by Jasper Rees
After the episode was recorded Victoria took the tape home, then on Saturday morning watched the VHS with Posner, who lived nearby, before going in to the studio to make more changes. These were first passed on to the script supervisor in charge of the camera script and then distributed to the actors. She soon grew wary of their reaction. ‘If we make too many cuts,’ she said in a diary entry late one Friday, ‘everyone will have the vapours and have to lie down frothing at the mouth with damp cloths over their eyes so we didn’t change very much.’29
‘It was quite tense,’ says Andrew Dunn. ‘Everyone sat round in a circle thinking, what’s coming up here? There was a look of fear and dread on some faces in case they were the ones that had to relearn things.’ Victoria sometimes asked Jane Cotton to pass on the cuts for her. According to Posner, the Saturday rewrites were ‘the source of about 50 per cent of fluffs’. While he took charge of the cameras, Victoria was effectively the actors’ director. ‘She was very much in control,’ says Anne Reid. ‘Geoff Posner was a brilliant editor, but she knew what the joke should be. She was terribly strict. She had no bedside manner at all. She would say, “It’s not funny like that.” She couldn’t bear it if it wasn’t perfect. She could be very unnerving because you could see she wasn’t really concentrating on the scene when she rehearsed. It is quite hard to act with somebody if you know that they’re judging you.’ Her quilted dialogue, with the characters chattering at cross-purposes, was so technically hard to master that even battle-hardened veterans felt the pressure. ‘If you saw behind the flat of dinnerladies,’ says Celia Imrie, ‘you’d see Julie and me taking Rescue remedies. It was like being on a skating rink.’ Duncan Preston grew disgruntled: ‘I said to Julie, “This is ridiculous, the pressure we feel on this. I’m sick to death of it.” And it’s not a happy atmosphere when you do that. Although it turned out all right the process was not.’ Victoria’s gang were so associated with one another in the public mind that such tensions would have been unimaginable to her audience. In fact, they didn’t often meet outside a television studio. The only regular at Victoria’s Christmas parties was Duncan, who lived nearby, while Julie did not visit her house for the first time till later that year, seven years after its purchase. ‘We were probably more the best of friends at the very beginning,’ says Julie. ‘But it was more a work relationship, if I’m honest – partly that I lived in West Sussex and she lived in Highgate.’
From the very start Victoria was running the show on depleted reserves of energy. It was at a read-through of the opening episode that she noticed a flaw. ‘I thought, no, I can’t get away with this,’ she recorded in her diary that evening. ‘I’m just not in it. It’s the first episode and I’ve got to establish my character. I’ve got to take my right place in the middle of the ensemble. I’m on the edges and it isn’t right.’ She had a photoshoot in the afternoon and came home, according to Geoffrey, ‘saying she had misconceived it completely and she needed to work on it then and there. This was at about seven in the evening. I popped my head round the door at eleven to ask how things were going. She said there was more to do. I woke up alone the next morning and thought she must be sleeping in the spare room. I went down to her office and there she was, still writing and completely knackered. But she did a great show for Grace and Henry at breakfast-time, merry and bright and cracking gags.’ In fact, she did snatch a little sleep before Duncan gave her a lift in: ‘I was really glad because with two hours’ sleep I don’t think I was fit to drive really. I don’t know if I’m fit to act but I managed.’30 Overnight, even in the depths of exhaustion, she had triumphantly slipped a line into the script that caught everyone unawares and triggered a deeply gratifying chorus of laughter. The next night she stayed up writing till one and got up at six. And so her routine continued. She was envious of the naps that Duncan and Julie took on the rehearsal-room sofa. ‘If I didn’t have Celia to catch an eye with I think I’d go barmy,’ she said at the start of the third week.31 That night, at two in the morning after a seven-hour shift at her desk, she reported that ‘I’ve just kicked the crap out of the ending of “Scandal”’.32 The audio diary is peppered with sniffs and yawns. ‘I am getting very tired,’ she confided to Jane Wynn Owen. ‘I am trying to be very up and team leader but I have to say once I get home I flag severely … But it is being the most fantastic job, and I love it.’33
Across six weeks and twelve recordings, audiences were royally entertained with character comedy – and an avalanche of jokes – that could have emerged from no other source. The structure of each episode established Bren as the canteen’s mother hen. Jean and Dolly would be bickering as they came in together. Twinkle was forever sullen and Anita sweetly naive. Victoria was aiming, she said, for ‘non-eventfulness’, the sense of a workplace where nothing much happened and the vacuum was filled with conversation.34 Writing for a largely female set of characters enabled her to revisit areas covered in her live show. The canteen thrummed with talk of mood swings, thrush, bras, cystitis, insemination by turkey baster, visible nipples, periods, irritable bowel syndrome, yeast infections, HRT patches, Fallopian tubes, orgasms. ‘I’ve worked on my pelvic floor,’ says Dolly. ‘Jean’s more or less let hers dangle.’ ‘And where’s it got you,’ retorts Jean, ‘having a pelvic floor like a bulldog clip?’ In the character of Tony Victoria created a sex pest with a porn habit and no understanding of women but somehow managed to make him loveable. ‘I’m not a dinosaur,’ he declares. ‘I quite like women in a sad baffled sort of way.’ Victoria stayed true to her comic credo – that sex was no more exciting than any other domestic task. ‘Did you get any?’ Tony asks Bren at the start of ‘Monday’. ‘What?’ ‘At the weekend, did you get any?’ ‘Any sex? ‘No, I had to go to t’launderette.’ She was loyal to another of her instincts. While the dictates of sitcom found Victoria’s writing at its most radiantly cheerful, even here she threw in a shadow of sadness by giving Tony cancer. ‘She never made a big thing of it,’ says Andrew Dunn. ‘I asked her, “How come you’ve given Tony cancer?” She just said, “Cos he has.”’
Meanwhile, Stan the jobsworth handyman galumphed around the canteen, attending to the toilets and the toaster, reminding everyone his dad was a Desert Rat. Petula stole in and out, a disruptive whirlwind dropping names and spreading havoc. The odd one out was Philippa in human resources, whose southern wishy-washiness gave the rest of the staff something to unite against. Victoria wanted the many minor characters she included to have their share of jokes rather than be used as feeds. ‘Have you never seen Vertigo?’ Bren asks Norman the hypochondriac breadman. ‘Seen it? I’ve got it!’ Led by Bren, there was a lot of knowledgeable chat about popular culture – films, sitcoms, soaps, TV drama. Victoria’s characters found themselves referring to the same celebrities who had populated her comedy for years: Pam Ayres, the Nolan Sisters, Mia Farrow, Richard Clayderman, Sarah Ferguson, Fatima Whitbread, Judith Chalmers. She gave a peculiar form of colour-blindness to Petula, who recalls encounters with people who looked ‘like a black Frankie Vaughan’ or ‘like a black Mary Hopkin’ or ‘like a white Nina Simone’. Victoria couldn’t resist yet another private joke about Celia’s anatomy. ‘They can gape, can’t they, the overalls,’ says Dolly to Philippa, ‘if you’re heavy-busted.’ Threaded into the workplace banter was plenty of old-school innuendo. ‘Bren, can you spread them for Tony?’ ‘Answer me one question, luv. Where’s my Clint?’ ‘Can you smell my Charlie?’ asks Jean, drunkenly hitting on Tony. ‘Vic did write some filthy lines,’ says Anne Reid. ‘I didn’t like saying ‘can you smell my Charlie?’, but you wouldn’t argue with her.’ It caused such an eruption that the audience had to be asked to laugh less in a second take. A viewer would write to complain that the loud laughter spoiled her enjoyment. ‘That’s how loud they laughed!’ Victoria replied. ‘I agree with you – it’s a bit too loud!’35
Some of the wordplay was fiendishly complex. Tony accuses Jean of ‘teetering on the thrush threshold, threatening to thrash’. Bren, searching fo
r a word just beyond reach, would come at it from a surreal angle. ‘What are them things like cucumbers? Suffragettes.’ One short speech contained most of the essential ingredients in Victoria’s comedy: ‘His auntie Dot from Cockermouth ate a raffia drinks coaster. She thought it was a high-fibre biscuit. She had to be held back from moving down the table and buttering two more.’ But there was also fresh fun to be had with feng shui and the internet and a new prime minister. ‘Tony Blair,’ sniffs Dolly. ‘Stick two poems up in a bus shelter and call it a university.’ It was in Bren’s nature to be cheerful, but Victoria barely had to act as she heard her jokes being delivered with such finesse. ‘Julie is giving a very good performance,’ she told her diary. ‘I can’t look at her because she’s so funny. I knew she would be.’ One day Andrew Dunn asked Julie how she and Victoria had met, and she told the story of that day at Manchester Poly when she did her an impression of a nurse wheeling a commode. ‘How wonderful,’ said Victoria on tape, ‘that I’m sitting with her at a table having first heard her talk about this when I was seventeen.’36
After the last episode was recorded in mid-July, several months before broadcast, Victoria hosted a company party at home. They were ferried there by a Routemaster bus decorated with balloons and a banner reading ‘HWD Components Canteen Closing Down Event’ – Thora Hird was cheerfully carried up to the top deck. Victoria presented everyone with a bespoke dinnerladies plate with a ceramic egg and chips and their name daubed on the side, which had been sourced by Cathy Edis.
Then she had an unsettled summer: ‘I have never worked so hard on anything, some days right through the night, and by the end of it I felt I’d used up all my sociability, jollity, energy etc.’37 As well as a holiday in Mallorca, the family were weekend guests of Phil McIntyre, who took them out on his boat into the Solent – Victoria had no sea legs and caught the train back to his house in Lymington. The family went up to stay at Mole Barn, where an old revolving summerhouse in green and white she’d bought at Sotheby’s had been installed in the garden. She visited her mother, who was now bedridden having undergone three hip replacements. But dinnerladies was never far from Victoria’s mind as she awaited the series edits anxiously. ‘I hope they are OK,’ she fretted, ‘because disagreeing with Posner is so hard.’38 After watching all six episodes, Peter Salmon declared himself happy enough to hope for more. Victoria started on promotional tasks, which ranged from being photographed next to giant vats of baked beans to doing her bit for the BBC’s dinnerladies website. ‘I can see a day,’ she prophesied, ‘when we don’t make programmes at all, we just describe them on the internet.’39
Victoria prepared to reappear on BBC One after a long absence – Pat and Margaret was four years in the past, All Day Breakfast six and her last comedy series was broadcast nine years earlier. At the heart of the campaign to reintroduce her was a profile for Best of British, a BBC series of tributes to popular stars. Victoria duly submitted to an interview in the Palladium, scene of her first major London triumph in 1987, and was filmed being interviewed on Woman’s Hour by Jenni Murray. She ticked Murray off on air for calling her a southerner. ‘No I’m not,’ she said. ‘I carry my heart with me wherever I go. I carry my language with me.’40 Murray then asked why she had accepted an OBE but never done This Is Your Life, prompting a less than complimentary retort about the ITV show. Victoria sent a pre-emptive apology to its presenter Michael Aspel. ‘I did ask them to take it out,’ she wrote, ‘but they then acted as if I had requested that Jenni Murray give the Pope a blow job … and told me to get lost. So that’ll learn me. Or not.’41 He wrote back to say he wouldn’t be upset, even if she’d meant it. The usual suspects were interviewed for the profile, while original perspectives were provided by David Morton of the Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop and Lesley Fitton from Bury Grammar.
The most intriguing choice of interviewee was Caroline Aherne, who acknowledged Victoria as an inspiration. While the programme was being made, the first episode of The Royle Family was broadcast, starring and co-written by Aherne. Its characters barely moved around a set shot on a single camera without an audience, forcing a down-in the-mouth Victoria to fret that she was out of step. ‘When I saw The Royle Family I thought my sort of sitcom is dead. It’s just been blown out of the water because they’d established the new style and mine suddenly looked like My Wife Next Door from twenty years ago.’42
Best of British and the first episode of dinnerladies were shown on consecutive nights in November. ‘I do feel nervous about the old dinnerladies going out,’ Victoria confessed to Richenda Carey, ‘even though heaven knows I’ve given it my best shot.’43 To help it along Peter Salmon loaded the Thursday night schedule with his most bankable comedies, and ‘Monday’ duly reached an audience of over twelve million.
The next day Victoria and Geoffrey flew to Barcelona for a restorative weekend away, where they ‘rambled very happily in the Ramblas, gawped at the Gaudis, peered at the Picassos’.44 As the series continued, with audiences hovering either side of ten million, she was called back to her writing desk. Richard Curtis asked if she had thoughts up her sleeve for Comic Relief in the new year. A sly idea occurred to Victoria to spoof Hetty Wainthrop Investigates, the gentle BBC crime drama starring Patricia Routledge as a retired housewife sleuth which had just completed its final series. Wetty Hainthrop Investigates was written in haste in early December. Victoria cast herself as the gumshoe who tackles various types of crime – ‘nothing upsetting’ – and is hired to solve a case of stolen fish fingers and disappearing celebrities. To send up the original character, she asked her regular costume designer Anna Stubley to supply her with an ever-changing array of woolly berets. For Julie Walters she wrote the part of an old woman who keeps tripping over the carpet, Celia Imrie was cast as a husky femme fatale in a nightclub and Duncan Preston played Wetty’s sidekick Sopwith Heckmondwyke, who is obsessed with naked gameshows on cable TV. She had fun writing cameos for Judith Chalmers, Alan Titchmarsh as his jealous younger twin Adam, and, to top off a long ticklist of northern clichés, the cast of Coronation Street filing out of the Rovers Return. Harriet Thorpe, a north London friend of Victoria’s, played a chanteuse called Carol Singer. To add authenticity, Geoff Posner filmed it on badly lit sets which cast distracting shadows. Wetty Hainthrop was to have one significant side-effect. Victoria composed a theme tune, and at the recording sessions she was much taken by the sound of the soloist’s cornet. ‘It really set me off,’ she confessed. ‘I will have to buy a trumpet now.’45
Victoria greeted 1999 ‘hoping for world peace and the chance to snap Woody Allen’s clarinet in two’ (Allen’s jazz odyssey Wild Man Blues was released a few months earlier).46 She also had a sitcom to write and threw herself into meetings to ‘decide if, when, how many, with whom, rehearsed where …’47 Peter Salmon professed a wish to get a second series of dinnerladies on by the autumn, culminating in a Christmas special. ‘Can’t quite see how we would do this without recording them before they have been written, which would be a first,’ she mused. ‘Once I get going it will not be too hard to do. I just know, however easy it is creatively, it is still a huge commitment and work load and effort and all those things for which I am paid so handsomely, and sometimes balk at the toll it takes of the family and the marriage and all that malarkey. But maybe I will manage it better this year.’48 She now trusted Salmon, who had made sure to show up at rehearsals and recordings and keep the door to his inner sanctum open to her. ‘This is the first one I think I can deal with face to face like normal people,’ she told Richenda Carey.49 She outlined a plan for the second series to start in late November, with episodes pegged to Christmas and the millennium and possibly three more in the new year. Salmon agreed to repeat series one beforehand.
In January Victoria went to up to Bolton to see a stage version of Pat and Margaret at the Octagon, having advised the theatre’s artistic director Lawrence Till on adapting it. His first draft included songs plucked from her back catalogue. To Margaret he had
given ‘Bessie Bunter’, Pat got ‘Fourteen Again’ and they united at the end to duet on ‘Saturday Night’. Victoria firmly discouraged this archival rummage. ‘Take it by the scruff of the neck more,’ she counselled.50 When she saw the production she privately judged it ‘a bit of a curate’s bumhole but not too dreadful in parts’.51 She was surprised to hear little snippets of dinnerladies crop up in the script and expressed her displeasure to the director Joanna Read when she wrote to her about reviving Talent at Watford Palace. Read asked Victoria if she might append an actual talent contest to make a full evening of Victoria’s short debut play. ‘Is it for the bar receipts?’ Victoria asked tartly, suggesting she instead couple it with a one-act play by a young female playwright the same age she had been in 1978.52 It was paired instead with an Ayckbourn.
While in Lancashire she paid a rare visit to Bury, which she found ‘ripped to shreds by developers of course, and I can’t say I felt very at home, but it was by way of researching for dinnerladies so it was worth it’.53 It may have been this visit to her home town which prompted an act of contrition. Victoria found a Bury Library label inside a book on her shelves. ‘I have a feeling I must have stolen this from your library!’ she wrote as she belatedly returned it, adding that she’d walked off with many more as a young teenager. ‘I’m very sorry – here’s a small donation to help replace a few.’54 She enclosed a cheque for £100.