by Jasper Rees
In April there were a few try-out gigs within driving distance of Silverdale. Victoria rehearsed right up to the afternoon of the performance, in each of which she dropped in more fresh material piece by piece. Then the tour proper started with three nights in Newcastle. While traces of Lucky Bag lingered on as a little package of gags about Dutch caps and the dyslexic boyfriend reading a sex manual – which she and Geoffrey referred to as ‘Sex Chat’ – she had plenty of new things to say about sex: ‘I filled in one of those sex questionnaires. They sent it back marked, “very poor work – see me”.’ There was a section about British manners inhibiting suburban wife-swapping orgies. But Victoria was now more fascinated by the consequences of sex. The first-half setpiece was a brilliant narrative about ovulation (‘one egg a month, like the war’) and pregnancy testing kits (‘have you tried weeing on a paddle? We’ve got the engine capacity but not the steering’). Motherhood had tilted Victoria’s worldview and given her a new angle on things. ‘I studied the symptoms for pregnancy,’ she said. ‘Moody, irritable, big bosoms. I have obviously been pregnant for twenty years.’ Breast feeding, she reckoned, ‘is like asking someone in a straitjacket to eat their lunch off of a beach ball’.
More than ever, this was a show about the female condition. Women in the audience screeched with recognition at jokes about first seeing the diagram on a packet of Lil-Lets: ‘I decided to put a ship in a bottle once a month instead – it was easier.’ A lot of the material flew over the heads of the mystified men in the audience, and the pitch of the laughter coming back at her told her who found this stuff funny. Geoffrey, wandering the auditorium to check how the show looked from various angles in the venue, confirmed it: ‘The men received the gags in stony silence and then stared at their wives, who were crying with laughter, and had not a clue what they were laughing about. They just sat there looking baffled and occasionally angry. There were sharp intakes of breath at the word “period” and delighted amazement at, say, “we’ve got the engine capacity but not the steering”. The audiences couldn’t quite believe it. At the beginning of her stand-up career she briefly billed herself as “The New Comic for Girls” and now it was coming true.’ At one point, after a gag about the strip in her new bikini bottoms, Victoria said, ‘Oh tell him what I mean, for heaven’s sake. We’ll be here all night.’ She was rewarded with an even bigger wave of screams.
There was another unsisterly kicking for Anne Diamond (the answer to the question: ‘what do you get if you cross Kylie Minogue and Mussolini?’). She expanded on the Bury Grammar reunion material she’d road tested in Lancaster, while the introduction of the unpopular poll tax tempted Victoria to make a rare foray into politics: ‘We’ve had over a decade of Mrs Thatcher and they’re only just now finding out about mad cow disease.’ At the start of the second half Victoria came on as Susan, a grotesquely fat northern roadie who preferred to be referred to as obese, while in the character of an inept speaker she addressed a luncheon club on the subject of ‘Life Begins at Forty’. These sections did not necessarily hit the heights but, says Geoffrey, ‘they gave variety to the show, just in the way the songs did, and she could write those kinds of sketch in her sleep. She relied on performance technique to get the laughs with them, rather than the ingenuity of the writing.’
The other change was to the end of the first half. Hitherto Victoria had closed the set with a low-key song and a blackout. She now experimented with ‘Carry on Regardless’, a clap-along tune which had not worked as a show-closer and didn’t quite land in its new slot either. The rest of the songs were scattered less liberally throughout the set. The highlight among the new ones was ‘Saturday Night’, which borrowed from ‘Oh Dear What Can the Matter Be’ to give a rambunctious account of two young women painting the town red. Tracey Clegg and Nicola Battersby were gaudy descendants of Julie and Maureen in Nearly a Happy Ending, or Kelly Marie Tunstall – out for a night on the tiles, and heedless of the consequences. To establish a sense of them Victoria harked back to the rhyme scheme of a song from In at the Death in 1978:
They rendezvous in front of a pillar.
Tracey’s tall like Jonathan Miller.
Nicola’s more like Guy the Gorilla,
If Guy the Gorilla were thick.
Her most lyrically inventive new song since ‘Barry and Freda’, it contained no fewer than seven clever rhymes for Battersby. ‘This one is good fun to sing,’ she said when the lyrics and music were published, ‘and was no trouble to write as the tune is nicked.’4
No longer was there much in the way of single-night bookings necessitating daily stints on motorways. Victoria was now so vastly popular her promoters could book her for a week at a time at the Bristol Hippodrome, Manchester Opera House and Birmingham Hippodrome, where six shows sold out so quickly two more had to be tacked on in July. She greeted each venue with the same opening quip: ‘All the glamour and glitter of show business is encapsulated in one venue. But not this one.’ Amber and Grace – as well as her tour manager Carol Spraggs and her sound man – travelled with her in convoy wherever she went.
‘I have done 30 shows now,’ she told Jane Wymark in mid-June, ‘and I’m just getting it the way I want.’5 Grace adapted to life on tour, although she needed to be entertained when she woke up at six in the morning. The early start meant her mother would ‘slap on a deal more panstick than usual to hide the baps by the time the half comes round’.6 In a tour schedule Victoria meticulously listed vital items, including Grace’s cot toys, shoes, book basket, dolly, reins. ‘It’s like taking a chimp round with you really,’ she quipped. ‘You really need a zookeeper to come with you.’7 Whenever the schedule allowed – Blackpool, Liverpool, Manchester – Grace would be kept at home and Victoria would dash back to Cove Lea after each show. For Nottingham and Sheffield, to both of which Victoria returned for extra shows in July, they stayed in splendour at Hassop Hall in the Peak District. Another measure of her enhanced status was the twenty days off built into the itinerary. Now and then Grace came along to the venue, from one of which she retains a very early memory. ‘Mum would put me in the wings,’ she says. ‘I was sat on a chair watching her from the side and as she moved from the mic to go round and sit at the piano, she gave me a little look, like a little smile.’
Everywhere, Victoria was greeted with crescendos of ecstasy as the show built to its climax. The official closer was ‘Reincarnation’, an up tempo number that looked at other lives she might try on for size. Through a series of bravura rhymes she imagined being a traditional housewife, a go-getting City trader, a timid singleton. It was, she later said, ‘a bugger to write. You try thinking up two rhymes for flip-flops.’ She went on and off stage left throughout the evening and, just as the audience thought the night was over, she reappeared stage right in an orange mac and yellow beret, triggering yells of delight. In an encore of only two minutes, Kimberley’s friend shared her enthusiasm for penis colada – ‘I made one myself out of a recipe in The Watchtower’ – and told of her efforts to teach herself Flemish ‘in case I ever go to Flem’. ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’, which remained the closer, was now so popular that one night in Birmingham the audience tried to join in the chorus. ‘I wasn’t aware it was a duet,’ Victoria paused to say, ‘but we could try.’
Before the spring tour was over Victoria prepared for the announcement of the autumn dates. Having deferred to Phil McIntyre to organise the national tour, André Ptaszynski took on the London leg. ‘Vic had built up a fair head of steam for a decent London run,’ he says. ‘The Palladium season had sold out so quickly and she was considerably more famous than she had been three years earlier. She was overdue for a meaty run in the capital.’ To that end he persuaded her to commit to ten daunting weeks at the Strand Theatre. The auditorium’s capacity of 1,100 meant that there were more than 46,000 tickets to shift. The show was given a title – Victoria Wood Up West – and sold out so quickly that two weeks were added. Before it opened, the run was reported to have taken over a million
pounds. Indefatigably, Victoria wrote the entire programme in the style of a celebrity magazine titled Ooh Hello! (whose exclamation mark kept moving). A spoof feature on ‘The Remarkable Home Life of Victoria Wood as told in her own words exclusively to Ooh! Hello’s Deborah Klepper’ was a merciless attack on celebrities who do Faustian deals with lickspittle glossies. ‘Earlier this year,’ it chirruped, ‘Victoria’s trip to Ethiopia to poke gentle fun at starving people had made a very nice feature in “Ooh Hello!”.’ Pictures of Ethiopian children appeared alongside snaps of Priory Road, the ASDA shoot and Victoria with Dolly Parton, ‘who flew over specially to advise her on diet and rib-removal’. The contents page offered more next week – ‘Celia Imrie ex Bergerac star shares her cocoa-dependency problem … Linda Lusardi shows us her doorknobs … Morrissey. We share the secrets of his tumble-dryer.’
In preparation for the West End run the family all squeezed into the flat in Castellain Mansions, which Victoria nicknamed Gravystain Mansions. There wasn’t really room and Geoffrey soon retreated north to prepare for his new post-Soprendo career as an after-dinner speaker – Victoria wrote some gags for him which he complained were too rude. She also wrote one for Grace: ‘I taught Grace to say “hello you old baldy” to Geoff and of course she will not stop saying it and I am afraid we may now bump into Ned Sherrin with embarrassing consequences.’8 As ever with a London run, she sent out invitations to her friends. ‘Dear Dunc,’ went a typical summons. ‘My first night at the Strand is Oct 2 – same old crap but do you want to come?’9
In fact, before she took up residence Victoria worked on some site-specific material, readily supplied by the delicious news that Joan Collins was to open in Private Lives next door at the Aldwych. Victoria urged her audience not to make too much noise: ‘It does annoy Joan.’ Exactly ten years earlier their paths had crossed on the arts programme On the Town. In the interim Dynasty had happened, and Victoria could not resist taking aim: ‘They wanted a soap star of similar stature to star alongside her in Private Lives – but Albert Tatlock from Coronation Street was dead.’ Her audience wasn’t to know the joke’s private subtext, that the producer of Private Lives was Michael Codron.
‘Wood is, now, the bigger star and the bigger draw,’ said her avowed fan Alan Coren in The Times; ‘you can still get seats for Collins.’10 The show brought in more critics than had ever reviewed her work. Not all of them enthused, some resenting the fact that, as the run was sold out, their views were superfluous. The Standard grumbled about ‘her transformation into a slick semi-pornographic entertainer’.11 The Observer fretted that ‘all her jokes about fat, once upholstered by the authority of her own bulk, now seem thin’.12 The critic who profoundly understood Victoria’s development as a stand-up was Jane Edwardes of Time Out, who had worked at the King’s Head a decade earlier: ‘Those far off times when she clung to the piano for support as she told a few jokes in between a programme of songs are now a distant memory.’13
The strain of performing night after night with barely any respite for months on end took its toll – even if, as one journalist noted, Victoria was earning enough to buy a bungalow each week. ‘The Strand is knackering me,’ she confided.14 She was so exhausted that she declined when Morrissey, a devoted fan who had adapted the lyrics of ‘Fourteen Again’ in a song by the Smiths, asked her out for tea. Towards the end of the run Victoria offered comps to her sister Rosalind. ‘You don’t have to,’ she said. ‘Also if you’d like to come over and see Grace. She’s a v nice girl I must say. Things have been hectic with only Sundays off.’15 One afternoon she took Grace to a children’s birthday party in Maida Vale, where the toast of the West End went into her shell. ‘She wouldn’t mix with the other mums very easily,’ says Chris Beetles, who was her host. ‘Her shyness would kick in again.’ Privately she was shocked that the candles had to be blown out a second time for the video. ‘That’s W9 for you,’ she told Jane Wymark.16 Beetles was now an art dealer specialising in British cartoons, and Victoria was attracted to his collection of thirty works by the Punch cartoonist Pont, on sale for around £3,000 each. She and Geoffrey already had two Ponts: ‘I treated us to 2 little ones as a cheer-up. Geoff of course thinks we should sell something like a flat and buy the other 28.’17
In fact, they were trying to sell a flat. Grace had turned two and Castellain Mansions was now deemed too small. Thanks to Victoria’s earnings, she and Geoffrey could afford to make an offer on a third-floor flat in Lampard House, a mansion block on Maida Avenue which looked down on the long boats moored along Regent’s Canal. There were no immediate plans to make it their permanent home, but that changed soon after Up West ended in early December and the family prepared to head back north. Victoria and Geoffrey set off in separate cars on a Saturday morning, she with Amber and Grace and a cargo of Christmas presents. Traffic ground to a halt south of Coventry, her car battery gave out and bladders started to burst. ‘While I will bob down anywhere at the drop of a hat,’ she told Jane Wymark, ‘the middle of a stationary 3 lane traffic jam with not a tree in sight was a mite daunting, especially when one had a familiar face to the great British public (I didn’t want any other parts to become familiar, particularly).’ Further north the M6 was closed by snow. There was no means of getting to a hotel. It grew dark and cold, and the petrol nearly ran out so she couldn’t run the heater. ‘It was a long night … I was scared Grace would die of cold … At 5.00 someone said an ambulance was coming down the other carriageway with HOT SOUP so I rushed over for 2 lots of tomato but it was cold. Another low point.’ Eventually, after twenty-two hours stuck on the motorway, they were allowed to turn through the barrier and drive south: ‘The M6 must have been like Horse Guards Parade by morning.’ In Rugby she asked the police if there was any chance of getting to Lancashire: ‘They just laughed. (Ho ho. Oh look it’s Victoria Wood ho ho).’18 They headed back to Maida Vale, where they found the central heating had broken down. Geoffrey had a similarly eventful journey but made it to Silverdale. ‘That was the decision,’ he says. ‘We’re moving to London.’
The lure of London had been the subject of a marital debate ever since they moved to Morecambe in 1978. In public Victoria kept to the line throughout the 1980s that the north was the best place for her. She maintained, a little fancifully, that she’d moved to Morecambe in pursuit of material for comedy. ‘It’s nice to be where everybody else isn’t,’ she said on Desert Island Discs. ‘I do like to keep away from other comics. I don’t want to end up doing the same as everyone else.’19 The solitude aided productivity. She also relished being close to the source of northern rhythms. ‘I’m just very attracted by construction of sentences, the vocabulary,’ she would argue. ‘Everything in the north is constructed back to front. Lancashire people, instead of saying, “haven’t they sent your carpet?” they say, “Have they not sent it – your carpet?”’20
The snowstorm was the catalyst, but there were other factors. Grace was being left in the care of her nanny too often for comfort, and the layout of Cove Lea had an undermining effect too. ‘It never worked,’ Geoffrey adds. ‘We were never happy there. Because it had been two houses it didn’t have a hearth.’ These misgivings were not mentioned by the estate agent when it was put on the market the following spring for £385,000.
They took possession of the Lampard House flat in mid-January 1991. The idea was to stop in Maida Avenue for a couple of years, and a Montessori school was found for Grace. As Amber chose to move to Winnipeg rather than live in London, a new nanny – Rebecca Wood, no relation – was employed. Geoffrey rented an office in the basement of Edwin Landseer’s studio around the corner in St John’s Wood, while Victoria took a room next door and spent a great deal to have a piano craned in over the roof although ended up rarely using it. The studios were run by Rita Birrane, the sister of the owner, and at Geoffrey’s suggestion Victoria offered her a job as a PA.
In terms of work, the year began quietly. Victoria was ‘not actually working my arse off for once’.21 She was jolted
into action when Comic Relief informed her that a song she’d written before Christmas for Red Nose Day would work as a single. She spent a weekend recording ‘The Smile Song’ and shooting a video in a north London studio with sixty musicians, dancers and crew. With high-velocity, densely rhyming lyrics, her medley of pop parodies called for her to dress up ‘in a series of ever more ridiculous outfits (Kylie mini-dress, heavy metal-type leather studded corsets and thigh boots etc etc)’.22 The song concluded with Victoria encrusted in jewels and singing in the style of 1930s cinema sweetheart Jessie Matthews. The weekend was, she said, ‘good fun but knackering’.23 While she thought of ‘The Smile Song’ as her first single, quietly ignoring her misadventure with Return to Oz in 1985, it was in fact released as a B-side to ‘The Stonk’ by Hale and Pace, a less subtly crafted rock’n’roller that reached number one in March.
Then she was back on tour, dashing for six weeks around the 2,000-seaters she’d not stopped in a year earlier. During the run she hurried up from Southampton to Tottenham Court Road, acting on a tip that the eminent designer Betty Jackson was a fan who would love Victoria to wear her clothes. ‘I thought she was one of the funniest people on the planet,’ she says. ‘I used to watch her on television and think I could maybe make a difference somewhere. I always thought there was this huge feeling of insecurity and I could maybe take that lack of confidence away.’ On this occasion, Victoria was not looking for an outfit to perform in – she needed something for the Olivier Awards, as Victoria Wood Up West had been nominated for Best Entertainment. ‘They bundled me in and out of various outfits, told me which suited me, stuffed them into a carrier bag (with jewellery) and when I said – “er, how much” said it was all FREE and to come back any time. Funny old world. It was nice to feel I had the right gear on for once.’24 Victoria presented herself at the National Theatre for the ceremony on the last Sunday of the tour. She had an inkling that she wouldn’t be winning when she found her seat was in the middle of a row: ‘A real bum-number of an evening. I could have been watching telly with G and getting pissed.’25