said to Vic, “I really don’t want to be in the West End for a year – that’s what Codron will want.” She understood, though she was a bit deflated by it.’ Besides, Julie had an alternative offer from the Royal Shakespeare Company: a short run in a new play called Educating Rita. After her own theatrical failure, Victoria was not in a generous mood when Julie showed her Willy Russell’s two-hander: ‘She went, “I don’t think much of that. That’s not going to do very well.”’

  9

  AND WALTERS

  ‘I think they must have driven around in a bus saying, “If you don’t like laughing, get on this bus and we’ll go to Granada and we’ll show you some sketches you’re not going to enjoy!”’

  Interview with BBC A
dditional Programmes Unit, 2009

  As the 1970s came to a close, the Observer identified eighty people in public life to watch in the 1980s. Among the politicians and QCs was ‘Victoria Wood, 27, actress, singer, pianist, playwright, composer and lyricist.’1 There was another job description Victoria hankered to add to the list, and she expressed it in a song. While Maureen is upstairs on a mission to lose her virginity, downstairs Julie chats with an old-school northern comic. Finding her funny, he offers Julie the chance to assist him onstage, which prompts her to break into ‘I’ve Always Fancied Being a Comedienne’. ‘Imagine getting wages,’ she drools, ‘for taking the piss out of men.’

  Through the character of Julie, Victoria gave voice to a fantasy. It’s Maureen who pipes up as the voice of reason. ‘You couldn’t stand up and tell jokes,’ she says. ‘Girls don’t.’ But girls had. The casting for Nearly a Happy Ending hinted as much. Playing the attendant who cleans the ladies’ loos was Jill Summers. Now a gravel-voiced septuagenarian, when she entertained troops during the war she was billed as a Lancashire comedienne. She was recommended to Victoria by Geoffrey, who marvelled at her outrageous antics when he worked as a flyman at City Varieties in Leeds.

  Since the summer of 1978, Victoria’s commitments had curtailed her opportunities to perform solo, and such bookings had not always gone well. One gig, organised through Geoffrey’s new agent early in 1979, put them in front of a packed audience at York University. After doing his act Geoffrey watched hers from the back as she tried out some new material with no means of amplification: ‘She struggled from the beginning. No one could hear properly and the show went downhill. I went for a walk round the building. As I came back two indignant guys were leaving. One said to the other, “That was awful. It was like watching What the Papers Say.” I was mortified. It felt as if all the work we’d done was going down the pan. I never told Vic.’ In the face of such calamities, Victoria was dauntless. ‘I would much rather be out doing my own show,’ she admitted when Talent was about to be shown.

  Things started to shift when she secured a booking in January 1980 at a hundred-seat venue on the Lancaster University campus. ‘Victoria Wood entertains’ promised the poster. Under it, as if racked with self-doubt about such a lofty boast, she added further improbable claims in her own handwriting: ‘chocolate’s not fattening, sex cures cancer’. The Observer’s prediction was added in a diagonal strip: ‘Stop press: Victoria Wood voted one of eighty for the Eighties’. Tickets cost £1.25.

  At home in Morecambe, Victoria and Geoffrey devoted time to preparing for this one-off date. ‘We started talking about how Vic might start being the first female stand-up comic,’ he says. ‘We were trying to find her style. What is a female comedian? Is she different from a male one? If so, how?’ Victoria had just about graduated to giving a spoken introduction to each song from the piano stool and the odd short monologue. As for getting up on her feet, ‘That was a very big deal and very scary,’ says Geoffrey. ‘If Vic stood up, she would be doing something unheard of. Men stood up; women stayed sitting.’ Most venues she’d played up to that point had only one microphone, set up for her to sing into, which inhibited movement. At the Minor Hall in Lancaster she went and stood in the crook of the piano and picked up a handheld microphone hidden inside the instrument.

  Because there were no female comedians, nor was there any template for how to dress. Other women who had made audiences laugh – Jill Summers, Suzette Tarri, Beryl Reid, Nellie Wallace – were all products of music hall who came on in character. Victoria proposed to come on as herself. She and Geoffrey established that she should not go back to the kind of dress she’d loathed wearing on That’s Life! A skirt would cause men to look at her differently, so it had to be trousers. She decided she ought to wear a tie. ‘This was for the audience’s sake,’ says Geoffrey. ‘The audience expected jokes to come out of a masculine frame, and so in some way there needed to be something masculine about her.’ (She would come to regret this as, aided by her feather cut, she was often assumed to be lesbian.) That night in Lancaster Victoria wore a square-cut grey tweed jacket and desert boots. She would admit to being ‘not very fashion-conscious. As long as it’s this year’s gravy spilt down the front, I’m happy.’2

  She opened with ‘Comedienne’ and added new songs from Good Fun and Start the Week. But the real innovation was Victoria’s first foray into stand-up. The main setpiece was a monologue – written in an exercise book and tested on Geoffrey – about living in Morecambe, a subject she had already tackled in her unused radio comedy Sunny Side Up, from which she recycled the odd joke: the pier was ‘a council house on a stick’ and the residents wore ‘kiss-me-quick hearing aids’. In the radio script she’d called it Pigwood on Sea, but this time she didn’t shroud the town’s identity. ‘See Naples and die,’ she said. ‘See Morecambe and feel as if you already have.’ She depicted pavements strewn with empty tins of denture cleaner and nosy neighbours so enfeebled they need Social Services ‘to help twitch the lace curtains for them’. ‘Morecambe’ was mainly a twentysomething’s ruthless assault on decrepit retirees, in which Victoria gave vent to conflicted feelings about her adopted home. It also found her bluntly scanning the female body for laughs. At a keep-fit class her head gets stuck between the legs of the leotard-clad instructor: ‘I was thinking, I must trim our privet.’ At the slimming club the girls ‘are so enormous men have to have a heavy goods licence to ask them to dance’. Victoria also brought back her WI monologue, first performed in 1977, while in a shorter monologue about her schooldays she wasn’t too proud to feminise patter nicked from Jasper Carrott: ‘I went to a mixed school, all girls – half of them were really common and half of them were really posh.’ During the laughs, or in the gaps where they were meant to be, she brandished a cigarette to give herself something to do.

  Throughout the spring Victoria picked up further practice as part of a double bill with Geoffrey, who urgently needed the work. These were booked usually on a Sunday when venues were free and Victoria was not otherwise engaged with Good Fun – in a Guardian interview she cheekily touted for business at £400 per gig. The most successful was at Theatre Royal Stratford East in early May, trailed in the theatre listings: ‘Sun. 8pm. Victoria Wood in Concert, with magician The Great Soprendo. Tkts £1–£3.’ Victoria recorded her verdict on the performance in a notebook: ‘Did two encores. They were in a good mood … Need a new encore.’ In the same book Geoffrey jotted down thoughts for her consideration. ‘Announce the Handicrafts song from the piano,’ he advised. ‘Careful of speeding up too much in the patter.’ By the time she was asked back to close the Lancaster Literary Festival a few weeks later, Victoria was ready for an audience of hundreds. This was a prestigious booking: the week-long festival also lured John Updike, Lillian Hellman, Melvyn Bragg and Alan Plater. ‘V good show,’ she noted. ‘Good enthusiastic audience. I was quite relaxed being a bit more familiar with the new material and having rehearsed the songs.’3 It yielded the first ever review of Victoria as a solo performer, published in the Lancashire Evening Post, which praised her ‘original wit and stunning professionalism’ as well as her ‘welcome departure from male-based jokes about sex … It must have been one of the happiest nights the Duke’s Theatre has ever seen.’4 She was learning the craft of stand-up comedy at pace. At a gig in Woolwich she was told by friends in the audience that she was talking too fast. ‘But you often have to with a small house,’ she reasoned, ‘so they don’t feel inhibited.’5

  A week after Lancaster, Nearly a Happy Ending was broadcast. On the same day Radio 4 interviewed Victoria about her comic tastes for a show called It Makes Me Laugh. But the question of how to make others laugh now preoccupied her. ‘I’m trying to be a stand-up comic,’ she informed the Radio Times, ‘but to do it in a new way, not to repeat the old pattern.’6 Hers was a radical plan to reinvent not just herself, but the whole landscape of comedy. ‘We don’t really have that sort of comedienne in this country at the moment,’ she argued, ‘so
why not me? I’m as well qualified as anyone.’7

  At this point, very few people had seen Victoria tell a joke, which Russell Harty attempted to rectify by inviting her onto a pilot for a new literary review show called All About Books. Aside from her bashful appearances to promote Good Fun, this was the first time she had ever properly spoken on television as herself, and she treated it as an opportunity for display. In front of a studio audience, Harty introduced her as ‘a lady commentator from Morecambe’ who was ‘very much flavour of the month’. On a serious panel including the Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James, she demolished four books about country living. One, which she refused to read because of its antique spelling, ‘looked like a ransom note from Just William’.

  Meanwhile, Victoria remained committed to Good Fun. After its first run ended, Michael Codron pointed out that none of the male characters spoke a single word to one another. She addressed this and added three new songs to a rewrite she submitted to Peter James, at whose insistence she stripped out some gags. Polly James, one of the original Liver Birds, replaced Annabel Leventon; Meg Johnson came in for Julie Walters. The day it reopened in June, a production of Talent began a run in North Hollywood. Victoria found herself fielding a barrage of queries from a baffled female director in Los Angeles such as ‘Who is Eric Morecambe?’ and ‘Is Leslie Crowther a real person?’ Back in Sheffield, she was falling out of love with Good Fun: ‘It’s terrible sitting there thinking, God this is boring and I wrote it and I’m acting in it.’8 She asked Julie Walters if she might be free to rejoin the cast in a putative London transfer, but she was ever more tied to Educating Rita. ‘It means we’ll be in the W. End together,’ Julie reassured her.9 In fact, Michael Codron came up again and decided not to risk it on West End audiences. Victoria would always regard his decision as a disappointment but acknowledged the fault was hers. ‘There was something terribly wrong with it,’ she conceded. ‘Why I just didn’t end up on a huge laugh I don’t know. People used to leave the theatre completely puzzled.’10