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

by Jasper Rees

  The autumn brought a much-needed boost to her morale as her tour resumed. While there were ready-made large-capacity venues all over the UK, it was far harder to meet the demand for tickets in London. Three years earlier the solution was an extended West End residency, which had exhausted her. ‘She hated the idea of being stuck in a thousand-seater for two months,’ says Phil McIntyre, who proposed a shorter run at a much larger venue: the Royal Albert Hall. Victoria had joked about the imposing size of the old hall in Talent: having sex after a hysterectomy is ‘like waving a woody in the Albert Hall’. Well aware that Billy Connolly had played there in 1987, she was eager to try it herself, so McIntyre took Victoria and Geoffrey for a recce. While she stood on the stage, the other two rambled all over the auditorium searching for poor sightlines. ‘We found that there were only about ten bad seats in the house,’ says Geoffrey, who then replaced Victoria onstage while she roamed herself. On one thing she was adamant: unlike Connolly, she would not use side-screens, insisting that she could play only to an audience that was looking at her.

  Finding a space in the Albert Hall’s clogged calendar was not simple. There was also the problem of wealthy debenture holders who, on about half the nights, had priority access to more than 2,000 of the best seats, exiling the majority of Victoria’s fans to high up in the gods. For other performances McIntyre was able to sell all 5,600 tickets himself. ‘She could tell the difference on those nights,’ he says. ‘But because Vic was every person’s comedian, she didn’t fare too bad.’ Technical rehearsals took longer than usual. ‘There was a lot of due diligence,’ says Amie Beamish. ‘She treated it with huge reverence. She felt it was an extraordinary magical place and it was really important to her to do well there.’

  Victoria entered to a full house for the first time on 21 September 1993. ‘When she walked out on stage,’ says Geoffrey, ‘I knew we’d got it right. She warmed to the place instantly and within five minutes she was playing it as if she’d never played anywhere smaller.’ As she embraced the space, it embraced her back. ‘It’s quite cosy,’ she said as she anticipated performing there. ‘It’s a bit like a Jammy Dodger.’23 To make herself and her audience feel at home she wrote a new opening section welcoming everyone in. ‘Have we got people at the top tonight? Hello! I’ve got a black suit and blue eyes, OK?’ She was careful to bow and scrape and give the hall its royal prefix; otherwise ‘it could be somewhere you play bingo in Widnes’. Quickly she learned that laughter travelled more gradually round the room, so she had to go more slowly, which she found tiring.

  Friends who had known her since Birmingham or even Bury were given tickets for the first night and could only marvel that the shy, lonely teenager they had known now held nearly 6,000 people in the palm of her hand. Phil McIntyre booked fifteen nights in all, but shrewdly announced only twelve so that he could add extra shows by popular demand. Victoria, on a percentage of the box-office take, was immensely proud that every ticket went. ‘Oh it was wonderful,’ she said. ‘Instant gratification.’24 Now when it was put to her yet again that she was the new Alan Bennett, she had a fresh retort: ‘He hasn’t played the Albert Hall, has he?’25 Methuen asked her to update her bio for the jacket of her next publication, and after the words ‘She is one of Britain’s top comedians’ she biroed an insert: ‘And the only one ever to have sold out fifteen consecutive nights at the Royal Albert Hall’.

  After the Albert Hall, Victoria continued with her visits to English cities. Then, one weekend in November, Stanley Wood died at the age of eighty-two. Of her parents, her father had been the one who evinced pride in her remarkable achievements, so much so that Helen forbade him from talking about her when they were out and about. At a book fair where they would sell some of the thousands of volumes Helen had accumulated, she once rapped him on the knuckles having caught him showing someone a snap of Grace. ‘My father used to talk about me to strangers at bus stops,’ said Victoria the following year, ‘and adored the fact I was on television. My mother won’t discuss me with other people. If someone says, “You sound awfully like Victoria Wood,” she might admit through gritted teeth we’re related.’26

  After retiring only a few years earlier, he gradually became dependent on Helen and lost interest in leaving home as he succumbed to dementia. Throughout, both parents kept their daughters at arm’s length, fending off visits which, according to Geoffrey, did nothing to mitigate the sense that Victoria ‘felt quite detached from Stanley’s death’. Indeed, she decided to honour her commitments and carry on with four performances in Newcastle. The only event she postponed was a ceremony to receive an honorary doctorate of letters from Sunderland University – it fell on the same day as the funeral in Bury, which was sparsely attended by immediate family only, as Helen refused to invite anyone. Not long after, Victoria’s newly widowed mother came to stay in Highgate and brought with her the recording she and Stanley had made together in the 1930s. Typically for this family who had all lived in separate rooms, its existence was a complete surprise to Victoria.

  It was in the days before Stanley’s death that Vivienne Clore sent Victoria’s second draft of Pat and Margaret to the BBC, adding that Julie Walters liked it very much. Alan Yentob, now controller of BBC One, passed it on to the drama department without reading it: ‘Luckily for us, she has fallen out with LWT … I have no idea what it’s like.’27 The script was given to Margaret Matheson, who had arrived only that month to run the single drama strand Screen One. She commissioned a detailed report by a script executive who ruefully concluded that ‘it’s far too linear & predictable to warrant the running time’ and contained nothing new or original – it was ‘a case of Victoria revisited’.28 Despite these internal reservations, Yentob acted fast after an alert that Marcus Plantin’s enthusiasm at LWT had been rekindled. ‘I wanted to ensure we didn’t lose it or Victoria Wood,’ he told his colleagues in Drama.29 Matheson passed the draft on to Ruth Caleb, a senior producer of hard-hitting dramas whose bafflement at being asked to work on a comedy was not assuaged by first sight of the script. ‘It wasn’t like a drama script,’ she says. ‘It didn’t feel rooted in anything. It was a series of sketches which seemed to be quite superficial. It didn’t have the depth I thought a script would need.’ When they met for the first time over lunch at the BBC’s waiter-service canteen, she gently probed Victoria: ‘I said, “Why did you write it? What is it about?” She said, “It’s about blood not being thicker than water.” I thought, that’s it, I’ll do it.’

  Victoria didn’t mention that the story was rooted in her own experiences – she was so averse to examination of her family background that three times she flatly refused to appear on This Is Your Life. The only inspiration for Pat and Margaret that she would admit to was Surprise Surprise. Thus she imagined her two estranged sisters Pat Bedford and Margaret Mottershead being thrust together in front of a television audience. Once the show is over – Victoria called it Magic Moments – they are forced to confront the vast chasm that divides them. They get to know each other as Pat fends off press curiosity about the identity of their mother, a former prostitute called Vera.

  The first draft was a loose and baggy container Victoria crammed with gags, some about Claire, the freelance publicist who promotes Pat’s new book. Giving her two small children and an obese northern nanny enabled Victoria to mint more jokes about the travails of motherhood. (‘I weaned the baby early because I have inverted nipples,’ says Claire in early drafts. ‘As long as you do the job properly,’ replies Pat, ‘I wouldn’t care if you had a three-speed vagina with stabilisers.’) Plotting, never Victoria’s strongest suit, was a muddle. There were several flashbacks. Not one but two separate journalists scamper around Lancashire looking for the missing mother. Margaret’s romance with her illiterate boyfriend Jim (who lodged with a woman called Mrs Constable) was not resolved.

  ‘I knew it would be quite hard work,’ says Ruth Caleb, ‘that you would have to strip away absolutely everything to work out what the central theme is
and start to build it up again. I knew I would need a really good script editor to help me do that.’ So Victoria found herself working with a younger woman who was mandated to push her. ‘It wasn’t my job to make it funny,’ says Robyn Slovo, who was in her early thirties. ‘It was already terribly funny. It was my job to help her get to the mother.’ The script was stripped back to twelve pages and built up again so the theme of maternal betrayal could swim into focus.

  In the second draft, submitted to LWT in August 1993, Victoria had already come up with a fiery confrontation between mother and daughter:

  Pat: I’m like you … Brought up the Vera way, what could I know – housework stinks and black bras don’t show the dirt. What else – don’t be warm, don’t be kind, look after number one, stuff any other bugger who does different – you made me, you stupid cow, and you fucked up.

  Vera: Did I? Did I? Would you have got out if I hadn’t shoved you out? … You should be thanking me for making you hard inside, because that’s what pushed you on, that’s what’s kept you going.

  Aside from the f-word, the exchange survived more or less verbatim through three more drafts. Also in this second draft Victoria created another mother by changing Jim’s landlady into an overbearing matriarch who thwarts his relationship with Margaret. She even blurts, ‘I’m supposed to be the woman you love!’ Victoria gave her one of the drama’s finest zingers: ‘They didn’t have dyslexia in those days; you sat at the back with raffia.’ Of Victoria’s many raffia gags, this was the apex.

  Victoria went to work on a third draft early in 1994, with a mission to zero in on the theme of maternal abandonment. At no point did she mention even to Geoffrey that, as with ‘Swimming the Channel’, she drew from her own well of loneliness and her mother’s emotional remoteness. ‘We both took Helen’s tacit contribution for granted,’ he says. ‘Vic lived and breathed parental unavailability, so we didn’t need to talk about it.’ The unspoken source was apparent to Julie Walters, in whom Victoria confided during the intense early phase of their friendship: ‘She said that her mum left when she was about eleven. When she left Victoria went into chaos. She felt abandoned and she couldn’t function very well.’ Where Helen resumed her education and left Victoria to fend for herself, Vera’s abandonment of Margaret takes a more dramatic form: she goes to prison for a few months and on her release doesn’t bother to reclaim Margaret from foster care. ‘We’re not a very family family are we?’ Vera says in an early draft, by way of an excuse for her coldness. Victoria used this very line when promoting the eventual film. ‘We’re not a very family family,’ she said of the Woods in one interview.30 ‘I am close to my sisters, but not my brother,’ she explained in another. ‘I was five when he went away to university and I didn’t have much to do with him after that.’31

  The drama explores how such a gulf can widen between family members. But the relationship between Pat and Margaret had more complex origins. Pat was a culmination of all the hard-hearted egotists Victoria had written for Julie. ‘I’m fascinated by people who are blatantly horrible,’ said Victoria. ‘That sort of pushy, dominant, domineering person who screams “get me this!” “You give me that!”’32 Pat angrily boasts that she ‘came sixth in the world’s Most Envied Bottom Poll, 1992, only two below Claudia Schiffer’ but is now ‘publicly linked with someone whose buttocks practically skim the carpet’.

  Victoria gained a new perspective on her own celebrity when Grace, prompted by gossiping classmates, asked her, ‘Mummy, are you famous?’ For all her own fame, Victoria was not Pat – the rank-pulling tantrum was not in her armoury. Nor was she Margaret, who has no get-up-and-go. And yet between them they made up two halves of a self-portrait. In one character she explored the side of herself that had achieved fame and wealth, ate healthily, did aerobics, was pestered by fans wherever she went and had fled her northern roots. In the other she revisited the rented bedsit which, in another life, she might never have escaped. In her introduction to the published script Victoria wrote of how, as she turned forty, ‘I had started to look back at my own youth … and think about the changes that had happened to me since I had become a television performer, and how easy celebrity makes it to distance oneself from the pre-famous self.’33 She went further in a South Bank Show profile two years later: ‘It was both me. It was that battle between the one who can never get on, the impotent person, and the one who is so determined to get on there’s no room for anything else.’34

  Victoria collected her honorary degree from Sunderland in February 1994. The same month, as she worked on the third draft, she went to see the first of several therapists. ‘I felt I had everything I wanted,’ she explained to Lesley Fitton, ‘career, kids, nice house, enough money, but was still depressed. So I started to have counselling, some of which was good and some of which was really dreary and hopeless, and some of which was in Neasden.’ The best of them, she concluded, ‘was terribly helpful in that it helped me get my ideas straight about the past and the different ways I’d behaved and I began to see it was possible to behave in a different way from before, and that it didn’t all have to stay the same for ever and ever.’35 Writing for Pat was also a kind of therapy. ‘I give her all these great putdowns that I would love to say to people myself,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s one way of working out my anger at always saying yes to people when I wanted to say no.’36

  There was a significant change between drafts when Celia Imrie, for whom Victoria had written the role of Claire, told her she was three months pregnant. She swiftly rewrote the part so that Claire stopped being a neurotic mother with inverted nipples and became an expectant mother with a pressing bladder problem. Pat’s lack of education, and tendency to get words wrong, was a new source of jokes: she says ‘virago’ meaning ‘farrago’, ‘vagina’ instead of ‘Geneva’ and claims to be travelling ‘incognino’; ordering chicken she clicks her fingers at the foreign maid and asks for ‘Pollet? Poulente?’ Right at the end, when Jim tells his mother that he and Margaret have had sex on her bed, Victoria added a new line in biro which would be immortalised by Thora Hird: ‘MUM: Not on the eiderdown.’

  In mid-March, Victoria went back out on tour for three weeks. After 104 performances, in which she entertained 300,000 people, she finally put the show to bed in a studio performance recorded by Geoff Posner in front of an audience at TV Centre for later broadcast.

  Meanwhile, Pat and Margaret was becoming a process of excavation. Pat was given a line that was possibly suggested by Victoria’s sessions of therapy: ‘You shove it all away, move on, grow up, cut your hair, and it’s all there waiting, isn’t it, waiting to be dealt with.’ The rewriting continued into May. As Robyn Slovo sent over yet more pages of suggestions, at one point Victoria cracked: ‘I phoned Vic on a Friday afternoon when we were just about to go into production and I gave her some notes and she burst into tears. She said, “You don’t understand, I’ve got a whole life, I don’t like being a writer, I don’t like getting notes and I just can’t.” I thought, God, this is amazing, I made Victoria Wood cry.’ In fact, Victoria did not resent being pushed and, according to Geoffrey, ‘really rated Robyn Slovo – she thought she was brilliant’. The final draft resolved the ending. Her career revived by a tell-all interview, Pat takes Vera back to Los Angeles as a trophy mother and buys Swiss Cottage, the café where she was once a teenage waitress, for Margaret and Jim to run together.

  By now the production had a director. Margaret Matheson originally thought of Stephen Frears, who said no. Instead Gavin Millar was recommended to Victoria by Julie, who had worked with him twice in the 1980s. ‘I thought he would be the person who would knock it into shape,’ she says. A second suggestion made by Julie was to give the role of Jim to Duncan Preston after Jim Broadbent, Victoria’s original preference, turned it down. Other regulars, who were required to meet Millar before he would cast them, were Deborah Grant as the predatory journalist Stella Kincaid and Anne Reid as the presenter of Magic Moments. Shirley Stelfox was cast as Vera, the c
hilly whippet-thin mother who, in her daughters’ memory, ‘used to do it standing up for ten Bensons … and lying down for twenty’.

  The BBC didn’t announce the production until May, which is when the press first heard that LWT had dropped the film announced two years earlier. The four-week shoot began in mid-May, migrating in London between Elstree Studios, Heston Services near Heathrow and the Regent Hotel on Marylebone Road.

  Margaret was described in the script as ‘plumpish and fairish’, while Pat deplores her ‘perm you could go trick or treating in’. To put detail on this look, Victoria asked her make-up designer Chrissie Baker to create a tight frizzy wig. ‘No naked flames near it, please,’ she joked on set, ‘all the budget went on it.’37 The million-pound budget was sufficiently tight that in one scene Gavin Millar had to play the manager of an old people’s home. Victoria quickly developed a high regard for her director. ‘I kept my nosy, critical, interfering side away,’ she claimed. ‘After you’ve written a play, you should hand the actors their words and let them get their own performance. It’s like a relay race.’ Resolute self-denial proved harder than she made it sound. ‘She’d be hanging around giving notes,’ says Duncan Preston, ‘and Gavin said, “Victoria, are you in this scene?” She said, “No.” “Well go away then, let me do it.” He didn’t want her to tell us how to do it. To her credit she took it very well.’ Millar was similarly emphatic with Anne Reid: ‘At one point he said, “I want you to slow down on this speech.” I said, “Oh my God, Vic won’t like it.” And he said, “She’s not directing this, I’m directing this.”’