by Jasper Rees
Having much more power to say no than when she was profiled in the early 1980s, she refused to let the camera crew into her home. So the real meat of the film was caught backstage before, during and after performances, where she was ministered to by Amie Beamish and at her most intensely focused. When she saw an edit of the film she told Nigel Wattis she worried that she came across as ‘gloomy’.20
As for the live show, in July a bomb planted by the Provisional IRA devastated the centre of Manchester, prompting Victoria to drop a reference into her act: ‘I was walking round St Ann’s Square – I was thinking, now why have all these shops got plywood curtains?’ One day she jumped at a rare invitation to visit the usually closed set of Coronation Street to watch the show being recorded and have lunch with the cast in the Rovers Return. In the daytime she kept in shape in her hotel suite doing aerobics and ‘some yoga-effect stuff called psychocalisthenics … it claims to revitalise your sexual organs,’ she confided to Jane Wymark, ‘but I won’t be too bothered if it doesn’t.’21 Romance was not, however, entirely dead. The same month was the twentieth anniversary of Victoria and Geoffrey meeting at the Leicester Phoenix. ‘We thought we’d do something about it,’ he says, ‘and get a couple of rings made. Vic asked around and discovered a jeweller who was a friend of a friend. We liked them and wore them a lot.’ By now Geoffrey had lost seven stone and eight inches from his waistline.
September when it came looked very much like national Victoria Wood month. ‘Crewe to Crewe’ won an audience of five million viewers, the largest on BBC Two that week. Within days came the South Bank Show film, as well as the publication of Chunky. Though some weary critics found her railway journey less than great, the reception for both films was positive and brought unlooked-for consequences. An invitation arrived from The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books to write its entry on The Swish of the Curtain, which Victoria submitted long before she’d even received her contract. A couple of months later Railtrack announced that it would stump up £1 million for the restoration of Carnforth station, which had been recently threatened with demolition. Victoria’s advocacy had made the difference. ‘You’d think Carnforth would be a gift for the nostalgia boom,’ she argued in Great Railway Journeys. ‘You could have a buffet with a spoon on a chain and people behind the counter going, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” whenever you asked for anything.’
Meanwhile, there was a promotional blitz as the Royal Albert Hall dates loomed at the end of September. Victoria was never a fan of media chores, but one interview plumbed new depths. It took place, she told Maureen Lipman, ‘in a super stretch limo with a woman from GMTV in snakeskin trousers with passers-by hurling abuse through the windows as we cruised the streets of Westminster. Her first question was “Now you’re a very private person aren’t you?”’22 She was thrilled to be back at the Albert Hall for another sell-out fortnight, and it showed in an alteration to her routine. ‘Vic was always an early arriver at theatres,’ says Geoffrey, ‘but never as early as there. She used to turn up in the afternoon, just to play the piano. And she used to concentrate harder on the show ahead at the Albert than at any other venue.’ One day, while Grace ran around on the stage, she played the organ, and both were given a tour of the roof. At her invitation friends flocked to her dressing room, which was bedecked with well-wishing bouquets. One night she drove herself home via the house of her friend Norah Wellbelove, whose husband was chronically ill with cancer, and deposited a bunch of flowers for her to discover when she opened the front door in the morning. Many cultural eminences paid court. ‘You must be the most adored woman in England,’ said Michael Codron.23 ‘You were stupendous,’ said Richard Eyre, who still couldn’t persuade her to write a new play for the National Theatre.24 His successor elect Trevor Nunn introduced himself, lavishly comparing her to Chekhov, Gogol and Molière. He too suggested she write a play, ‘hopefully a big theatre play about living here in England, now’.25 Another offer came in from a record company wishing to release ‘Wanker’ and ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’ as a double A-side for the Christmas market. They didn’t have a plan for overcoming the problem that the lyrics of ‘Wanker’ would limit its air play, and the collaboration didn’t come off.
In October at the Savoy Victoria addressed the Women of the Year lunch, which she’d first attended in 1980. ‘Just what I need after 12 nights at the Albert,’ she grumbled to Jane Wymark. ‘Where is my “good” handbag, I wonder.’26 Among the women listening were Anne Diamond and Margaret Drabble, who had often featured as punchlines in her stand-up. The same month brought the release of The Wind in the Willows, featuring Victoria’s cinema debut, just as she waited to find out about another film. The director Peter Chelsom had been a guest of Gavin Millar at the Leicester Square screening of Pat and Margaret in 1994, and a few months later Victoria returned the compliment by attending the premiere of his film Funny Bones. On the back of its success Chelsom moved to Los Angeles, where he proposed adapting Pat and Margaret for the big screen and transplanting it to the American south. With Victoria’s approval he acquired the rights and retitled it Patty and Marge. While content to remain at arm’s length, Victoria warmed to the idea of seeing her name prominently displayed in a Hollywood film. ‘MGM love it,’ he confidently updated her over the summer. ‘It looks like it will get made.’27 A table reading took place with Lynn Redgrave in the role of Patty, and word of the script reached Cher, who arrived at a meeting at Chelsom’s office in leathers on her motorbike. Then there was a regime change at MGM and the project was promptly dropped from the slate.
While Victoria’s graduation to the big screen stalled yet again, on the small screen her regal status found her at the heart of BBC Television’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations. The half a million viewers who cast their votes in the BBC’s birthday poll chose her as their favourite comedy performer and Victoria Wood As Seen on TV as their favourite comedy. The awards were doled out at a ceremony broadcast in November as Auntie’s All Time Greats. The seating planners made sure Alan Yentob was by Victoria’s side. ‘I was all ready with my good loser face, not needed,’ she said, accepting her first award. Privately, to Dawn French, she pronounced it a ‘dull evening on very hard seats’.28
The creative highlight of the broadcast was a new addition to the canon of Acorn Antiques, which Victoria used to spoof fresh fashions in television. Susie Blake reprised her continuity announcer, now languishing on cable as a nighthawk presenter. ‘Asians, wheelchairs,’ she grumbled, ‘that’s where the jobs are these days. But if you’re from Camberley, forget it.’ The two browsers in Acorn Antiques were now in wheelchairs which jammed at the exit like bumper cars, forcing the actors to rise up and walk off set. The episode was sponsored by a stairlift company. In the latest developments Miss Babs was on day release from open prison, Mr Clifford revealed himself as a transsexual whose real name is Fern, and Miss Berta had contracted a tropical disease from playing ping-pong. ‘Yes, well,’ said Mrs Overall, ‘sometimes an incurable disease is God’s way of sending you to Disneyland.’ The most overt reference to new soap trends drew on recent lesbian storylines in Brookside and Emmerdale. The episode was meant to climax with Mrs O in a passionate clinch with Miss Babs. But Bo Beaumont simply refused to utter the key word. ‘What I have to say is that I’m a l … a lll … a Lebanese!’
Victoria retreated over the winter as 1996 turned to 1997 to look after the children while Geoffrey was away doing panto. Sharing a home with the bookish Grace, now eight, and larky Henry, four, ‘feels like living with AS Byatt and Benny Hill’.29 Her one outing was to attend the inaugural South Bank Show Awards – Melvyn Bragg informed her she was nominated in the comedy category, but she didn’t win. In February the family flew with their old Sheffield Crucible chums Roger Glossop, Charlotte Scott and children to Disneyland in Florida, where Victoria was embarrassed to be ushered to the front of every queue.
The first task of the new year was to bed in her new assistant. Rita Birrane had decided to
leave, and Victoria asked the likes of Dawn French and Maureen Lipman to recommend someone local ‘who might want to answer my phone crossly and mistype my letters’.30 In the end it was Jane Wynn Owen who suggested a mother of three children who had worked in casting and lived nearby.
‘I didn’t think it would work out,’ says Cathy Edis. ‘My attitude was, I’m not sure if I want this, but it would be nice to meet Victoria Wood. I went to the house. The first thing that struck me was how slight and small she was. We had a quick interview, very business-like. She made out that she was seeing other people, but I don’t think she was.’ Cathy started in January 1997. Her routine was to visit two mornings a week, which soon became three five-hour days. ‘I’m very pleased with her so far,’ Victoria informed Geoffrey by fax. ‘I think we can build a good thing, and I think she’s very committed to making a good job out of it, and enjoying it.’31 The job initially encompassed everything from typing to housekeeping, dealing with gardeners and builders, running Victoria’s appointments diary and opening her post. One of the first letters Cathy opened was from Buckingham Palace announcing that in the forthcoming Queen’s birthday honours list Victoria was to be made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. ‘Vic’s first response to the letter was amazement,’ says Geoffrey, ‘and real uncertainty about whether to say yes. OBEs were the kind of thing given to other people, and she wasn’t sure she wanted it. I was still in the mode of encouraging her to believe in herself and was quietly delighted that she’d achieved that kind of recognition. In the end she said she’d accept it, but she wouldn’t be saying yes to anything else that might get offered in the future.’
When Comic Relief came around again in March, Victoria contributed an appeal on behalf of carers, making an affecting short film in the West Country about a woman looking after a husband suffering from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Then in April the tour resumed, taking in cities Victoria had missed the previous year. At the urging of Phil McIntyre’s office, Victoria went into the studio to record new versions of her songs to be sold at the venue and through shops. Real Life – The Songs contained ‘all the songs I can remember,’ she told Geoff Posner, ‘and I’m just going to do them with piano, keep it simple is my motto.’32 Released from the need to sing over her right shoulder to an audience, her left-hand bass-playing acquired oomph. The selection was mainly from her three 1990s live shows, but she went back to the late 1970s for ‘Love Song’ and ‘Music and Movement’ and the mid-1980s for ‘Crush’ and ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’. Geoffrey came up with the running order – ‘They are fairly well mixed as far as spreading the gloom around goes,’ she told McIntyre33 – while she assembled the lyrics for the inner sleeve. It didn’t sell particularly well.
It was during the spring tour that Victoria took the momentous decision to leave the Richard Stone Partnership. Stone’s retirement was the reason she cited to Phil McIntyre, whom she now asked to represent her. ‘We were walking along Oxford Street and she said, “I want to move from Richard Stone because he’s not involved any more. Do you think you’d be interested?”’ Vivienne Clore, who handled all her television work, had first caught wind of the move as preparations were underway for a tour of Australia and New Zealand. This was organised in haste at the suggestion of McIntyre’s colleague Paul Roberts, who was in Australia on a stand-up tour with the agency’s client Ben Elton. ‘There was a question of her going to Australia,’ says Vivienne Clore, ‘and Phil Mac was busy selling it out there without us knowing about it. I said to Phil, “We don’t know what’s going on here.”’
By early May, Victoria had made up her mind and sent an ominous fax to the Richard Stone office from her tour hotel in Birmingham: ‘I would like to have a meeting with you all as soon as possible next week. I have been thinking a lot about my future and I have taken some decisions.’34 After they met on the Monday morning, Victoria described the scene to Maureen Lipman: ‘On Monday I left my agents after twenty years. You can imagine what that was like. There was so much nervous tension in the room the Expelair was working and it wasn’t even switched on.’35 ‘She came in and just said she wanted a different kind of management,’ says Vivienne Clore. ‘She sent a hamper from Fortnum’s and a nice note and went off into the sunset.’ In her handover instructions to McIntyre she concluded, ‘I suppose if it had to happen at all, I’m glad it’s you – look after her …’36 On the day Victoria went in to sign her contract they made sure to get the china cups out of the kitchen cupboard. In due course her agent in effect became McIntyre’s colleague Lucy Ansbro and her assistant Adele Fowler, who handled all her needs and attended all her recordings. She came to refer to both as her lady bodyguards.
When the tour brought Victoria to Portsmouth, she took the ferry to the Isle of Wight to pay her respects to Richard Stone, who was able to congratulate her on her OBE, announced days earlier. The Times listed her as ‘Miss V Wood (Mrs Durham) comedian, serv to entrtnmnt’.37 Among many nabobs sending congratulations was the mayor of her home town: ‘Bury really is very proud of you!’38 The sentiment was echoed by Julie Walters. ‘I feel very proud of you,’ she wrote. ‘Is that daft?’39 When replying to Vivienne Clore, who was still handling any business relating to deals she’d originally negotiated, Victoria signed off ‘love Vic OBE’.40 She would not receive the award till the end of the year, when it was presented to her at Buckingham Palace by Prince Charles. ‘Afterwards,’ says Geoffrey, who sat and watched with the children, ‘Vic couldn’t really remember what was said – it was very much a something and nothing conversation.’
The trip Down Under was scheduled for the school holidays. Victoria’s last act before getting on the plane was to work the tombola at Grace’s end-of-term fête, honouring a promise from the previous year to keep the date free. In the parents’ race she finished in the middle of the pack. ‘I can’t tell you what a thrill that was,’ she confided to her audio diary the following year. ‘It gave me a boost all the way to Australia, that did.’41 She also worked up some new jokes specific to the Antipodes, did two days of Australian press and had a fitting with Betty Jackson. ‘She is doing me a couple of pleated skirts for the trip,’ she told Jane Wymark. ‘We think beige and possibly even a muted lilac.’42 Victoria, the children and Rebecca the nanny boarded a plane bound for Auckland at the end of the first week of July. Amie Beamish, though from New Zealand, could not accompany her as she was about to give birth – Victoria asked if she could be a godmother and was accepted.
Victoria was nervous about this leap into the unknown, and Julie Walters attempted to allay her anxiety. ‘They will absolutely love you,’ she wrote, adding that ‘they are nothing like as foreign as the Americans’.43 The first two weeks were given over to an intense schedule of promotion: ‘A typical day has been – awake at 4, Grace in at 4.30, persuade Gr. back to bed at 5, Hen in at 5.30. for a big colouring session by Mummy of Popeye and Woody from Toy Story, Mummy in the shower, Rebecca in at 7 with a cold missing fiancé … Mummy down in the lobby by 7.50 for non-stop and I mean that day of interviews, Pebble Mill at One type TV shows, “madcap” radio shows etc etc. Interviews finish 7ish by which times kids are in bed, mummy is a complete zombie.’44 Just before her first performance Geoffrey arrived in Auckland to share the strain. Grace remembers spending ‘hours in the bathroom drawing because I didn’t want to wake anybody else up’.
Victoria worried that she’d had little rehearsal time to bed in her new location-sensitive material: ‘altering references to Curly Wurlys etc (replace with Dried Koala)’.45 She was familiar with the process, having performed a similar surgery before recording the voiceover for the US version of ‘Crewe to Crewe’ (out went Sooty and Thora Hird; in came Roseanne and Bob Hope). There were ten dates in all. After some debate – because it would eat into family holiday time – a later show was dropped into the schedule at a larger venue in Auckland, which sold out. ‘NZ was v. pro-me,’ Victoria reported. ‘They knew me and were quite thrilled I had come. Ozzies couldn’t give a
damn, never heard of me and don’t want to know. So I am going out all guns blazing but it is being a tough few days.’46 On one light-entertainment show she was allotted three minutes of stand-up to sell her wares: ‘Whoo hoo. I seem to remember being in this position 20 years ago … Where are my platform shoes?’47
For much of the trip the family were based in a smart high-rise flat in Quay West overlooking Sydney Harbour, from which Victoria commuted in and out of different Australian cities, where the venues were smaller – in one theatre the capacity was only 500. The reception was still tumultuous. The gruelling itinerary meant she had plenty of reading time. After a quiet final show in Perth, where Victoria was joined by the family to go on holiday to Bali, she asked Paul Roberts – who was acting as tour manager – to take home some books for her that she’d bought while on tour. She handed over two heavy suitcases stuffed with paperbacks.
Roberts, from up the road in Preston, was McIntyre’s more emollient sidekick, and over the years they had come as close to friendship as professional prudence allowed. One night, after a show, the two of them sat on the steps of the Sydney Opera House looking at the harbour and the skyscraper where Victoria’s children slept.
‘You’ve done all right for a girl from Bury,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ she replied. ‘I never expected to make people laugh this far away from home.’
18
DINNERLADY
‘Just sign it, Bren, I’ve got an itchy bum.’
dinnerladies, 1998
Victoria first flirted with writing a sitcom during her 1987 tour. Two tours later, in 1993, she thought she’d missed the boat: ‘When Jennifer Saunders wrote Absolutely Fabulous I thought that is what a sitcom should be and I can’t do that now. I haven’t got that edge now.’1 But the idea for a mainstream sitcom continued to solidify until it came to the notice of Alan Yentob at the start of 1996. ‘I don’t mind taking it to another channel,’ Victoria told her agent. ‘I am not trying to do a Vicar of Dibley, I don’t mind creeping in with a low key series.’2 It remained just an idea until the summer of 1997 when she met up with Geoff Posner, who committed to booking studio space for a year hence. Before she flew to New Zealand Victoria sounded out Julie Walters. ‘Vic I would love to be in your series – as regular as you want me to be,’ she replied. ‘Have you any idea when it will be? & have you written it yet?’3