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

by Jasper Rees

  It wasn’t quite the end of the line for the play. The King’s Head, a small theatre above a pub in Islington, decided to mount a new production in the autumn. This soon brought about a second booking. Victoria had earlier sent some material to Dan Crawford, the theatre’s impulsive director. He knew nothing about her, but, having heard about the Stratford East show with Geoffrey, Crawford booked them sight unseen to fill a vacant fortnight. When they came into the theatre, Geoffrey did all the talking. ‘Vic was very shy and didn’t say much,’ says Crawford’s colleague Jenny Bialek. ‘She kept her head down and looked up under her fringe. It took her a while to feel at ease with us.’

  Crawford proposed calling their double bill Funny Turns. They subtitled it One Good Turn Deserves Another and Victoria’s half was trailed as ‘A smile, a song and a lot of eye make-up’. ‘As we started to do it together, we had a responsibility to make this a show,’ says Geoffrey. ‘I would be as camp as you like in the first half and she would walk on and her first line was ‘Hello, chaps’, the precise antithesis of what you’d just had. She would make friends with them. She developed a technique of watching latecomers and saying, “No, no, it’s fine, you get that mac folded.” It was new.’ A friend told Victoria that ‘our act was so good because Geoff wasn’t totally masculine, and I wasn’t totally feminine’.11

  They approached the booking ‘without any nerves at all,’ says Geoffrey, ‘because we were filling in, it wasn’t full, and nobody knew what it was’. He had grown a steely carapace playing rowdy clubs in Yorkshire since his elimination from Rising Stars nearly a year earlier. ‘Are you in show business?’ he’d say in the Great Soprendo’s Hispanic falsetto. ‘Well, get your feet off the stage.’ As for Victoria, she could confidently draw on a catalogue of songs in a variety of moods: she could be wistful singing ‘Fourteen Again’ from Talent, energetic with ‘Handicrafts’ from Good Fun and solemnly touching with ‘Love Song’ from In at the Death. First performed by others, they were now all reclaimed by her.

  Dan Crawford didn’t mention that the critics were coming. ‘Neither of us had a clue,’ says Geoffrey, whose most inflammatory trick involved ripping up a copy of the Daily Telegraph. ‘If we’d known, it would have been a completely different story.’ Victoria was variously praised as ‘a cross between a plump and bashful schoolgirl and Joyce Grenfell with claws’,12 who delivered her turn ‘as if serving a pound of crumbly Lancashire cheese across the counter of a corner shop’.13 One review found her observations about sex and slimming ‘crude and banal … shallow, and a bit patronising’.14 Michael Billington in the Guardian felt she peppered the audience ‘with gags like a one-woman firing-squad’.15 For the lesser-known Great Soprendo there were unanimous raves. ‘What splendid reviews Geoffrey got!’ Stanley Wood beamed.16 The capacity of the theatre was about 120, but most nights Crawford squeezed in thirty more. ‘Standing room only unless they are left new chairs in will of old lady,’ Victoria told Roger McGough.17

  The intimacy suited her and she began to feel comfortable as a performer. ‘I’m not hiding onstage,’ she told Mavis Nicholson during the run. ‘I’m not pretending to be anybody else onstage.’18 Nicholson, interviewing her for Thames TV, alluded to her courage in daring as a woman to stand up and tell jokes. ‘There’s a lot of things that women thought they couldn’t do,’ replied Victoria. ‘I just like to stick my neck out. I like to live dangerously.’19 In acknowledgement of her pioneering role, Victoria was invited to the Women of the Year lunch at the Savoy. The event, to which she defiantly wore jeans, brought out all her social awkwardness. ‘Hardly anybody spoke to me,’ she blurted to an interviewer. ‘I was sitting opposite a social editor of a glossy magazine and a woman rabbi and some old bat covered in diamonds.’20 When someone asked her what she did, she mentioned she had a play opening that night, but the conversation closed down when she named the fringe venue.

  Good Fun followed Funny Turns into the King’s Head in October, and Victoria did her bit to promote the production. She sang two songs from the show on On the Town, a BBC arts programme introduced by Joan Bakewell. But she was ambivalent about the play’s instant revival. According to Geoffrey, ‘She was worried that it might not fit on the tiny stage and didn’t especially relish the idea of watching someone else play Elsie.’ That task fell to Nichola McAuliffe, while the thankless role of Liz was handed on to another sitcom refugee, Paula Wilcox. The play proved beyond rescue. ‘It wasn’t a very good production,’ she reflected later. ‘They got their biggest laugh when a lighting bar broke loose and fell into the audience. They called out from the stage, “Don’t panic, we’ll carry on with the show.” The audience were saying, “No honestly, we’d rather panic, please don’t go on with the show.”’21 Some critics threw acid: ‘A tiny disaster.’22 ‘Miss Wood has spread her wings too wide, and too frivolously. In attempting to do everything, she achieves almost nothing.’23

  If he had been right to resist transferring Good Fun, Michael Codron was keen to bring Funny Turns to the West End. Frustratingly Victoria wasn’t available, and the idea had to be deferred. Competition for her time came, as ever, from Peter Eckersley, who pressed for a third drama about Maureen and Julie. She was reluctant after the mixed reaction to Nearly a Happy Ending. Critics, male ones especially, were not persuaded by Maureen’s sexual quest. Russell Davies wearied of ‘great Clapham Junctions of one-liners … When we get over the novelty of Miss Wood, this is destined to be her biggest fault.’24 That wormed its way under her skin, as did a barb from Herbert Kretzmer in the Mail, who suggested that she was ‘stuck in a self-admiring rut … she should now be advised to stop giving interviews to every magazine and TV arts programme under the sun, and concentrate instead on perfecting her craft’.25 ‘She was really pissed off about that,’ says Geoffrey.

  While Victoria hated reading about herself, at this stage she was reliant on good press. ‘If they say something bad, I always believe it,’ she told one interviewer. ‘If they say something good, I can’t believe it.’26 The critique that could not be avoided came from the proprietor of Preedy’s, their newsagent in Morecambe. ‘Not very good last night, Victoria!’ he hollered at her. ‘We expect more from you than that!’’ According to Geoffrey, ‘That put the tin lid on it. It confirmed something we’d always known, which was that this little lovely funny old town was absolutely the wrong place to be if you were on the telly.’ They walked over the road to an estate agent, spotted an end-of-terrace cottage in a picturesque village up the coast, viewed it the next day and, while the move itself took far longer than expected, they didn’t look at any other property.

  Victoria was adamant that she also needed to move on creatively. ‘I turned down a few thousand pounds by refusing to write a third Julie and Maureen play,’ she said. ‘I thought it was a brave decision at the time. And then they offered me money to do what I wanted so I got my reward.’27 What she wanted was to carry on with Julie Walters but to rediscover that extraordinary high they both felt when performing ‘Sex’ at the Bush Theatre. According to Baz Taylor, the idea crystallised during the shoot for Nearly a Happy Ending: ‘Peter said, “These two girls are made for each other. I want to get the two of them just doing comedy sketches.”’ In Victoria’s version, Eckersley ‘asked me if I wanted to have my own show. I said, “I don’t want to carry a whole show on my own. Can Julie be in it as well?” And we sat in a room for a day before anybody thought of the title Wood and Walters.’28

  That autumn Victoria found time to script a pilot episode with four songs and four sketches. She eased her burden by borrowing from Good Fun and sent the results to her co-star. ‘I just loved it instantly and couldn’t wait,’ says Julie. ‘I thought, all of the stuff feels like mine, not something I’ve got to interpret.’ After a week’s rehearsal it was recorded in front of a receptive studio audience in Manchester. The two stars were dressed up to the nines in burgundy satin (Wood) and a plunging jumpsuit (Walters). ‘Vic hated it because of her size,’ says Julie. ‘We both felt a bit
pushed about in what we would wear. There was an uncomfortableness about it for both of us. She particularly didn’t know what power she had then in being the writer and the performer.’

  ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Victoria as they trotted onto a raised studio stage. ‘Or for those of you with video recorders, where did you get the money?’ They flagged the show as ‘Two creatures great and small’ or ‘Wood is thicker than Walters’, and introduced the band led by Jim Parker, which he filled with a quirky array of instruments to reflect Victoria’s enjoyment of his Betjeman album Banana Blush. Unusually, it was only after the introductions that the title sequence rolled while Victoria sat at the piano and sang ‘Turned Out Nice Again’, a breezy song from Good Fun, comically shooing Julie away as if to establish her priority. Also lifted from the play was Betty, reincarnated as Dotty, a self-appointed agony aunt in a pink twin-set and blonde perm, who describes herself as the co-authoress of Wuthering Womanhood. ‘This is my problem slot,’ she announces, before realising it might sound like a bawdy reference to a nether region. ‘I’m sorry, can we change that?’ she calls off-camera. ‘I’ve never liked it.’ Dotty dispensed her tips on nookie before breaking into ‘Handicrafts’, in which she was joined by a lithe and nearly naked black male dancer.

  Victoria would soon become the preeminent sketch-writer of her generation, and her very first foray was a promise of things to come. She played an unsophisticated woman sent by a computer on a blind date with a cultured but nervous man in pinstripes. Unlike him, she hasn’t been to university. ‘I was thinking of going,’ she explains, ‘but my mother thought I’d get better lunches in an office.’ ‘Do you like Manet?’ he asks. ‘Well, I spend it when I’ve got it obviously.’

  The everyday preoccupations Victoria would make her own were all here: body image, sex and relationships, the specific minutiae of domestic life. She and Julie wore leotards and commented on other women in a fitness class. ‘I’m bent over between her lower limbs,’ said Victoria, borrowing from her Morecambe monologue, ‘thinking I must trim our privet.’ Julie played a Scouse hairdresser who yaks about sex: ‘Oh, I do it, you know. Don’t get me wrong. But I don’t smile or nuttin’.’ Together they sang ‘Phone-In’. Composed for Start the Week, it was a melancholy portrait of a lonely single woman who from a phone box flirts with her favourite DJ on air before trudging back to her bedsit, ‘short and stumpy up the stairs / Grey hair spread upon the pillow’. The show closed with a song in the bonkers style of GRIMMS, which experimented with self-referential jokes:

  But when you’ve got Victoria Wood completely mixed up with Pam Ayres

  We feel that you have come to the wrong place.

  Two nights before Wood and Walters was broadcast, Victoria was herself in the wrong place, singing ‘Fourteen Again’ on Granada’s There Goes 1980, a cheesily wholesome variety round-up co-presented by the middle-of-the-road Northern Irish comic Roy Walker. Her own show was to be the antidote to such fare. ‘I’ve just recorded a TV show for New Year’s (Wood and Walters),’ Victoria nonchalantly informed Robert Howie. ‘10.20pm if you can stick Dr Zhivago first.’29 In the event she was disappointed by the pilot when it was broadcast on 1 January 1981. ‘She thought it wasn’t up to her standard,’ says Geoffrey. ‘She just wanted to be Morecambe and Wise and realised that hadn’t happened.’ Two fan letters caught her attention: ‘One advising me to wear crimplene dresses in dark colours, one saying I should be ashamed of myself, my mind is obsessed by intercourse. As if!’30 Nonetheless Peter Eckersley was satisfied enough to commission seven more episodes.

  First, she had to complete the third film in her Granada trilogy, to be directed once more by Baz Taylor. ‘All over Xmas up to March I will be doing the writing,’ she told Roger McGough. ‘Nescafe and new biros.’31 Having said all she needed to about female friendship, she was finished with Maureen and Julie (‘in our minds they got killed in a car crash on the way home’).32 Instead she got the green light to write a love story with no role for her. The title she chose was Bonkers About You, later changed to Living Together and finally to Happy Since I Met You. Julie Walters was to play Frances, a drama teacher under pressure to tie the knot and have babies. One night she makes her escape from a toe-curling dinner party with a like-minded actor called Jim. They take a shine to each other, but she is nervous of commitment. ‘I’m dead crabby,’ she warns. They launch into a sexual relationship but then the mood sours. Frances comes home one day to find Jim’s actor friends being pretentious. There is an outbreak of violence – Frances clouts Jim who shoves her back. Frances runs away on the train. Eventually Jim catches up with her and they reconcile in a greasy spoon. Jim was Victoria’s first portrait of male decency, but this remained a woman’s story, which Victoria made clear by giving monologues to her female protagonist.

  She had some influence over casting. ‘I made a list of all my favourite actresses and then tried to fit them to parts.’33 They included Fidelis Morgan, Sue Wallace and Tracey Ullman, who had been in a revival of Talent at the Liverpool Everyman. The role of Jim was intended for Gregory Floy, but he was unavailable, so Peter Eckersley called in a gangly ginger-haired beanpole in his mid-thirties called Duncan Preston. When he arrived for his audition everyone was out to lunch. ‘Julie and Vic came back a bit pissed,’ he says. ‘They were really, really noisy. Julie was taking the piss, kept saying, “God, he’s tall! I’d have to jump up to hit him!” It was like being in front of a firing squad. The producer and director were trying to calm them down, but it wasn’t very successful. I rang my agent and said, “I don’t think for a minute that I would want to work with them. They were just out of order.” He said, “They’ve just offered you the part.” I was absolutely gobsmacked.’

  Victoria was on set for the whole shoot in Manchester. ‘I’m not in it so I just stand around on location in my anorak,’ she grumbled to Rosalind. ‘What I’ve seen so far isn’t v. good but there’s another two weeks yet.’ Her frustration communicated itself to Duncan Preston: ‘That was the first time she’d worked on film. She wasn’t used to all the waiting. I got the sense that she wasn’t happy with some of it.’ Her sense of exclusion was exacerbated when the two stars enjoyed what Julie calls ‘a bit of a romantic encounter’ – Duncan backed Aldaniti in the Grand National and they blew his winnings on a weekend in a hotel. Once Victoria saw the first edit she was no happier. ‘I was trying to do something different,’ she confided to Robert Howie, ‘and I should have had a different director really. It was all on film, which should have been great but just meant there was no time for rehearsal because they took so long to focus the camera. However, I am prepared to be hammered by the critics, tho this time I don’t think I’m to blame.’34

  To push the story along, Victoria wrote songs to be played over montages of Frances and Jim. Over the worst of their rows, the jolly title song plays. Another lilting song evoked the Beatles and the recent assassination of John Lennon:

  Love was once an easy thing, I never disagreed

  With Lennon and McCartney that love is all you need

  But love just made me wash my hair and hover by the phone

  And Lennon’s dead and I’m bored with love, I’m happy on my own.

  The script was rich with Victoria’s signature wit, much of it about the reality of relationships with boring men who do DIY and bellringing. A colleague of Frances complains about a measly Christmas present from her fiancé: ‘Last year I got Estée Lauder Youth Dew, a sapphire pendant, Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady and car seat covers.’ In a health-food café Frances is served by a gloomy woman who is only there because her sister ‘put her neck out unscrewing a jar of beetroot’. Two of Victoria’s favourite words – raffia and guttering – took their first bow in a script of hers. Above all, in Frances she set out to create a frank portrait of a real woman who admits to farting, having ‘breath like a car crash’ and a history of bad relationships with men. ‘When I lived on me own, and I got depressed,’ says Frances, ‘at le
ast I didn’t have to explain it or analyse it with somebody else.’ Squalls and squabbles had been part of the fabric of their relationship from the start, according to Geoffrey: ‘We found each other difficult to live with. There were frequent niggles, arguments and rows. The reasons were often trivial – usually pathetically so. We knew each other so well and were tuned in to each other’s thoughts so acutely that a misplaced word or a frustrated glance could cause a minor explosion.’ Doing press to promote the drama, Victoria suggested that ‘Geoff’s certainly a much nicer person than me’.35 One source of tension was to be found in their contrasting rhythms in the tiny space they occupied in Morecambe, which didn’t lend itself to creativity. ‘We both work at home and it’s a tiny flat with one bedroom,’ Victoria told Rosalind. ‘If people stay they have to sleep on the living room floor – which means I can’t do any work … I work at nights and Geoff practises tricks all day – it’s a bit odd.’36