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

by Jasper Rees

  There were more alpha females for Julie Walters to play: a bossy pretentious shopkeeper; a self-pitying pensioner. Victoria visited her Bury Grammar days as Alison Smedley, a naughty schoolgirl in the Lower Fourth who comes up with ever more absurd excuses for her poor behaviour. Another ghost from her distant past was Alan Rickman, whom Victoria first met in Gunslinger in 1976. When he was starring in Les Liaisons Dangereuses she joked that she couldn’t pronounce the name of the play. Sally Crossthwaite makes a great show of getting it right, only to introduce him in the studio as ‘Alan Dickman’. Victoria wrote the sketch before she knew Rickman would do it.

  The core cast and other regulars gathered to film some of the show, including ‘The Mall’, without an audience. New actors were blended in – it was specifically decided to use unfamiliar faces for the Romany Roast ads. Then on a Saturday night in early December the rest of the sketches were shot before an audience. On the script for the Sally and Martin sections, Victoria wrote, ‘See the set for “This Morning” and copy it’. The All Day Breakfast set was ludicrously littered with ancient maritime bric-a-brac. As with As Seen on TV, Geoff Posner filmed more sketches than were needed, and Victoria was not precious about culling her own performances – out went a patronising telethon presenter and a useless weather girl.

  Posner advised holding her usual stand-up section and song back for the finale. ‘That released a bit of a blockage in Vic,’ he says. ‘Previously she had supplied a load of sketches and I put them into an order, but this show came fully formed.’ The stand-up was originally to be cued by Martin Crossthwaite (played by Duncan Preston) – ‘if you like your comedy female-style, take a look at this!’ – before the idea was dropped for lack of space. To perform as herself Victoria wore a double-breasted tuxedo and a longer version of her trademark crop. She joked about moving house, and low self-esteem, and how she and her husband used to leave messages to each other on the mirror in lipstick. This image was the product of a visit to Lizzi Kew Ross’s home – when breastfeeding Henry in the bedroom Victoria was intrigued to see ‘I love you’ inscribed in lipstick on a mirror. She then walked over to white piano to sing ‘Real Life’, a new song with the same melody as the All Day Breakfast theme tune. The two sides of Victoria – the empathetic entertainer suffering ups and downs like everyone else – were neatly contained in the chorus:

  Cos this is real life

  Which is always such a mess,

  Badly designed, under-rehearsed, no proper tunes.

  We live in real life,

  Which is not a nice address,

  Needs doing up, needs some white paint, needs a few balloons.

  The credits rolled over black-and-white footage of cast and crew backstage, inspired by the recent practice of adding behind-the-scenes extras to video releases. There was little time to stitch the show together, and it was only late in the day that it was granted a prime slot on BBC One on the evening of Christmas Day. Among the millions who watched were Judy Finnigan and Richard Madeley. Victoria heard word that ‘they were thrilled by the attention’.

  The income from television – and the release on video of an Acorn Antiques omnibus – could not be matched by the riches promised by touring. At the start of 1993, after two years spent giving birth to a boy and two television specials, Victoria once more prepared to return to the stage. In that period she had also acquired not one but two new homes. The second came about as a result of a visit from her sister Penelope, who voiced a worry about feeling unsafe in her area of Bradford. Victoria had an idea: to buy a house in the north that Penelope could look after. This would address Victoria’s mounting nostalgia for the north, while quelling anxieties about leaving a second home empty. ‘In particular,’ says Geoffrey, ‘she missed the voices and the language and the word order and the turns of phrase. All those things combined to help her write jokes. She had northern voices in her head all the time and she was hankering for them.’ A few months on Penelope found a small ad for a converted barn with a granny flat in a village outside Skipton. It had a vast living room with ancient beams and a children’s playroom. They made an offer in the early part of 1993 and gave it a new name. ‘Just a brief note in the middle of this blur of bedwetting, nappies, shows and white wine,’ Victoria wrote to Jane Wymark near the start of her tour. ‘From Saturday I’ll be at Mole Barn, Halton East. We are trying Mole Barn out to see how it looks on the envelope.’10

  Not for the first time, the task of coming up with a new show brought on domestic strain. ‘Geoff is the one who gets everything dumped on his head,’ Victoria conceded. ‘It’s a bit of a strain for him. I can be hard to live with. If I get down about working I moan all the time. I have a huge insecure patch before I start something, but he’s used to hearing me say, “Life is over, nobody wants me, my nose has got bigger and I cannot tell jokes any more.”’11 She relied on him not just to stiffen her spine. With two small children, she had to be more organised than ever about creating an entirely new show. Together they came up with an even more rigorous system for dropping in new material piece by piece in a series of weekly warm-up gigs. The venues were booked for Sunday nights in towns with biggish theatres not far from London. Scarcely publicised, shows in Swindon and High Wycombe sold out on word of mouth. Initially Victoria went on after a magician booked by Geoffrey whose act would not compete with her comedy. Working close to the wire, she spent a week on a new opening section and learned it with cue cards Blu-Tacked to the piano lid. In the first try-out she bolted it onto the front of forty minutes of old material.

  ‘We’d come home and do a post-mortem,’ says Geoffrey, ‘sometimes only deciding then what should follow the new opening. Next morning she’d make a start on that and she’d have another, say, fifteen minutes written by the following Friday. She’d learn it on the Saturday. I’d sit with her exercise book of script, only chipping in when she dried completely – that was usually better for her than trying to learn what she’d written word for word. Little connecting gags could creep in unexpectedly that way, too. It was always a scramble having to keep more and more in her head as the weeks went by.’ By the fourth week she had enough material to do without a support act, but the whole set wasn’t yet complete. Three days before she opened in Sheffield, she dashed off a twenty-minute section and performed it without even rehearsing it. It went ‘pretty well,’ she reckoned. ‘I thought I was doing well to know it let alone perform it.’12

  She prepared for the tour by visiting the studio of Betty Jackson, who found their early consultations tricky: ‘Vic was so private at the beginning that it was a bit like pulling teeth. She always said, “I’m nobody’s fashion icon and I never care about the way I look.” I wanted to do her justice because she was a genius.’ Already a friend of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, she slowly earned Victoria’s trust – it helped that she came from Bacup in the Rossendale Valley – and was able to sell her the idea of dressing androgynously: ‘A boy’s suit was always my starting point with her. She had great legs and really narrow hips. The rest of it I didn’t ever want to draw attention to. I thought make her look more energetic and modern. Once that image walked onstage it reinforced everything: she was in control.’ Unlike some celebrity clients, Victoria made a point of leaving enough time for the fitting session and for the suits to be made, and on paying her way. ‘At the beginning she said, “I’m not here to get something for nothing.” I said, “If you cover the cost, then that’s fine. It was the pattern cutter’s time and the seamstress’s time and the fabric that I billed her for. There was a northern respect about that.’ (Betty Jackson’s other service was to send Victoria around the corner to Charles Worthington, whose salon took charge of her hair for the rest of her life.)

  As Victoria wrote in her large eighteenth-century north London home – to downplay its grandeur she took to calling it a ‘Georgian semi’ – there was a new fear that she might become disconnected from the ordinary lives of those who paid to see her. ‘You can fall out of favour very easily
,’ she acknowledged in the first week of the tour. ‘I don’t know if it’s a side effect of being successful or having quite a lot of money – is that you’re not in touch with people. I do worry about that slightly. I don’t think it’s happened yet.’ Her solution was to visit ‘the below-the-waist area’ in more detail than any comedian had ever done before. She had strategically avoided the subject of childbirth on her previous tour: ‘It’s only now that I’ve got two and people aren’t going, “Oh yes, she’s just had a baby,” I feel I can mention it.’ But she was careful to ensure that her own children and their father remained out of focus – the only glimpse she afforded her audience was that her latest baby looked ‘like something out of the Beano’.

  To reassure the women in her audience that she was still one of them, she softened them up with a riff on the differences between super-thin celebrity mothers with model babies and their real-life counterparts. Real mummies, among whom she counted herself, ‘carry their stomachs up to bed over one arm’ and ‘think sex is like full employment: it’s a nice idea but it’ll never happen in their lifetime’. This was a warm-up for a second-half section about antenatal classes, epidurals, pelvic-floor exercises and breastfeeding. Victoria had grown increasingly frank and unembarrassed about the female body, but now went further than ever: ‘You know something nobody ever really told me about having a baby? When you’re having a baby, as the baby pops out the front, a haemorrhoid pops out the back. Mine was massive. It weighed more than the baby. I phoned my mother up: “Knit two hats!”’ Geoffrey reckons this ‘may just have been her all-time best line’.

  Among all these gynaecological close-ups, Victoria found a new use for one of her favourite comic words. A nurse tells her that labour is like passing a rubber dolly through a balaclava helmet: ‘I remember looking down at myself and thinking, no, there’s a design fault here. This is nothing like a balaclava.’ As she worked her way through the mechanics of birth it was as if she was a conductor in control of a choir of 2,000, which with masterly manipulation she led towards an inexorable hysteria. Throughout the show she couldn’t leave the subject alone – she imagined a car called the Vauxhall Placenta and reached a peak of graphic candour in ‘Bum to the World’, sung from the point of view of a baby surveying its new surroundings:

  I’m terribly torn about being born

  I mean what is the whole thing about?

  Plop! Out you come

  Very near someone’s bum

  It can’t have been properly thought out.

  Having a child of school age whom she could no longer bring with her, Victoria stipulated certain scheduling conditions to Phil McIntyre, who had now become her sole promoter. She would perform four nights a week, Monday to Thursday, go home on a Thursday night and stay until Monday morning when she would take Grace to school. For the spring leg she resumed the arrangement of touring with a baby and a nanny. Travelling with Henry, she said, was ‘a bit like taking Keith Moon on tour except the damage is only two foot up the walls’.13 One week in the north he came down with chicken pox – not a hazard encountered by any male comic on the circuit: ‘I ended up wrapping him in a blanket and taking him to the bar to cheer him up.’14 If the venue was anywhere near London, she’d travel alone and dash back every night.

  Victoria had another travel companion in the shape of a new young stage manager. Amie Beamish, a New Zealander in her early twenties, was introduced to Victoria by Phil McIntyre and earned her instant approval. An intimate ritual soon developed when Victoria was about to go onstage. ‘If she and I were alone, she’d give a little flash,’ says Amie. ‘Up with the shirt and down – and that would give her an adrenalin rush to build herself up. She’d take a big step onto the stage on the back of it.’ A routine was established away from the theatre too: ‘Part of my job was to sus out the best chippie between the venue and the hotel. Afterwards I would stop by the chippie while she waited in the car, and we would sit in the hotel bar with a bottle of champagne and chips and talk till two or three in the morning.’ Victoria came to rely on what she identified as Amie’s ‘twinkly ruthlessness’ which found her getting the job done ‘without crews realising that metaphorically speaking, she’s just mashed them in the groin with a mole wrench’.15

  There was more to the show than baby talk, including much discussion about the real life of royalty. Among a new set of celebrities now placed in the firing line, tabloid fixation Camilla Parker-Bowles provided the punchline for a long, fantastical section about insomnia: when presented to Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace, Victoria finally remembers the name of a posh rebel with a double-barrelled name she was at school with. She invented a treacle-toned right-wing Radio 2 DJ called Charlene Dawson, ‘putting the we into the wee small hours’, based on Julie Dawn whom she used to be hooked on in the 1970s. A scathing attack on Weight Watchers found her giving vent to real political anger.

  Victoria emerged after the interval to pumping music, dressed in big curly wig and padded leotard, to take an aerobics class. Madge, introducing her ‘low-impact class for fatties with attitude – welcome to FATTITUDE!’, was an experiment in physical comedy. It took courage to go out in body-hugging Lycra – earlier in the show she talked about squeezing herself into an exercise bra: ‘like trying to fit two blancmanges inside an envelope’. But there was an instant reward: ‘The first time I went out in that leotard the woof that went up I thought, oh thank God, this is going to be all right. I’m all right here for a few minutes. I’ll just stand round wearing this leotard for a bit.’16 Her many years doing Jane Fonda’s workouts meant she knew how to devise a comic set of aerobic thrusts and jerks: ‘I just worked it out as if I was an actual aerobics teacher and what would I do? And then I just tried to make the movements funny rather than real.’17 On a weekly regime of four aerobic and body-conditioning classes, with an exercise step in her dressing room, she was also fit enough to carry it off. As Madge eggs on her plus-size class of amputees and lobotomees, she radiates can-do self-belief and medical savvy, talking up the importance of the ‘glutonious maxitive muscle’ and a vital hormone known as ‘phenophonobarbametamorphomone’.

  For her encore Victoria used an offcut from All Day Breakfast. ‘Madeline’ was a wordplay funfair, in which a hairstylist remembers how her ambition to model was quashed by her mother: ‘“Ooh, Madeline, you’d be very middling at modelling.” I said, “Would I?” She said, “Yes, if you go muddling with modelling, you’ll be middling, our Madeline.” I said, “You’re meddling.”’

  The set was less reliant than ever on music. The opener ‘In the Mood Tonight’ – a self-mocking portrait of life as a comedian – didn’t arrive until fifteen minutes in:

  Comedians are tough and hard

  We’ve all been hurt, we’ve all been scarred

  We all do ads for Barclaycard

  I’m feeling in the mood tonight.

  The previous year Rowan Atkinson had taken the Barclaycard shilling. According to Geoffrey, ‘Vic was really beginning to doubt the songs – she found them hard to write and she often thought they were naff. But she knew she needed them.’ She limited the supply of downbeat songs to just one. ‘I’ve rooted that out,’ she said as the tour started. ‘I thought I don’t want to be moving. I just want to get a lot of laughs.’18 And yet the lone ballad was one of her very best. With a bittersweet, McCartneyesque melody, ‘Go With It’ urged anxious and fainthearted loners to seize the day:

  Just another life, it’s true,

  But particularly yours, particularly you.

  If you have a dream, go with it.

  Feel the slightest hint, go with it.

  What is there to lose?

  Do you dare, dare to choose?

  When the encore came around after two triumphant hours the audience greeted Barry and Freda and Kimberley as old friends.

  Halfway through the spring tour, Victoria turned forty. The day fell on a Sunday, and she and Geoffrey threw an afternoon party with a children’s entertainer. ‘It’s a sor
t of late housewarming/b’day do’, she wrote on the back of one printed invitation.19 The chippies and decorators who’d helped do up the house rubbed shoulders with Dawn French, Lenny Henry and Alan Rickman at the first proper party Victoria and Geoffrey had ever been able to host – and Victoria’s first since she turned twenty in Richmond Hill Road. To make up for all their years of not hosting, they would soon start to throw Christmas parties that became an annual fixture. For the most part the house would remain a private sanctum – Victoria entertained friends and school mothers with afternoon tea and cake, but evening guests were rare. ‘The truth is that not many people came to the house,’ says Geoffrey. ‘Vic expressed her love for people by writing to them, which in many ways was more important to her than face-to-face communication, because she was in charge of it. She needed control. And she used to fret that she couldn’t talk about her life in ways that people not in show business could empathise with. That became more of an issue as an increasing number of her showbiz pals moved out of London and so weren’t around to socialise with at weekends.’

  Over the summer Victoria worked on a new draft of Pat and Margaret. Her film script about estranged sisters was duly approved by Marcus Plantin, whose background was in light entertainment, but was less welcomed by the drama department, whereupon the relationship with LWT rapidly broke down. Victoria felt aggrieved about the snub: ‘They couldn’t wait to do it. Six months later they couldn’t wait not to do it.’20 Informed that there were problems with the script, ‘I said, “What are they?” She said, “Well, I haven’t read it properly yet,” and that was the last I heard from her.’21 Sarah Wilson, LWT’s controller of drama, clarified to Vivienne Clore that there were ‘very serious concerns about the script … we cannot convince ourselves that the story in its present form will survive a theatrical release’.22 Rank, the film distributors who were to put up some of the money for production, were no more than lukewarm. So, on her agent’s advice, Victoria bought back the rights. She told Bob Monkhouse, who was about to feature in his own An Audience with … on LWT, that she wouldn’t go near the building again.