by Jasper Rees
After two weeks the shoot moved to Blackburn, attracting attention on the steep street where Duncan and Victoria filmed their climactic clinch. It was her first-ever screen kiss. ‘I’m quite nervous,’ she confided to Duncan. ‘Are you all right with this?’ But the star of the scene was Thora Hird. ‘The whole bloody street turned out to watch her brush the privet with her feather duster,’ says Duncan, ‘and when she said, “Not on the eiderdown!” about a hundred people laughed and we had to do it again.’
The shoot was over in the middle of June. As if to draw a line under the story, Victoria went back to Birtle for the first time in several years to help her mother pack up the house and move to a bungalow in Skipton which she paid for. In the clear-out she and Penelope filled eight skips.
At a press screening of Pat and Margaret in Leicester Square, Victoria was finally offered a brief tantalising glimpse of how her work would look on a cinema screen. The television broadcast in early September was seen by ten and a half million viewers, and brought near unanimous praise, from the Sun (‘The best thing Victoria Wood has written’38) to the Guardian. ‘Victoria Wood has an ear for a manner of speaking that is akin to perfect pitch,’ reckoned Nancy Banks-Smith.39 The Evening Standard, berating LWT for dropping the ball, purred that ‘the aroma of a Bafta nomination began wafting through the screen from the start’.40
The following year, in March 1995, Pat and Margaret was indeed up for Best Single Drama at the BAFTAs, while the vulnerability and guts of her revelatory performance found Victoria, rather than Julie, nominated for best actress. Both awards were to go elsewhere, despite a rumour that reached Ruth Caleb as she mingled before the ceremony: ‘In my mind I thought, we’ll get the Single Drama award. We’re sitting there waiting for it and they said, “And the winner is …” and I started to get up. And I was really pissed off. Victoria would have loved to win, and she should have done.’
17
JOURNEYS
‘Party bags are a real nightmare where I live … This year you can’t really get away with less than one decent piece of jewellery and some air tickets.’
Live show, 1996
After Pat and Margaret, Victoria experienced something new and unfamiliar: a hiatus. The pause was of her own choosing. ‘After years of practically flogging myself to death,’ she said, ‘I have the need to go on working, but only when I’m really enthusiastic about something.’1 Richard Eyre, the artistic director of the National Theatre, tried to enthuse her about the idea of writing a play, possibly for children. ‘I don’t think I could attempt a children’s play,’ she replied, ‘but I am taking a break at the moment for the specific reason that I want to think about stage plays – I haven’t written one for 14 years, and now might be the time. I’ll let you know.’2 She had made no progress with her own play when Eyre renewed the offer eighteen months later.
Victoria did express interest in a pitch to make a documentary about food. Catherine Seddon, a young producer at the BBC, contacted her directly rather than through her agent. The series she proposed would address the marketing of food, emotional responses to food, body image issues and the development of eating disorders, all under the working title of Food, Glorious Food. They duly met in Highgate to map out half a dozen films. The approach was timely. Geoffrey, having peaked at 20 stone, was near the start of a long quest to eat more healthily and lose weight without officially dieting. He ate his last biscuit in May 1994 and threw himself into Canadian Air Force exercises, while the house acquired a rowing machine. With the proposal fleshed out, a lunch followed with more senior BBC figures, including Alan Yentob. ‘Conversation began to veer away from what I had originally discussed with Victoria,’ says Catherine Seddon, ‘and I could tell that she had some reservations, but I wasn’t in a strong position to remonstrate.’ In due course Victoria felt the idea slipping through her fingers and wrote to Yentob to withdraw: ‘It was a really good proposal, and I was very keen on it, but after the tour and the special and Pat and Margaret, I need some time off before I commit myself to a new project.’3
After the summer Geoffrey prepared to perform over Christmas 1994 back at the King’s Head. Having relied on his involvement for all her live shows, Victoria now returned the compliment. The subtitle was hers: One Man’s Intrepid Journey Up His Own Sleeve. ‘Vic and I spent a lot of time discussing it, working out a sequence and giving it a reason to be there,’ says Geoffrey. ‘She wrote bits of script for it, too, but I ended up sounding like a carbon copy of her, so that side of the plan was abandoned quite quickly.’
As for herself, Victoria stuck to one-off commitments and good causes. In October she did a benefit at the Spa in Scarborough to raise money for the newly built Stephen Joseph Theatre at the request of Alan Ayckbourn, who witnessed for himself the transformation in real time between the two Victorias: ‘When she arrived she was this very quiet person. She started on a walk that took her round the auditorium, and I gathered that this was a woman psyching herself up for a performance. She got increasingly nervous and focused. By the time she came on she was Victoria Wood. An amazing show.’ Afterwards she chatted and laughed with the local ladies, all keen fans, who had organised the benefit before going back to his house for dinner: ‘She was sitting there at one end of the table and was keeping us all in fits. She began to quieten down and by the time we finished she was back to her quiet monosyllabic self. The spell had worn off.’ In the guestbook the next morning she wrote, ‘Nice clean bath.’
In November, for the Sunday afternoon show The Bookworm, she went to Norwich to do a short piece about safeguarding libraries, so often a feature of her comedy. On Christmas Day, Victoria Wood Live in Your Own Home was shown on ITV to an audience of more than thirteen million.
Then she was invited, as an eleventh-hour substitute for Lenny Henry, to make another trip to Africa. According to Geoffrey, ‘she had reservations about Comic Relief as an institution and got quite edgy about it if she suspected people of using it to enhance their reputations, which she was convinced they did. But she did love being the person to get someone out of a jam.’ In February 1995 Victoria flew club class – the crew were upgraded to join her – to Zimbabwe to make a film about a family living with minimal access to water in a village several hours’ drive from Harare. The children of the Masara family she met were called Scholastic, Besta, Apologise, Blessing, Forward, Before and Fortunate, which the director worried might be a source of amusement. ‘I am hard put not to smile,’ Victoria reported, ‘when in the middle of filming she calls out, “Tell Forward to go backwards.”’4 On the first day she joined in the family’s daily tasks, collecting water from half a mile away, milking the cow and digging trenches. ‘I barely do one percent of what the family does every day, and by evening I am completely knackered.’5 The plan for the night was for Victoria to share their mud hut with the four daughters before getting up with them at four in the morning – they were filmed cheerfully bidding one another good night. But there was no room for her inflatable mattress and mosquito net, so she was obliged to keep to her tent. On the second day, helping with irrigation and sanitation projects, she was delighted and moved when the children and then the village women sang to her in harmony. After a half-baked plan to detour to the Victoria Falls did not come to pass, she returned home ‘very full of the family she’d been with,’ says Geoffrey, ‘and relieved that the rapport she had with them enabled her to be natural and unpatronising, though she found the culture shock of the whole experience pretty intense.’
Living Without Water, presented by Victoria at her most empathetic and practical, was broadcast the night before Red Nose Day, when Victoria made another contribution in the form of a sketch. Following her many assaults on bad television in As Seen on TV and All Day Breakfast, she now took aim at the rowdy daytime talk show. The genre was new to the UK – Vanessa, presented by Vanessa Feltz, began broadcasting in the same week that Pat and Margaret was screened. Victoria was quick off the mark. In her sketch a blowsy alpha-hostess in
a peroxide wig and a figure-hugging pink two-piece was played by Dawn French.
Victoria’s friendship with half of French and Saunders had been slowly growing over the years – long before she met them she sent a supportive note advising them to ignore a bad Edinburgh Festival review. She overcame her dislike of parties to go with Geoffrey and the children to the summer get-togethers thrown in the early 1990s by Dawn French and Lenny Henry at their home near Reading, attended by the cream of British comedy. Competing in the tennis tournament for the Double D Cup, Victoria wasn’t a natural, but ‘she gave it a bloody good go,’ says Dawn. For a while theirs was an unequal friendship: ‘Vic had a very big issue with trusting people and I certainly had to pass a lot of tests and I had to be persistent. I was aware that it was a bit one-sided for quite a long time.’ Gradually they formed a bond over shared anxieties about motherhood: ‘She was one of the few friends of mine who absolutely admitted she didn’t know what she was up to. She was a real safe harbour for that. She listened for hours to me talking about my fears and worries. She was discreet and understanding and quite wise and said things that were helpful.’
It was a different story when they worked together on the Red Nose Day sketch. As ‘Dawn’, Dawn dashed about the set, perching on laps, faking outrage, thrusting her microphone in faces and flirting with the camera. Victoria cast herself as a soppy Brummie housewife, married to a ping-pong addict who believes in the power of love. ‘Can I just say?’ she simpers, ‘If love’s on the table, who needs gravy?’ Many of Victoria’s regulars were in the cast. Celia Imrie played a woman who tolerates her husband’s serial attempts to poison her (reprising a similar figure played by Julie in Wood and Walters). In a loving dig at ITV’s hospital sitcom Surgical Spirit, Duncan Preston appeared as a man wearing scrubs who has had seventeen operations to make him look exactly like Duncan Preston. Jim Broadbent played an angry transvestite in earrings (‘thinks ban on importation of tortoises should be lifted’ read the caption). A woman ‘campaigning for leg waxing to become Olympic Event’ was played by Anne Reid.
Dawn, who knew of Victoria’s mousiness at social gatherings, was now exposed to her steely professionalism: ‘She was absolutely directing it word for word. It wasn’t like a relaxed collaboration where we threw some ideas around. Vic had written a little Rolls-Royce and I needed to get in and drive it. I went from feeling so delighted to not enjoying it much at all and feeling like I was getting it quite wrong. If you work with her, and I only did it for that tiny little moment, I could see what the cost would be. She wasn’t humourless. Whenever you tripped up, she would forgive you once. Once. I felt like I had learnt my lines as well as anything I ever did. But it wasn’t sufficient for a Victoria Wood sketch.’ None of these lesions were visible when it was broadcast, but the hierarchy was clear from a caption that appeared at the end as Victoria tried to grab Dawn’s autograph: ‘Wants people to know she wrote this sketch, not Dawn’. According to Geoffrey, ‘Vic came home having greatly enjoyed working with Dawn.’
Aside from the odd well-paid cabaret booking, much of the remainder of 1995 was a year of recuperation, childcare and grappling with a new computer. ‘Just a short note to say thankyou [sic] very much for lunch today,’ Victoria wrote to Jane Wymark in February, ‘and I’m sorry one of us wet our pants … I’m learning to type in case this comedy thing doesn’t work out.’6 At the invitation of Eric Morecambe’s family, which came partly because of her connection to his home town, one Sunday in May Victoria unveiled a commemorative blue plaque outside his home in Finchley before a hundred-strong gathering. ‘The only thing Vic insisted on,’ says Morecambe’s son Gary, ‘was that no one else was involved in unveiling the actual plaque or making any kind of speech. I got that completely – she was either chosen to do it or not do it, but nothing in between.’ In her speech hailing a genius of comedy, she made supportive noises about plans for a new museum of comedy in the town and reminisced about the wax museum. Then, in July, Bolton University awarded Victoria her third honorary degree. There were no speeches at the ceremony, but a reporter from the Bolton Evening News asked if she had any advice for the students. To his bafflement she suggested doing a first-aid course, having just completed one herself.
Meanwhile, continuing in therapy, the main topic she wished to confront was her ceaseless perfectionism. The drive to pay attention in every area of her children’s lives grew out of her own memories of childhood abandonment. Grace grew up with the story of Stanley Wood’s lackadaisical approach to his daughter’s music education: ‘Mum told me that she wanted him to teach her the piano and he said, “That’s middle C,” and left.’ When Grace started learning piano and violin, practice took place every morning at seven o’clock before school. ‘It was a bit hectic,’ says Grace, ‘and I remember moaning to school friends that this was what I had to do. Sometimes she would get impatient.’ The impatience was felt in other areas too: ‘A lot of the time it was because she was so quick and intelligent and also quite hard on herself that she didn’t extend any more patience to anyone else than she did to herself. She wanted to be as good a mother as she was a performer and she threw that energy at absolutely everything and that’s a really tiring thing to do.’
The desire to provide her children with the detailed attention her own parents had not given to her meant that Victoria was in constant fear of failure. While she continued with therapy, another kind of spiritual guidance was available at the Hampstead Friends Meeting House of the Quakers, which Geoffrey started to attend regularly, sometimes accompanied by Victoria and the children. The clerk was Richenda Carey, an actress who was under no illusions about the extent of Victoria’s commitment: ‘She went because Geoffrey and the children went and because it was a real place that had real people in it. She never became a Quaker and wasn’t a regular attender. But she was very much in sympathy with it and understood about letting your lives speak and there is that of God in every person.’ For several years Richenda became a supportive local confidante of Victoria’s, though the friendship would be conducted as much in the exchange of long faxes packed with detailed reports of ordinary home life. Victoria acquired her fax machine the following year and used it to communicate prolifically. She acquired a pen pal in Maureen Lipman, with whom she enjoyed jousting repartee about show business. With Jane Wymark, soon to join the cast of Midsomer Murders, she traded in gossip, banter and book chat; both often wrote in the quaint style of the whimsical countryside novelist Dora Saint, in honour of whose pen name ‘Miss Read’ they signed themselves Miss Wood and Miss Wymark.
Victoria’s main commitment for the year was a film for the BBC’s Great Railway Journeys. Having agreed in principle to take part, Victoria rejected one potential producer-director who had just made an essay about art with Alan Bennett – she deemed him too intellectual. The second choice was Russell England, who had made several playful films with Jonathan Meades and a profile of Ernie Wise. When he asked her what kind of film she wanted to make she said, ‘I don’t want to go very far. I just want to watch people mostly.’ Over a couple of meetings in Highgate, she alighted on a circular journey taking her clockwise from Crewe up to Thurso and back again, wherever possible on local branch lines. She didn’t mention that the itinerary, which would enable her to film in five-day blocks and fit in two trips home, followed the path of a Wood family road trip around Scotland in her childhood.
As she made her debut as a factual presenter, Victoria was conscious of following in the footsteps of Michael Palin, the globetrotting Python who had done two films for the series. ‘One of my biggest worries has come true,’ she said to camera on the first day of filming, from a bench on a platform at Crewe as men went in and out of the gents behind her. ‘That under the new-style BBC, if you’re a comedian, once you hit forty you have to stop telling jokes and just be in documentaries.’ Her commentary was dotted with familiar reference points – quips about Margaret Drabble, Esther Rantzen and Judith Chalmers – but Victoria was determined to steer away
from regular terrain. She made a point of avoiding Morecambe and Edinburgh, and also Scarborough, which was so associated with a rival comic writer – though she did imagine buying Alan Ayckbourn a pair of water wings.
As they began their journey the crew had an ominous start when they were ushered into a first-class carriage. Against the wishes of a hovering Virgin Trains publicist, they stole into second class to look for people happy to be filmed. Victoria was soon collared by a sozzled Glaswegian who recognised her and asked her to hold his McEwan’s while he fished out a fiver to donate to Comic Relief. This was telly gold on day one, but it was precisely the sort of encounter Victoria dreaded. ‘I don’t want to meet any more people,’ she told Russell England. ‘I don’t really like talking to people and I would prefer it if you could just film people and film me watching people and I’ll write something funny.’ They reached a compromise. She went through with some pre-arranged set-ups, but others were cancelled. As it was her own idea, she was happy to meet a woman who’d been an extra in Brief Encounter, shot in a now dilapidated Carnforth station. A trainspotter in Carlisle gave tips on his mystifying hobby. She was most reluctant to hang out in Yorkshire with a collector who kept bits of train in his garden, having no soft spot for the age of steam – she also had to be persuaded to do picturesque sequences in the West Highlands and the North York Moors. There was no avoiding the public when a rowdy carriage full of teens on the school train to Whitby clamoured for her to autograph their exercise books.
A scene at the core of the film captured something of her essence. In a Glasgow tea room a beady Victoria sat alone in the middle at a table surrounded by chattering ladies. She listened and watched and quietly smiled, exactly as her father used to in cafés when she was a child. At her suggestion, the pianist played ‘Strangers on a Train’ so she could mime playing along at her table (‘I can hardly play the piano at all. I’ve got grade eight tablecloth though’). Much of the time, as the crew filmed on trains and platforms, she would hide behind them pointing out faces worth capturing. She also hid from the crew in the evenings, apart from one night when she joined them to play darts. The one fixed point in the schedule arrived at 6.30 every evening, when Victoria would pull a book and a mobile phone from her bag, go to a quiet place, and read the children a bedtime story.