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

by Jasper Rees

  In August Funny Turns went to Edinburgh, where Victoria also joined a panel of male comedians and writers debating taste in comedy. She earned a round of applause for the argument she’d formulated when filming Talent three years earlier: ‘If something is good it couldn’t be tasteless. If it is tasteless it couldn’t be good.’17 As for the show that brought her there, it was reaching the end of its natural life. A job guesting in Crackerjack had greatly raised Geoffrey’s profile and he had become less available. To speed him on his way Victoria bought him a van for ferrying his props around the country. The time for Victoria to go solo had arrived.

  In the autumn, therefore, a random run of dates was set up in small-scale venues dotted around England – from Maidstone and Horsham to Bowness and Tewkesbury. Her travels brought her to London in October to attend an award ceremony hosted by the British Clothing Industry Federation in the City of London. By dint of her penchant for wearing a tie in her act, she became the first woman to be nominated for Man of the Year.

  Mainly, Victoria was at home attempting to write. The itch to return to the theatre grew out of the still recent memory of Good Fun. ‘I start my PLAY in October,’ she confidently informed Jane Wymark, but she had made no progress by Christmas, when the annual summons to appear on Russell Harty’s seasonal special found Victoria and Julie Walters briefly back in tandem.18

  At the start of 1983 Victoria was saved from her playwriting problem with an offer to adapt a novel into a film script. The Natural Order, published the previous year, would earn its author Ursula Bentley inclusion in Granta magazine’s twenty Best of Young British Novelists alongside Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. The novel was a comic satire in which three young women from the south of England go to work in a Jesuit school in the north and all ending up sleeping with the charismatic head boy. Having agreed to adapt it, Victoria suddenly found herself in highfalutin company. The finance came from David Puttnam’s company Goldcrest, which had won Oscars with Chariots of Fire and Gandhi. The producer was Leon Clore, whose most recent hit was The French Lieutenant’s Woman. He and Victoria were not well matched. ‘They lived utterly differing lives,’ says Geoffrey, who accompanied her to ‘a particularly toe-curling intimate dinner party at his house’. More intriguingly for Victoria, the director-in-waiting was Stephen Frears. ‘I remembered reading about her first thing in Sheffield and thinking she sounds really good news,’ he says. When they met he was informed by Victoria that his film Sunset Across the Bay from Alan Bennett’s script was the reason she’d moved to Morecambe.

  In February she began on the script after three final dates for Funny Turns at the Theatre Royal Bath. ‘I would like to do a Woody Allen,’ she grandly told a local journalist in Bath.19 The adaptation consumed her for several months, during which she turned thirty. For much of the time she was left alone, as Geoffrey was now touring with the other stars of Crackerjack. When he was away she fell back on the company of local friends. She had a stab at canoeing on Windermere with Roger Glossop and his partner Charlotte Scott, who owned a house by the lake. Closer to home she was finding friendships trickier because she felt she couldn’t talk about work. One friend ‘is not into it at all,’ she told Jane Wymark; another was an actress who seemed to struggle with Victoria’s high profile. ‘Whenever I came back with tales of my own there would be a frosty silence, as if I was name-dropping or boasting, which I don’t think I was.’20 Nor could some older friends cope with her success. Over the summer she met one from university who ‘managed to be incredibly jolly, insecure, rude and jealous which was entertaining if not pleasant’.21

  Victoria handed in the first draft of the script in June and went down to London to hear the verdict. ‘They told me what was wrong with it, in Stephen’s case, helpfully, and in Leon’s case, not (“can’t we have this character in a few more scenes, I like her”, “need a better joke here”).’22 She went home, cut it by forty minutes and resubmitted it. On these trips to London she stayed with Frears at his home in Notting Hill. Frears’s wife was heavily pregnant, so Victoria accompanied her on a shopping spree to Kensington High Street to buy baby clothes. Finding that ‘S.F. appears unmoved by this coming event’, she couldn’t resist dropping hints about the imminent birth in the next rewrite.23 ‘There were lines in the script about little vests,’ he says. With her contracted period for reworking the script set to expire in mid-July, she ‘took it home and beat the hell out of it’.24 Jim Broadbent was mentioned for the lead role, and Frears remained encouraging – ‘he thought it was v.g. but had a few little last nitpicks’.25 Having addressed these she gave the final draft a new title: Gobsmacked!, which reflected the reaction of Goldcrest upon reading it. ‘They had no idea what to expect,’ says Frears. ‘When she handed it in everybody was very, very shocked. They just couldn’t cope with it. They said, “We’ll give it you back.” They literally said, “It’s all yours.”’ Thus Victoria’s first adventure in the film world ended in disillusion. ‘I don’t think I will adapt another book I don’t like,’ she concluded. ‘It’s too restricting.’26 While The Natural Order remained unfilmed, Victoria instead approached Deborah Moggach, whose fiction she had been reading since the novelist came to Morecambe to interview her in 1979. Porky, only just published, was a shocking depiction of an overweight young girl corrupted by her father’s sexual abuse – Victoria wanted to adapt and star in it. ‘We had this very stilted and rather wary lunch,’ says Moggach, ‘with this weird thought that she would play this incest victim. She didn’t eat much quiche and when she left there was a funny smell. I saw I had accidentally melted this knife handle into it and nearly poisoned her. She didn’t mention it and I never heard from her again.’

  Meanwhile, Victoria itched to get back to stand-up comedy. The day after completing her script, she began working on a new solo set. ‘I’m a bit nervous,’ she told Jane Wymark, ‘because I’ve never sat down and just written JOKES & PATTER before.’27 In Stankelt Road she did intensive shifts conjuring up monologues in an exercise book and, whenever available, Geoffrey acted as her sounding board. In rehearsals at home he told her what worked and what wanted tightening or cutting. Once the text of a monologue was pinned down, Victoria would learn it by reading it over and over and once more perform it for Geoffrey, who checked her delivery against the script in the exercise book. If she deviated his task was to tell her which version worked best. These laborious sessions could last for a long time as the monologue was kneaded and chiselled. The contract of understanding between them was that she would trust him to tell her if something was funny, even if he grew so used to the punchlines he didn’t physically laugh.

  One thing they both thought about deeply was how to create variety. From his experience of northern clubs, Geoffrey argued against repeating an entry or an exit. ‘If they’ve seen it once,’ he told her, ‘they don’t want to see it twice.’ So for the first half Victoria offered a simple welcome: ‘Hi, chaps. Well done for picking your way through the brochure and getting here.’ The idea was to acknowledge the effort entailed in leaving the house. ‘You could have just stayed in and watched a video nasty. Like your wedding.’ Her entry after the interval needed to be different, so she devised a costumed character whom she announced from the wings as ‘the one and only Miss Paula du Val!’ A salty northern pub entertainer with a tendency to overshare, she was the grotesque antithesis to Victoria’s own act. She was based on Pauline Daniels, a groin-obsessed comic whose potty mouth Victoria aped with laser accuracy: ‘Ooh, girls don’t you just hate it when they gob in t’ashtray? I said, “If you must do it, do it in your bloody turn-ups.”’ Paula admits to having suffered her share of troubles: ‘A dropped womb and two lads in Parkhurst.’ ‘She’s the type of comedienne I can’t bear,’ Victoria explained. ‘I can’t bear the fact that they’re reversing the role of the male comic. I don’t think it rings true.’28 With a ukulele Paula du Val sang a snarling ditty in the style of George Formby called ‘Nasty Things’ from he
r new album (‘available in all good petrol stations’):

  There’s nasty things wherever you look

  There’s nasty things in every book

  You’re down and out, you’ve got no rent

  Your leg’s been mashed in an accident

  There’s nasty things wherever you look.

  The next trick was to find a way of smoothly removing Paula’s costume. Victoria hit on the idea of peeling off her long black wig and dress and revealing herself as a posh, nervous actress who has devised the previous act for auditions. ‘I thought it would be nice for an audition, you know, sort of not to do Juliet or Lady Macbeth,’ the character explains uncertainly.

  As for getting off the stage, they chose to close the first half with a blackout. This freed Victoria from the requirement to work up to a climactic torrent of laughter. Geoffrey suggested she blindside the audience with one of her more sombre songs – ‘Love Song’, about a widower’s unexpressed devotion composed five years earlier for In at the Death, proved the best fit. ‘That would give her the opportunity to play to the gallery at the end and try for a standing ovation.’ The songs she picked to close the second half made for a strategic contrast: ‘Music and Movement’, a cute comic ditty, was followed by the rambunctious ‘Northerners’.

  Victoria was aware that performing the show came with jeopardy. ‘I wrote it myself, there’s only me onstage, there’s no script, which means if I go blank one night, I’m lumbered. No one can prompt me, or cover up for me – if I dry badly, and there’s a silence, and you can hear the stage doorkeeper doing the Daily Mirror Quizword, I pretend to have a coughing fit.’29 But from the moment the novel concept of a funny woman holding forth for a whole evening in stand-up and song was launched, Victoria was suddenly unique. ‘That’s where she turned into Victoria Wood,’ says Geoffrey. ‘It was completely impossible to compare her to anyone else.’

  There was little time to assemble all of this. The deadline was imposed by a booking at the Coventry Festival in August, leaving less than three weeks to supplement existing material with twenty fresh minutes. On the way to Coventry they stopped in Birmingham, where Victoria plugged the gig on a TV show hosted by Chris Tarrant ‘whom I know doesn’t like me,’ she wrote, ‘but he managed to conceal his loathing’.30

  Victoria generally enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere of festivals but not now as she unveiled her new solo show: ‘I went blank, like an exam, and didn’t think I could do it, but did in the end. The real problem was remembering the new opening – Geoff rehearsed with me over and over again and in the event I did remember most of it, tho’ I was just operating on nervous energy and didn’t really perform it v well the 1st night.’31 Having written yet another song and a new monologue, Victoria then took the show to Edinburgh, where she was booked to perform in a converted church known as the Wildcat. For an hour and a half late at night, she played to sell-out houses whom she discouraged from excessive laughing ‘because the Dutch juggler’s in at midnight’. She officially titled the show Victoria Wood on Her Own and billed it as ‘a one-man show with no men in it’. Audiences soon saw what she meant with references to the underwear she wore under her electric-blue suit: cheap pants from Safeway and a ‘Playtex discontinued’.

  After a swift resumé of her career so far – there were rich pickings in New Faces and That’s Life! – she took the mickey out of the Arts Council for sponsoring depressed playwrights and alternative cabaret (including an act who ‘juggles three copies of the Guardian and a wok’). She then sat at the piano perform a pacey new song called ‘Even If’, written specifically as a curtain-raiser. In it Victoria pledged to cheer her audience up:

  Even if you’ve not laughed since that Wednesday when

  Deirdre said she was leaving Ken

  Put it out of your mind.

  The festival critics approved: ‘She can make skeletons dance,’ marvelled one.32 The box office received a welcome leg-up from Channel 4, which repeated Wood and Walters in June to cash in on the celebrity of Julie Walters, who was now a film star after the royal gala premiere of Educating Rita. Feeling eclipsed by her friend at least gave Victoria a joke: she pretended to overhear a whine from the audience – ‘It’s the other one I like, the thin one.’ Her competitive streak would only intensify when the Academy Award nominees were announced. ‘Being a comedian takes a long time,’ she explained. ‘Julie was doing things like Educating Rita and being nominated for Oscars and I was playing Southport Theatre to 250 people. People would say, “Aren’t you jealous?” Well, yeah, I was, but basically I was dedicated to learning that job.’33

  After Edinburgh she went to Leeds to make a series of eighteen short programmes aimed at deaf children for Yorkshire Television. She played a so-called Wordwitch and wore a tiara, blonde ringlets and a pink tutu. There were sporadic live dates across England before she returned to the King’s Head in late October with a new title. Lucky Bag suggested both a favoured collection of bits and pieces, and a woman who’d hit the jackpot.

  Of the new numbers, there was a mock-sentimental northern love song she cheekily titled ‘Skellern in Love’, in which she crooned about ‘You and me / And thirty-three / Big buggers from a big brass band’. In ‘Funny How Things Turn Out’, sung in the accent of a well-to-do southerner, Victoria imagined receiving news from old school friends. This was a dazzling improvement on a similar song she’d written in the mid-Seventies. Bobbie Fields ends up as a failed actress singing ‘Lerner and Loewe to the mentally ill’. Jennifer Hill, once a sex-mad hippie, is now a stressed mother who ‘moved to Tufnell Park / With a cat called Muriel Spark’. Then there’s Brenda James, the captain of games:

  I came out at a Lesbians Ball.

  Didn’t feel glad to be gay at all.

  Whoever said that? Tom Robinson, was it?

  I couldn’t agree and got back in the closet.

  Then saw the light and had no doubt.

  I took all my savings and just disappeared

  And found a nice doctor who said, ‘You’re not weird.’

  Now I’m Jonathan James with a wonderful beard.

  Funny how things turn out.

  Meanwhile, each monologue was crafted to be distinctive. She hurled herself into a wild narrative rooted in the everyday but peopled by grotesques such as Hilda, who is six foot nine, has tattooed knuckles that spell ‘anthrax’ and lacquered hair ‘like a 78 with a parting’. A man on release from a mental hospital owing to a strike wants to know what it feels like to be in a relationship so Victoria takes him home. ‘What a night … We put up shelving.’ One glorious story, about a disastrous radio interview, was inspired by just such a humiliation when she toured with Jasper Carrott.

  These observational riffs were a means to dart from joke to dazzling joke, untethered by structure. If she was fond of gags first heard on Wood and Walters, she had no guilt about recycling them – one was about Shakespeare (‘some of my best friends are Brummies’), another about Dutch caps (‘If they’re too small they make your ears itch’). But mostly Lucky Bag was an unstoppable volcano of invention: ‘Sexual harassment at work – is it a problem for the self-employed? … I went to The Body Shop. I said have you got this in a size 8? … Last night I was in the library – I’d gone there for a new Shirley Conran book, The Menopause and How to Make Money Out of It.’

  Each of Victoria’s characters emerged from ‘voices that lodge in my head … they are usually based on someone I’ve seen or someone I’ve met in a very vague form and then you transform them’.34 Paula du Val plays at places like the Dolce Vita in Smethwick – a reference to Victoria’s New Faces audition, and Julie Walters’ home town. The starchy young actress in the audition, who is prepared to go nude for a dandruff commercial, was modelled on a friend or two from Birmingham University who suffered the wandering hands of their lecturer Clive Barker. She joins Lorryload, ‘an educational theatre group based in Canvey Island’ inspired by Vanload, in which both Julie and Geoffrey toured Liverpool in 1974. A witless tour
guide showing visitors round Haworth Parsonage, with only the sketchiest interest of the Brontës (‘now alas no longer with us’), grew out of Victoria’s memory of going there as a child. A desperately serious sixth-former participating in a debate about school uniform harked back to the swots of Bury Grammar School. The thread linking each character was that Victoria’s script and delivery told the audience far more about the speakers than they knew about themselves. ‘What interests me,’ she explained, ‘is trying to tune into the experience of every ordinary person’s existence – what it is like to be alive in the 1980s, what is like to get up, watch television, go shopping, the things everybody does.’35 Yet normal life was filtered through a prism that could alchemise it into something glitteringly surreal. She imagined knotting sheets together to make a moped, orgasms and how to knit them, making a model of the Forth Bridge from empty lager cans, smoking a Lil-Let, converting a mill chimney into an aspirational family home.

  In time for the run, Lucky Bag was released as an album from a recording made in Edinburgh – Geoffrey was tasked with selecting the order and suggesting cuts to reduce it to an hour. The national critics were dazzled. ‘Two hours of Miss Wood turns out to be twice as funny as one,’ purred the Observer. ‘Miss Wood’s new prowess as a stand-up comic is the great feature of the show.’36 Victoria could not entirely enjoy her success in Islington, thanks to the supper-club layout of the theatre. ‘You’re performing for a public who are just on the coffee stage of a meal and hardly bother to look up. You have to fight across them for the public at the back who have come in specially for the show.’37 Still, it was better than the Stables, the theatre in Buckinghamshire built and run by Cleo Laine and John Dankworth, where the layout meant she ‘had to do all the jokes continuously on the revolve like a fucking lighthouse’.38