by Jasper Rees
The show retained a few old favourites, some of which went way back. A nervous woman trying to light a Lil-Let was recycled from Lucky Bag in 1983. The Dutch cap gag was first heard in Wood and Walters in 1982. Trustiest of all was her dedication of ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’ to ‘my deep interest in the act of physical lovemaking – it’s very short’. She’d said the same at The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball in 1981. From the same era she also mentioned her Hollie Hobby vibrator (‘it’s better than the My Little Pony one’). These were all retained because she knew she could rely on them at junctures – coming on, moving to the piano, cueing up a song – when she absolutely needed a laugh.
But most of the material was brand new. There were thoughts that arose from personal experience – swimming, Christmas with relatives, donating blood, periods – all twisted and wrought into gags. One monologue was an extended riff inspired by Victoria’s trip to Alicante with ASDA, only in this made-up story she travelled on a package holiday with a large posse of sex-mad girls from Derby and a starchy single woman called Betty Comstock. The set was peppered more liberally than ever with references to shops and brands from Benetton to Spud-U-Like (poshly pronounced ‘Spudoolickay’). Her piano, she said, was supplied by MFI. Victoria depicted herself buying trendy condoms in Boots (‘shall I wrap them up or will you wear them now?’). The most savage joke about a brand was in the character of a whiny-voiced department-store beautician attempting, ever more desperately, to flog the new autumn range from Sacherelle: ‘We have a special offer on special offer, coming to you with any item worth £36 or more – this is a free gift comprising of suede-effect pochette packed to the drawstring with handy-size oddments totalling mouth blot, eye wipe and shimmering cleavage enhancer.’
Another new character was a marketing desperado who found sundry ways to mispronounce ‘bona fide’ as she pitches her tone-deaf questions: ‘Given some type of structured post-nuclear society, do you think people are more likely or less likely to be eating Hellman’s Mayonnaise?’
The most successful new character made an entrance at the start of the second half: ‘I come through the audience, which confuses them. With the house lights up. They think there’s been a terrible mistake.’21 Though highly visible in a bright orange mac and a yellow beret, it was only when she drifted onto the stage that audiences twigged. ‘I’m looking for me friend,’ she announced in a dense Lancashire accent. ‘Kimberley. Have you seen her? She’s got right dangly earrings with sausages on them, only they’re not on her ears. She’s really, really tall and they just pierced as high as they could reach.’ Victoria stretched her arms up towards two imaginary nipples.
The mac was Victoria’s recent gift to herself, which she then decided she didn’t like. Geoffrey bought the beret to go with it. The resulting outfit had a comic implausibility – the endearingly naive character would never put together such a zesty get-up – but a long coat and beret were practical for a quick backstage transformation and had a bright simplicity that became rapidly iconic. It never seemed to matter that Kimberley was merely described while her friend did all the talking. (In a rehearsal tape Victoria gave Kimberley the surname of Clark. Privately she and Geoffrey always referred to the character in the mac and beret as Kimberley.) Kimberley’s imaginary bulk enabled Victoria to turn up the dial on her jokes about body image. In Wood and Walters she played a fat shopper who is offered the cubicle curtain; the only thing in the boutique to fit Kimberley is the cubicle itself – ‘she’s having the doors taken up’. In Lucky Bag Victoria imagined her class at school denting the viaduct when out cross-country running; when Kimberley sits down she makes the town hall steps sag.
As the strength of Victoria’s stand-up material grew, there were fewer songs. ‘One Day’, composed as a spoof, was repurposed as a straight-faced break from comedy. She closed the first half with ‘Litter Bin’, about a depressed mother putting her newborn baby in the rubbish, which tended to confuse audiences. ‘I would start off that song,’ she recalled, ‘and people would start to giggle and then you’d think, I’m just going to hold my nerve and do it, and then they would realise.’22 There were new comic songs too. In ‘Things Would Never Have Worked’ Victoria tells a man why they’re romantically incompatible:
Rapport’s a thing you just can’t manufacture
You had your pin-up girl, I couldn’t match her
I didn’t want to – it was Mrs Thatcher
Things would never have worked.
The punchline is he shares her taste for hunky men. ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’ was now cemented as the closer.
Victoria embarked on an intense schedule with a new tour manager. Carol Spraggs was suggested by her promoter André Ptaszynski, but Victoria insisted she see a performance so the job requirements were clear in advance. ‘My new girl Carol seems to be very nice, tall and jolly,’ she was pleased to note.23 The tour party expanded to three with a new sound man. All three travelled in separate vehicles, then at the end of the night they would wind down with a drink in the hotel bar, where Victoria sometimes found herself targeted by strange men. ‘They’ll come knocking at my bedroom door, saying: Can I sleep with you? Then there’s this conversation through the keyhole, me saying No you can’t … go away. If they’ve bought you a drink, they think it’s quite all right to pop round later.’24 The experience made enough of an impression for Victoria to write up a monologue about overconfident men in a notebook: ‘They’re all milling about with the big plastic badges that say “Hi I’m Barry I’m facing the future”, “Hi there I’m Ken I’m going for it”. And they come lurching up to you, and you think I should wear the badge “Hi I’m Victoria I’m knackered and I’m going to bed.”’25
She was insulated from male attention whenever Geoffrey was around. He joined her in Birmingham, where they discovered her old bedsit in Priory Road had been converted into a private hospital. She was recognised when she entered a newsagent in Selly Oak. ‘It’s not every day we get Victoria Wood coming into the shop,’ said the paperboy, before turning uncertainly to Geoffrey – ‘or Colin Welland.’26
The centrepiece of the tour was a prestigious fortnight at the London Palladium, which smoked out dispersed relatives. Her mother came and was rewarded. ‘Best show yet,’ Victoria wrote in her tour itinerary. ‘I’ve finally got the hang of it now.’ Rosalind brought her son Mazda – Victoria had seen neither for four years and was pleased to find ‘they were both extremely nice’.27 Elsewhere a young woman Victoria didn’t recognise was ushered into the dressing room who turned out to be her brother’s daughter, whom she’d last seen as a toddler. It was quite common in Victoria’s family for relatives to keep their distance from one another. Once at a book signing a woman reached the front of the queue, announced that their mothers were sisters and disappeared before Victoria could engage her in conversation.
National newspapers had not reviewed Victoria live for three and a half years, and critics now discerned a new aura of confident command. ‘The unmistakable gloss of success is upon her,’ said Jack Tinker in the Daily Mail.28 ‘At 34,’ said the Financial Times, ‘Victoria Wood is already an Institution and one that demands an instant conservation order.’29 The Guardian talked of her ‘spiked knuckledusters’,30 The Times of her ‘lurking viciousness’.31 The targets of that aggression were mainly celebrities. ‘I don’t usually pick on specific people,’ Victoria claimed while still writing the show, but sometimes she couldn’t resist. Anne Diamond, the daytime presenter who had a penchant for oversharing in the media, was ‘so publicity mad that she went for a scan and wanted to turn it into a cartoon’. She imagined Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Richard Stilgoe collaborating on a musical called Twats.
By now Victoria was becoming a target too as other entertainers took to impersonating her. That summer in Edinburgh Jan Ravens performed a song in the style of Victoria, who nipped in to watch it from the back and was not amused. According to Geoffrey, it caused ‘some rumblings in the business – a feeling that comed
ians shouldn’t take the piss out of comedians’. Pauline Hannah reached a much wider audience on ITV’s impersonation show Copy Cats. But the most thought-through take on Victoria was in a series of solo sketches scripted by Geoff Atkinson (who had written for The Two Ronnies) and performed by Kate Robbins. She and her brother Ted, Victoria’s old warm-up man, had their own show that summer on ITV. At the piano she went close to the knuckle with a song about female jealousy: ‘You’re prettier than me, and I can’t live with it. / That pretty face of yours – can’t you give me it?’ In ‘Victoria Wood: A Very Funny Woman’, also from Kate and Ted’s Show, Kate Robbins’s besuited Victoria explains how she gets all her sharpest ideas from looking at food labels in the pantry.
After the high of the Palladium the tour proceeded to less salubrious venues. There was a hairy return flight from Aberdeen to Newcastle on a tiny plane which ‘looked like it had come out of a cereal packet’.32 When exhaustion set in, she was given a driver to ferry her in and out of venues and back to London. At Brighton Dome, where the performance was recorded for future release, a man wandered into Victoria’s dressing room and walked off with £10. Carol Spraggs (‘who turned out to be a real trouper’) chased him down the corridor.33 At the police station the theatre management wanted Victoria to press charges, but she was reluctant. In November, after the last date in Liverpool, there was a champagne party where Victoria drank for the first time in weeks and her promoters presented her with a black cake in the shape of a piano marked MFI. To Jane Wymark she audited her epic odyssey: ‘Nine and half weeks, 27 hotels, 51 shows and 5869 miles – as the song says – and I’m still here.’34 She felt flush enough at the end of it to send her parents money to sink a borehole at Birtle Edge House in order to access their own water supply after thirty years. ‘The size of the cheque made me think it must be an insurance premium,’ wrote her mother gratefully.35
December brought a last chance to write a silly billing for the As Seen on TV Special: ‘Anthropologist Kerry Askham gave chimpanzee Chester a typewriter and lots of paper. After three years he came up with an idea for a jeans commercial, a sonnet and a Victoria Wood Special. Sadly, after this programme was made, Chester contracted an infection and is now working for Channel 4.’ Meanwhile, a new set of sketches was published under the title of Barmy. It included material from the Christmas special which had not yet been broadcast, and there was even room for one that would never been seen at all: ‘Lady Police Serial’ poked fun at Juliet Bravo, the pioneering police drama with a female inspector, but ended up on the cutting-room floor. Victoria dedicated Barmy ‘to Susie, Ceal, Duncan and Julie – for the acting’ and added a preface by Margery and Joan.
Margery and Joan were exhumed for the last time when, in February 1988, Victoria made her first appearance on Comic Relief. Live in the studio, the pair took passive-aggressive potshots at each other while offering their usual consumer advice. It was revealed by Joan that Margery, the more sexually active of the two, was expecting a baby after a chance encounter with a café waiter called Pedro. In the original script Joan asks Margery what she’s going to call the baby. ‘Something short and snappy,’ says Margery. ‘Anne Diamond?’ says Joan.36
The sketch capitalised on the news that Julie was pregnant, visibly so when sitting at right angles to the camera. Motherhood was much on Victoria’s mind too. When her nephew was born ten years earlier, she described herself to Rosalind as ‘a baby freak’.37 For years the task of building a career, rather than starting a family, remained her priority. There was also the problem of scheduling – she and Geoffrey spent so much time apart on the road. ‘It is about the best contraceptive there is,’ she said during her previous tour, and it would continue: through the whole of 1986 they barely saw each other.38 Meanwhile, many of her contemporaries from school and university were having children. ‘If I ever do get around to it,’ she told Jane Wymark, who was one of them, ‘I should be quite an expert.’39 Media interest intensified when Victoria and Julie did a press call for the second series of As Seen on TV dressed as Margery and Joan: ‘All they wanted to know was who Julie was living with and when I was going to have a baby!’40 Another magazine asked the same question: ‘We’ve practically given up on the idea of ever starting a family. It’ll be 1988 at this rate before we even get the chance.’41
In 1988 Victoria would turn thirty-five. On the last day of 1987 her thoughts about what it meant to be in her thirties were published in the Sunday Times Magazine. Dashing the piece off while on tour, she cracked a couple of jokes about wrinkles gathering around her eyes and did not mention motherhood. ‘We thought about it a lot over at least two years,’ says Geoffrey. ‘Vic always knew she wanted to do this. Her clock was ticking. It was very much a natural impulse of hers, that she was just acting upon.’ As often happened with her preoccupations, the subject burrowed its way into her comedy. In her stand-up show she told of a (possibly invented) friend who had post-natal depression: ‘She showed me the baby, then I had it as well.’ It was as if she was laying a false trail. ‘Why are children so horrible?’ she asked her audience. ‘I don’t know how people can have them. I don’t! I don’t know how people can give birth apart from anything else. No, the more I hear about it the worse it sounds.’ In her speech notes she imagined a conversation between a child and its mother. ‘Am I adopted?’ ‘Course not.’ ‘Yeah but – can I be?’42 But as she came round to the idea, she began to accept that she could afford to put her career on hold, that she ‘could stop for a bit and it wouldn’t all disappear’.43
Victoria’s pregnancy, when it came, was meticulously planned to fit in with her schedule. She had a tour booked for April 1988, preceded by a benefit gig for the King’s Head Theatre at Sadler’s Wells. ‘I didn’t want to be newly pregnant then, yet I didn’t want to be too pregnant when I went on tour either.’44 Also she needed to dovetail with Geoffrey’s schedule, so, in mid-January, Victoria flew back from Dublin and drove late at night from Heathrow to a hotel they’d booked in order for the date-sensitive rendezvous to take place.
Though scarcely necessary, ticket sales for the tour were boosted by a swift repeat of the As Seen on TV Special, which also won its third consecutive BAFTA. Victoria added bits and pieces of new material to her set – a joke about the spotty back of Jeffrey Archer, topical after his recent libel trial. As she drove herself up and down the land, she made notes about the venues she visited in a ring-bound itinerary. Such was the perfectionism she asked of herself, her morale could be affected by something as seemingly minor as the quality of the piano stool. ‘V nice warm friendly audience,’ she said of Crawley. ‘Dire leisure centre venue as per.’ ‘Peculiar venue,’ she wrote of St Austell, ‘but who cares?’ She grumbled about Wolverhampton’s ‘terrible venue – useless crew’ and St Albans’ ‘terrible ushers in and out all the time – don’t want to play it again’. The venue in Norwich was ‘horridish’, in Newcastle ‘dumpish’ and in Hull ‘khaziish’. She wasn’t a fan of the Steinway in Scarborough: ‘too old and battered and tinny’. In Oxford she encountered a ‘v dead piano, v alive audience, v damp dressing room’. The audiences were the clay she went to work on, and they varied greatly. Her favourites were ‘jolly’; her least favourite ‘snotty’ or ‘snottish’. She got both over two nights in Birmingham: the first was ‘TV-bad’, the second ‘FAB’. On occasion she’d have to work hard to earn an ‘extremely good reception at end’ (Preston) or ‘fantastic reception at end’ (Bournemouth). In Derby she ‘really worked my arse off and got them in the end’. In Lincoln they were ‘v jolly, v thick’, in Carlisle ‘v agricultural’. Coventry: ‘worst yet’. Liverpool: ‘excellent audience – really warm and jolly. One of the best receptions’. She loved Sunderland: ‘extremely nice kind audience – a good feeling’. Manchester was ‘VVVG’. She had a great night in Edinburgh: ‘tore em up’.45
By the time she started the tour she was three months pregnant and could begin to plan. It occurred to her and Geoffrey that Stankelt Road would be too small t
o house a family. Their initial thought was that the time had come to spend less time on the M6 and M1 and move south. They did some house-hunting along the M4 corridor – ‘G nearly died of exhaustion going to Wilts every weekend,’ she told Lesley Fitton – and had an offer accepted on a vicarage in Bradford-upon-Avon.46 On the day of exchange the vendor withdrew, so the next day Victoria offered the asking price for a house at the other end of Silverdale. Cove Lea was a converted pair of cottages on a narrow lane leading down to a small sandy inlet, with a walled garden and fruit grove over the road and a one-up one-down cottage to house a nanny. After nearly seven years in Stankelt Road, they moved in over the summer. Though she wasn’t a fan of the ‘floor-length Liberty curtains – all v. dreary but too good to discard and I can’t afford new ones at the moment’,47 she enthused that ‘it is a v nice house, with room for visitors’. It was sufficiently roomy that they had an intercom installed so she and Geoffrey could communicate from each other’s offices without shouting.
Somewhere in all this Victoria found time to plough through books as judge of the inaugural NCR Award for non-fiction. Also on the panel, chaired by general director of the Royal Opera House Jeremy Isaacs, were Oxford University professor of modern history Norman Stone and Baroness Blackstone, head of Birkbeck College. According to Geoffrey, she ‘hated one or two of her fellow judges – and expressed her feelings vehemently at home. Norman Stone treated her like one of his students.’ Whenever back at home, and perhaps to get her into a parental frame of mind, she wrote the scripts for Puppydog Tales, the children’s series she’d first discussed with the animator Hilary Hayton eighteen months earlier. The commission called for thirteen four-minute stories, each containing a little moral lesson, about a sensible dog called Rosie and her pals Ruff, Scratch and Sniff. Though written for pre-school children, the scripts retained her distinctive flavour, with jokes about TV, magic, chocolate. ‘Hello, Sniff, got any cash?’ says Ruff. ‘I’m saving my money – I’ve seen a luxury semi-detached dog kennel in the paper.’ ‘How long’s that gonna take?’ ‘About seventy-two years.’ There would be quite a gestation for Puppydog Tales – playing all the characters, Victoria would record the dialogue and sing her own theme tune the following summer, after which began the long hunt for a broadcaster.