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

by Jasper Rees

  She didn’t insert just herself into these dramas but also drew on her actual friendships. The friend she walks with in Val De Ree was partly based on Celia Imrie. ‘There were three jokes in that,’ says Celia. ‘Me eating chocolate behind the bush, something about my tits and the fact that I was embarrassingly ill-read. These were quite sensitive things.’ When the two hikers fail to erect their tent to its full height, Celia’s character reasons that it won’t matter as they’ll be lying flat. ‘And if you sleep chest down,’ says Victoria, ‘we can drop it another foot.’ Victoria had been impressed by Celia’s bust ever since borrowing her dress to appear on That’s Life! in 1976.

  Then in Staying In there is a bossy friend who parades Victoria at a cocktail party in order to boost her own career. ‘Really let yourself go,’ she says, ‘jokes, routines – people will love it.’ For some of her friends, the big glasses worn by Deborah Grant hinted ruthlessly at the character’s inspiration. We’d Quite Like to Apologise even made a smutty reference to a boyfriend from her Birmingham years. Julie Walters, playing a manhunter called Joyanne, shows Victoria a snap of a potential holiday conquest: ‘Nobby – you’ll like him – he’s very witty. I bet you’ve never seen a medallion hung round that before.’

  As ever there were plenty of jagged little digs at celebrities – Alma Cogan, Felicity Kendal, former TV-am weather girl Wincey Willis, Harold Pinter and Elaine Paige, whose diminutive stature was irresistible. When The Library came up a couple of minutes short during rehearsals with Anne Reid, Victoria retreated to a table and wrote a speech about how Torvill and Dean never did it because they spent too much time lying down.

  As she wrote, there were conversations with Geoff Posner about how to film them. Logistics helped force a decision: as they couldn’t bring a studio audience with them to a moor in Yorkshire, they would do without one throughout. He was also keen to push boundaries by filming on video in order to erase the jarring switch in texture between exteriors and interiors common to all sitcoms whenever they ventured outdoors, which meant taking some unwieldy new equipment up onto Ilkley Moor.

  As for casting, Victoria was loyal as ever to her troupe. ‘It would be good if everyone was in at least 3 episodes,’ she wrote in her casting notes. ‘I think it would give it a nice Reppy feel.’8 Thus Julie Walters played a dim beautician, a nymphomaniac holidaymaker and the horrendous presenter Pam. As well as Victoria’s hiking partner, Celia became a ditzy travel rep, a silly socialite and an actress in a saucy television ad. For Jim Broadbent Victoria wrote the part of a bitter Yorkshire playwright. Another trophy guest in Staying In, he claims he can tell Victoria is from the north: ‘There’s a pain behind the eyes, a sob in the voice.’ He deplores ‘southern parasites licking the fat of the land while the north lies dying’. Victoria asks him where he lives. ‘Chiswick,’ he says. When Jim Broadbent received his script, it had a note attached in Victoria’s hand: ‘This is Colin Welland.’

  The only absentee was Duncan Preston. He had just been cast in Surgical Spirit, a new hospital sitcom on Granada. His co-star was Nichola McAuliffe, who at the King’s Head in 1980 had taken over the role Victoria wrote for herself in Good Fun. ‘It doesn’t look like the dates are going to work out for my next BBC thing,’ Victoria wrote to him. ‘I’m very sorry you won’t be in it but as you have to have your rubber gloves up Nichola M for the next 20 years I hope you won’t mind too much.’9

  While Victoria stuck to her trusted company, with the help of a casting director the net was widened. Patricia Hodge and Joan Sims, both of them guests in An Audience with Victoria Wood, were cast. Such was the show’s blur of reality and make-believe that Sims appeared alongside Victoria in Val de Ree and was namedropped by her in Staying In. ‘I’m watching television,’ she says while curled up on the sofa. ‘It’s a film with James Robertson Justice, Joan Sims, Hattie Jacques and Norman Wisdom.’

  Joan Sims played a terrifying ogress who runs a youth hostel. The truth was that she was herself terrified when Val de Ree was filmed. ‘Joan got very intimidated by Victoria,’ says Celia. ‘She was of an age where it becomes more and more difficult to learn. Victoria often wouldn’t hide what she felt, and it made poor Joan get more and more nervous and in the end she had to have great big boards.’ Celia herself, who had never worked on her own with Victoria before, found it ‘a very daunting prospect knowing it was only going to be me and Vic’.

  ‘I like people who learn the lines,’ Victoria explained when asked if there was a special sort of Victoria Wood actress.10 A lot of her lines were more difficult to deliver than usual, even for regulars. Much as she had in her stand-up monologues – the Brontë guide, the Sacharelle saleswoman – Victoria cocked an ear to quirky ways of mangling the language. The nervous woman running the health spa in Mens Sana in Thingummy Doodah coins gibberish in the hope it will make her sound more professional: ‘I don’t know everybody’s name as yet,’ she says in her welcome speech, ‘and until me doing that, “everybody” as a sort of termitude will have to huffice.’ She talks of ‘intending to your needs’ by ‘intoxifying the body’ before having to ‘pronounce a change of itinament’. In We’d Quite Like to Apologise an airline employee uses befuddling jargon: ‘To be explanatory you have ample minutage because your flight is carrying a small delay.’ Susie Blake found it hard to get the scene right under pressure filming early one morning at Leeds Bradford Airport and was hurried along by a flustered Geoff Posner. ‘Afterwards Vic told him off. He came over and said, “Thank you, that was really lovely.” So she was in charge.’

  Victoria placed no more pressure on others than she did on herself. She was in virtually every scene, in some of which she addressed the camera directly. Often the plot called on her to pretend to be someone else. In The Library, to make herself unattractive to her friend’s blind date, she comes along as Miss Sapphire, ‘an artiste in the entertainment business’ who has a hygiene problem: ‘I won’t beat about the bungalow – I’ve been flatulating – and, boy, have I stunk!’ When that doesn’t work, she dresses up as Mrs Witherstrop, a grouchy old woman from Eccles who likes nothing better than a ‘nice plate of brains and a ginger nut’. In Over to Pam, in order to expose the bullying daytime presenter who exploits her guests for entertainment, she dons a frizzy blonde wig and a plunging leopard-print top and presents herself as the product of a broken society. ‘I had seven children before I were eighteen,’ she tells Pam. ‘But I couldn’t cope. I were too stupid to cope. I kept leaving them in skips.’

  Victoria’s creative fixation with parental neglect was unaffected by becoming a parent herself. But there was a practical change to how she made television. The gang ethos fostered by Geoff Posner on the As Seen on TV location shoots was no more. Victoria no longer stayed in the same hotel as the cast and crew, while Grace was kept nearby with her nanny throughout rehearsals and production. ‘I would never have put Vic down as maternal,’ says Celia, ‘but when we got to four o’clock she was absolutely yearning to see this little girl.’ Victoria’s mother turned up on the Val de Ree shoot – it was the only time Celia met her and recalls her as ‘quite overpowering and not very warm’.

  When Posner presented the finished versions to BBC executives the reaction was cool. ‘Although we told the BBC we were shooting it without an audience,’ he says, ‘I got a very heavy director saying, “This doesn’t feel warm enough for Victoria, and I suggest you put a laugh track on.”’ A pre-recorded laugh track was out of the question, so he showed individual episodes in the BBC Television Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush to audiences who had come along to see a live recording of something else. One of the programmes was Wogan. Enthusiastic laughter was duly captured, but it was a fudge. Further warmth was supplied by Victoria’s chirpy theme tune, arranged by David Firman and featuring a solo for harmonica.

  There was little time for the whole package to be put together. The first episode was to be shown in mid-November, less than a month after filming on the last one wrapped. Victoria flung herself into promo
tion, going so far as to be grilled by Hello! She walked out after one broadsheet interviewer, seeming to assume hers had been a typical northern working-class childhood, asked if her parents had taken her to Blackpool. ‘What do you take me for?’ she huffed. ‘We used to go to Vienna.’11 The BBC publicist had to coax her back. As she had been out of the public eye for most of the year, interviewers could not help noticing that she had lost a great deal of weight. She also introduced a trim new bobbed pageboy haircut.

  Once more Victoria’s billings for the Radio Times gave nothing away. ‘The Channel Tunnel – vital artery or alimentary canal?’ she wrote of Over to Pam. ‘Two experts and a French person thrash out the issues in a lively late-night debate. Song by Spinning Jenny.’ For We’d Quite Like to Apologise she wrote, ‘Ken Hope served a 16-year prison sentence for armed robbery and assault. Now he is one of Britain’s top comedy script writers. Meredith Leazely asks if the law should be changed?’ With Val de Ree (Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha) she supplied her own review: ‘Patronising. D MAIL.’ One or two of the actual reviews for the first episode weren’t much different. Mens Sans in Thingummy Doodah had the best title but, with the most obvious target to aim at, it was the least ambitious of the six plays. ‘If I explain that this comedy-let was set in a health farm,’ grumbled the Sunday Telegraph, ‘you really can guess most of the rest of it.’12 Such critiques uncharitably overlooked the show’s bold attempt to disrupt the traditions of half-hour comedy and Victoria’s matchless ear for the absurdities of the dieting industry: women with ‘underarm swoop’ and ‘runaway midriff’, or the hard-boiled egg which ‘kind of eats some of the meal for you’. The episode contained the first ever use of Volvo as a euphemism for vulva. For Alan Coren (another member of Victoria’s LWT audience), there was more to savour in We’d Quite Like to Apologise: ‘Wood triumphs over cliché not by ducking it but by meeting it head-on.’13

  Victoria’s foreword to the published scripts was an idiot’s guide to creating a comedy series, from commission to casting to shooting. ‘Now the fun really begins!’ she repeated at every fresh stage of the process, right up to the moment ‘the people who write for the newspapers are settling down to tell everybody just what they think of our “programme”.’14 But perhaps the fun never really began at all. Her audience at home grew and grew, peaking at over thirteen million, and there were as usual two BAFTA nominations in the light-entertainment categories. But Victoria would come to distance herself from Victoria Wood. She felt her ubiquity was a flaw: ‘There was always that character that was always me except it wasn’t me. I thought who’s this person who looks a bit like me, who sounds like me who doesn’t make any sense and has no part in the story?’15 But mainly she attributed her dissatisfaction to the lack of a live audience: ‘It was just so dull. We showed them to an audience afterwards, but it was just no buzz for me at all.’16

  Making the series took her – and Grace and Amber – away from home for three months. While the show was running on BBC One, there were two significant events that brought her back to Lancashire. In November she could not resist the allure of an old girls’ reunion, twenty-five years on, of the 1964 intake at Bury Grammar School. Victoria had always been a curious observer of others at school. ‘I suppose they’ll be looking at me now,’ she sighed before she went.17 For company she had her two oldest friends, Lesley Fitton and Anne Sweeney, who remembers ‘when we went in the room there was a frisson of excitement’. It was not shared by their retired headmistress Dorothy Lester who was ‘just so cold and made no reference to Vic’s success’. Some contemporaries coolly kept their distance, while others gushed with admiration. One bounded up to announce that she had three degrees from London University but no job. ‘Vic thought that was hysterically funny,’ says Lesley. ‘It became a catchphrase with her: three degrees and no job. In a faintly horrible way she and I were drifting around vaguely laughing at people we’d always vaguely laughed at.’

  Less than a month later, on the day We’d Quite Like to Apologise was broadcast, Victoria was made an honorary doctor of letters by Lancaster University. The university’s public orator praised her ‘highly original investigations into contemporary anthropology’ and, to her embarrassment, compared her voice to that of Samuel Beckett. After her pass degree in Birmingham in 1974, it was a pleasing accolade to be presented with her doctorate scroll by the university’s chancellor Princess Alexandra. Her parents were in the audience to hear her muse in her acceptance speech on the recent school reunion she’d attended: ‘I spent so much time in the corridor the only person who recognised me was the cleaner.’ Afterwards local journalists gathered round for an impromptu press conference. ‘When I was at school I was advised by an English teacher not to be a performer but to go into journalism,’ she told them. ‘You see, if I’d taken any notice of her, I could have been sitting round the back with the notebook, getting everybody’s names wrong for the Lancaster Guardian.’18 Dr Wood was chuffed, she added, that the university had accorded the same honour to Eric Morecambe.

  It was a satisfying way to close the decade. Ten years on from the Observer’s nomination of eighty names to watch out for in the Eighties, at thirty-six Victoria was part of the national furniture, and an incomparable commentator on the British way of life. Plenty of reviews of the decade named her as one of its towering figures, while Victoria and Geoffrey were now established as a celebrity couple, in which capacity they were once again grilled by Mavis Nicholson, who had first interviewed them together at the King’s Head in 1981. Sitting on a sofa in a Lake District hotel, Geoffrey talked about saying goodbye to the Great Soprendo. The new streamlined Victoria did not look down shyly even once.

  15

  UP WEST

  ‘God, it’s hard work eating muesli. It’s like having two jobs. Apparently in London you can phone up and somebody comes round and chews it for you but we don’t have these facilities where I live in the north.’

  Victoria Wood Up West, 1990

  Victoria’s first act of the 1990s was to fly to Ethiopia for a week to make a film catching up on Comic Relief’s activities. She had done her share of pro bono good works. In recent months Pamela Stephenson had invited her to support her Parents for Safer Food campaign, although her phobia for socialising kicked in when she attended a dinner party to help launch it and she clammed up. Before Christmas, she appealed on Radio 4 for donations to a charity offering counselling and contraceptive advice to young people. She wasn’t always careful about lending her name to a cause. Though just the right person to be on the board of trustees for a Fame-style academy planned for Croydon, she withdrew after a series of public spats about the venture.

  Leaving Grace behind for the first time, Victoria boarded the plane the day after hosting an awards ceremony for the food industry at the Grosvenor House Hotel. ‘I feel like a delicious combination of Kate Adie and Judith Chalmers, only paler and with less epaulettes,’ she wrote in a cheerful article to promote the film, only to arrive in Addis Ababa looking ‘like a cross between WH Auden and a self-assembly Chesterfield’. The film was pitched as a plea to viewers not to give up on Ethiopia, to which they had donated five years earlier in response to Band Aid and Live Aid. ‘Of course some of it was wasted – it was a crisis, people made mistakes,’ she said in a piece to camera as she walked along a hot dusty road. ‘It’s a mess. I don’t pretend to understand the half of it.’ She used her humanising skills as a comedian to convey a message that the Ethiopians featured in her film were just ordinary people. ‘Some of the children are absolutely horrible and are driving me nuts,’ she said in front of a crowd of them. With the crew she travelled around the country for a week on buses and tiny planes. Her moment of greatest connection came when she was struggling with the language barrier in conversation with a shy birth attendant until a newborn baby urinated on her, which greatly entertained the surrounding throng: ‘Years of being stuck in bus queues with comedy haters gives me a sound sense of the conversation. “Well I’m sorry she doesn’t make me laugh.
” “What’s that patch on her leg?” “A baby just weed on her.” “Now that’s funny.”’1 Back home she reported to Geoffrey that she had ‘quite enjoyed the tough conditions in a masochistic sort of way. She definitely felt a strong sense of guilt and worried that she was being helicoptered in and out, bringing her privileged life with her, like a kind of Lady Bountiful.’ Victoria responded to a quite different appeal a couple of months later when the novelist Rose Tremain asked in the Independent for funds to support Angus Wilson, who had fallen on hard times. She sent £1,000.

  Her thoughts now turned back to what she considered to be her day job. Victoria had not toured in nearly two years but got back into the swing of performance with a couple of private cabaret bookings. One gig was at the Imperial War Museum, where she had the odd experience of ‘trying to fit the piano between a tank and an anti-aircraft gun’.2 These bookings were lucrative, and useful for introducing new material, but they could be precarious. ‘They’re full of drunken businessmen,’ she said. ‘When they’re drunk they cannot concentrate. It’s much better if their wives are there. They tend to behave better then.’3

  A recording in Victoria’s archive from 1989 reveals how meticulously she prepared for each performance. Taping herself on a cassette for Geoffrey to listen back to, she would sprint through the act and add her own notes and comments – such as where an extra gag was needed to cover a walk to the piano. Diligent about targeting the act at her audience, she crafted a boilerplate section into which she could drop the name of the client: ‘I said, “Everybody will be drunk and they’ll throw bread rolls at me.” And they said, “Oh no, this is [name of company].” I said, “That’ll be even worse. They’ll all throw [name of product] at me.”’

  It was after finishing the scripts for Victoria Wood that Victoria got in touch with her tour promoters, who always hungered for her to do more live work. A tour was booked to start in May 1990. To whet the public appetite and stimulate ticket sales, Victoria Wood Live, recorded at Brighton Dome two years earlier, was released in January. This established a template that would continue for more than a decade. After double exposure on television and VHS, her live set would be dropped and replaced with a new show that in its turn would be released on video and broadcast on TV.