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

by Jasper Rees

  As the pregnancy advanced, the challenge now was to keep the news private. This would be difficult because, the month after finishing the tour, Victoria would be more scrutinised than ever before by a television audience: she had agreed to record a stand-up performance for London Weekend Television’s An Audience with … strand. Alan Yentob, the controller of BBC Two, soon caught wind of Victoria’s potential defection and implored her to bring it to the BBC instead. Victoria replied that the decision had not yet been taken, adding a barb that was to reverberate through the BBC for years to come: ‘I’m glad the BBC is interested too. Nobody has ever bothered about what other work I’m doing, or taken any notice of me while I was there, or acknowledged any awards that may have come the way of the programme – so it’s nice to know.’48 After she’d met the LWT producers she reported back to Yentob: ‘As they all seem perfectly decent and professional, I can’t really think of a way of getting out of it, especially as I think they would all notice if I nicked their formula and took it to Wood Lane. But I am busting to come back to the BBC – and will be there with you in 89.’49

  The approach from LWT had come via Judith Holder, a producer whom Victoria met in 1984 when she was a junior researcher on Gloria Hunniford’s Sunday Sunday. In mid-April Holder, executive producer Nicholas Barrett and Marcus Plantin, the head of entertainment at LWT, went to see Victoria perform in Guildford. After agreeing in principle, Victoria then asked the two men to leave the room. ‘Listen, I’m pregnant,’ she said to Judith Holder. ‘I don’t want anybody to know. It might be tricky because of costume fittings.’

  By the time the show was recorded, on a Wednesday night at the end of June, Victoria would be nearly six months pregnant. ‘An Audience with … was a big deal,’ says Geoffrey. ‘She prepared for it meticulously – much of the prep focusing on hiding her pregnancy.’ The outfit she chose to cover her bump was a long mid-blue satin coat over fuchsia trousers, affording no clue of her condition to an audience which included hawk-eyed journalists; only a single camera angle, shot from the side when she sat at the piano, offered the merest hint. Her clothes were designed, she said, ‘by the famous couturier Maison Renée, or Renee Mason as we call her’ – sharp-eared fans would have recognised the name from the ‘Self-Service’ sketch.

  An Audience with Victoria Wood was Victoria’s most exposing appearance on television yet, because she would be playing to an audience of celebrities, all of their faces visible. The fifty or so stars who said yes included a dozen actresses, plus broadcasters, controllers, presenters and comedians. ‘Maidenhead and Barnes are like ghost towns this evening,’ she told them. Some whose careers had intersected with Victoria’s were invited to ask questions which were in effect cues for her to carry on with her regular act. She seized the opportunity to have a pop at Joan Bakewell, whom she’d met on the feminist discussion show Pandora’s Box in 1977. ‘Do you think large bosoms are a handicap?’ Bakewell was asked to ask. ‘I suppose Mensa was shut, was it?’ replied Victoria. Celia Imrie and Julie Walters – ‘the lady with the split ends’ – gamely lobbed up questions. Jokes about being mistaken for Virginia Wade or Pam Ayres had become passé, so instead there was a running gag about being married to Lenny Henry, each prompting a cutaway to a beaming Dawn French. She sat between Jennifer Saunders and Adrian Edmondson, who afterwards told Victoria he felt the strain of having to maintain a broad rictus in case the cameras were watching.

  Extraordinarily, ninety minutes were recorded without a single retake, later cut down to just under an hour for broadcast. For the second half Victoria launched into an extended narrative about being followed through town by a man she mistakes for a kidnapper. The chase takes her from a launderette through a department store and finally into a theatre where she finds herself taking part in a terrible farce called Whoops! There Go My Bloomers. The sequence, inspired by a real incident in which she escaped a stalker in London by ducking into a bad West End revue, enabled her to weave in her Sacherelle saleswoman. For an encore she pulled on her orange coat and yellow beret, clambered along a row containing the DJ Kid Jensen to walk onstage looking for her friend Kimberley. She finished with ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’. Perhaps to apologise for Margery and Joan, she rewrote one of Barry’s excuses for getting out of sex:

  No dramas

  Give me my pyjamas

  The only girl I’m mad about is Judith Chalmers.

  Despite the warmth of the reaction, at first Victoria wasn’t convinced that the performance had worked. ‘We were both a bit disappointed by it on the night,’ says Geoffrey, ‘and amazed afterwards when everyone had clearly been so bowled over – no one seemed quite able to believe it. Judi Dench was absolutely beside herself with enthusiasm.’ He attributes their own despondency to the bright lights of the studio. ‘The worst thing about doing An Audience with …,’ Victoria would say, ‘is not that the audience is famous, because it really doesn’t make any difference, but that you can see them because it’s a television show and they have to be lit. And I really never want to see my audience. That was the biggest trial for me. That and the fact that I was six months pregnant and my legs were aching standing up that long.’50 At a packed afterparty she circulated in a glow, accepting praise and quietly breaking her news to an inner circle. Julie was already in the know, having had her daughter two months earlier – ‘I thought I caught a whiff of Napisan,’ Victoria said to her audience.

  Her motive for keeping it secret was to avoid what she called an ‘Anne Diamond media circus … I didn’t think it was necessary to see me in the papers in the hospital with everything hanging out of my nightie.’51 Eventually her pregnancy became public knowledge by accident when in late August she was spotted entering the Portland, the exclusive private hospital in central London which Julie had recommended. Victoria’s antenatal check-up happened to fall on the day the Duchess of York was giving birth. ‘Of course, I might just have been visiting – except someone in hospital let the cat out of the bag to the man from the Sun, so I had to admit it.’52 She still contrived to keep the date of birth to herself by announcing that the baby wasn’t expected until late November.

  ‘At present it is upside down but there’s plenty of time for it to flip over,’ Victoria told Lesley Fitton as she entered her final trimester, which she spent doing Jane Fonda aerobics tailored to pregnant women and attending antenatal classes at the Portland alongside well-heeled women, none of whom recognised her.53 ‘It was like having your own comedy show,’ she enthused. ‘They were all really posh and very thin – very thick as well.’54 Meanwhile, back at home she waited out her pregnancy by attempting another play for Michael Codron, this time set in 1969 and drawing on her own adolescence.

  On the morning of the last day of September Victoria went in for an inducement only to find the delivery rooms all in use. That night she went into labour and, to while away the time, she and Geoffrey watched synchronised swimming from the Olympics in Seoul, which she deemed ‘better than the epidural’. There were complications – high blood pressure, the cord wrapped round the baby’s neck – but eventually, at 1.41 a.m. on 1 October, Victoria gave birth to a girl weighing 6 lb 3 oz. They called her Grace Eleanor.

  As the new parents drove north with their precious cargo, Victoria’s joy was instant and profound. ‘She bathed in the glory of it,’ says Geoffrey, ‘the elation of it, the absolute delight, and she lived it day after day after day. It was just fantastic.’ Indeed, Victoria would concede that Geoffrey ‘really didn’t get a look in to start with. My instinct was so strong. I might have excluded him at the beginning. She was very tuned into me. She just wanted me.’55

  When Grace was two months old An Audience with Victoria Wood was broadcast and won her mother the most unanimous praise she had received for her work on television since Talent in 1979: ‘There are no words good enough to describe Victoria’s talent. She encapsulates everything we’ve ever thought about everyday life in Britain. And wish we’d said first.’56 ‘I was so weak with laug
hter that I could barely bother to be irritated by all those close-ups of second division celebrities grinning vacantly.’57 One female reviewer reckoned the shots of famous men laughing had an influence on male viewers: ‘Men have been telling me daily that Victoria Wood is the best thing to happen since zipped flies. And they feel safe saying it.’58

  As for Victoria, the rhythm of her life was to change for good. She also had a new source of comedy. ‘I’ll probably get Grace a clean outfit for Christmas,’ she said soon after the birth.59 It was her first joke about motherhood.

  14

  STAYING IN

  ‘People come up and go, “Heh, heh, we know who you are!” And you want to go, “Yeah, I know who I am too, ta very much.”’

  Interview, 1989

  At the start of 1989, Victoria held a new type of casting session. A nanny was sought to look after Grace. Help was required partly, says Geoffrey, because ‘we knew we were going to get no support whatsoever from any of the four grandparents’. Two candidates were asked back to Cove Lea for a second interview, and during each conversation the parents contrived to be called away, leaving the applicant alone with Grace. Victoria and Geoffrey then listened through the door. One of them was a young woman called Amber who got the job when she was heard to say to her three-month-old charge, ‘Well, Grace, what’s your opinion?’

  Grace’s arrival did not keep Victoria away from her desk. A month after the birth Richard Stone promised Michael Codron she would deliver her play by Christmas, whereafter it quietly vanished. It was the last of her vain attempts to write a successor to Good Fun, whose publication with Talent drew a line under her career as a playwright. ‘Somehow they just didn’t work,’ she mused. ‘They just made me miserable.’1

  Her first booking as a mother was to read Roald Dahl’s newly published Matilda for Jackanory. For the recording, the party of four went to Newcastle, where a second dressing room was requested and the schedule was built around feeding times. The children’s programme was moving away from static readings in chairs to something more dramatised, with sets and effects and an autocue. Victoria narrated in a bright and eager style and threw herself into the various voices. ‘At the end of it there was a big sigh of relief,’ says Geoffrey. ‘Yes, that’s worked. Vic can be a working mother.’ When it was broadcast hundreds of children wrote in to say how much they’d enjoyed it.

  In the meantime, the BBC awaited her. The successor to Victoria Wood As Seen on TV would be on BBC One and negotiations about how it would be presented got underway at the start of the year. Jonathan Powell, the controller of the channel, was so keen to announce Victoria’s return to that autumn’s schedule that he proposed to broadcast the start of the series when the end of it was still unfinished. Communicating through her agent, she put a stop to that. ‘Victoria would be most unhappy,’ her agent Vivienne Clore wrote to head of light entertainment James Moir, ‘if the new series began to go out, while still in production.’2 In March An Audience with Victoria Wood added two more awards – for best light entertainment programme and performance – to Victoria’s haul of BAFTAs (she won ahead of French and Saunders and The Lenny Henry Show, both produced by Geoff Posner). The double win intensified the urgent need to bring her back to the BBC. ‘I do hope that Victoria Wood is signed, sealed and delivered?’ Powell wrote to Moir days afterwards.3

  The series that Victoria wanted to write involved a longer narrative format. In six half-hour plays she would mulch together skills she had mastered in the last few years – sketch-writing and stand-up, character comedy and observational storytelling. She would sometimes cast herself as the feed, or as the commentator, then throw on a garish disguise and switch to grotesque caricature. The scripts would also draw on her aborted attempts at writing plots for theatre and film. The only element from her skill set that would be missing was music: for the first time in her fifteen-year career, Victoria would not compose or perform a single song.

  Getting back into the swing was difficult. Victoria was habitually a slow starter, but now there was an extra distraction and she would take frequent breaks to dandle Grace on her knee. Confused by the trick of writing herself into comic dialogue, she got to the end of one first draft ‘and I flicked through and found out I was only saying things like “yes” and “can I have my key?”. I thought, this won’t do, it’s my show, I haven’t got anything to say, so I scrapped that one and wrote it again and put some jokes in. It was hard to find a line.’4 As the deadline loomed, she finished one episode in only two days. She did at least have assistance from a secretary who lived in Silverdale and who was hired to type letters and help organise her diary.

  The series had no fixed title. On one BBC draft typed out in July it was billed as Victoria Wood Comedy Playhouse. The title flirted with the idea that these plays were somehow connected to the theatre – Victoria called them ‘playletinos’. It also evoked the pilot show Comedy Playhouse which gave birth to many popular BBC sitcoms, from Steptoe and Son to The Liver Birds. But the tag didn’t quite fit. ‘I can’t call them sitcoms,’ Victoria acknowledged, ‘as there is no front door or a sofa.’5 There was also no continuity beyond the presence of Victoria in each episode. By September the title at the top of a studio rehearsal script had been reduced to Victoria Wood.

  The boilerplate title was a simple reflection of her ever-increasing celebrity. In April An Audience with Victoria Wood was shown again to nearly ten million viewers. In May a second repeat of Victoria Wood As Seen on TV Special was seen by more than four million. In June a poll by Punch magazine asked readers to nominate Britain’s funniest woman. Victoria accumulated 48 per cent of the vote; Julie Walters, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Emma Thompson and Tracey Ullman all scored 5 per cent or less. Her mailbag included requests for interviews from students writing theses on women in comedy: ‘I’m always first on the list. I just write back saying, “I have nothing to say. Sorry. Here’s a signed photo.”’6

  Her unassailable popularity emboldened Victoria to have a go at something no one had quite attempted in British television comedy: she would play a version of herself. The idea is there in her pencilled draft to The Library, one of her new half-hour plays:

  Interior. Edwardian library of largeish-town. VW is browsing round the shelves. She speaks quietly to camera.

  VW: This is the dreariest library in the whole world. They haven’t got anything new. I think they’re waiting for the Domesday Book to come out in paperback. It’s run by this terrible woman called Madge, awfully narrow-minded, makes Mary Whitehouse look like a topless waitress.

  This was an experiment in comic storytelling. Victoria cast herself as ‘Victoria’ (now and then referred to by others as ‘Vicki’). The scripts played on the idea that she was a famous entertainer. In The Library, about lonely hearts and computer matchmaking, Victoria offers to hold her friend’s hand on a blind date, but the nervous friend urges her to keep her job a secret. ‘As soon as he hears you’re in television,’ she says, ‘he’s not going to squint my way.’ In one script Victoria describes herself, tongue in cheek, as ‘a much loved and irreplaceable entertainer’. In another she is mistaken for one half of French and Saunders. At a drinks party she says she’s a comedian. ‘Call me old-fashioned,’ drawls a guest, ‘but I don’t like to see a woman telling jokes. You name me a funny woman who’s attractive with it.’

  The format conferred freedom to delve deeper into her own preoccupations. A stay in a health club with Geoffrey was the basis for Mens Sana in Thingummy Doodah, set in a terrible spa which trades in empty mantras and unscientific drivel. Val de Ree (Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha), drawing on her love of fell walking, was inspired by a calamitous hike in the Lake District that was ruined by sudden rain and fog. ‘Morale did get very low indeed,’ says her walking companion Judith Holder. ‘Vic started to sing “Val de Ree”. At its lowest we walked into this field where these farmers were castrating lambs.’ Staying In explored her horror of large social gatherings.

  Victoria was not averse to s
eeking inspiration from her back catalogue. The Library was a longer version of ‘Mr Right’ – Anne Reid even reprised the role of a lonely spinster who has squandered her best years looking after an elderly mother. We’d Quite Like to Apologise revisited the theme of package holiday mishaps, described with such gusto in her recent live show. Over to Pam continued her project of satirising television with an angry broadside against daytime TV. ‘It’s so cheap and nasty,’ Victoria explained. ‘It’s such an easy formula to get women in the studio and pay them virtually nothing to say a few words. We should instead put up a caption saying “We have no TV worth showing”, and then leave the screen blank.’7