by Jasper Rees
As was her habit Victoria turned down Richard Curtis’s invitation to be live in the studio on Red Nose Day, but she did agree to act as guest editor of the Radio Times for their Comic Relief issue. Rather than merely lend her name as a figurehead, she drove to a meeting at the magazine’s office in west London, where she signed up to write several features. She ‘interviewed’ ‘Julia Walters’ (‘the actress most men would like to discuss hernias with’55), questioned the Chancellor Gordon Brown about Third World debt, wrote about celebrity ailments (including her own bunion), surfed through the desert wastes of digital TV and had a pop at The Archers, ‘expressing my wish that the entire cast would fall into the slurry’.56 The cover portrait, shot by her regular photographer Brian Moody, required her to look editorial. ‘I don’t really know how editors act,’ she wrote for the magazine. ‘I settle on an expression of paranoid smugness, which I think will cover most jobs in the media.’57 She enjoyed the experience but found it exhausting – ‘I’m too tired to do capitals,’ she told her commissioning editor – and went with the family to a Belgian Center Parc to recover.58 The advantage of slipping across the Channel was anonymity. ‘I cannot bear being pestered when I’m with the children,’ she confided to Richenda Carey, ‘and neither can they. It’s a bit inhibiting when one is in one’s cossy to be accosted by beaming couples wielding cameras … But then how can I complain after shoving my features in front of the Great British P for 25 years?’59
Victoria started on the second series just as dinnerladies and Julie Walters were up for BAFTAs. Father Ted and its recently deceased star Dermot Morgan won in both categories, but a few days later she fared better at the Montreux Festival, where the ‘Party’ episode was shortlisted for the press prize. She flew to Switzerland with Paul Roberts. ‘I didn’t cry,’ she reported, ‘but felt a bit gulpy and ooer when the woman said the jury had been unanimous but mainly I was trying to get to the stage without losing a bosom.’60 At her table she was approached by a young northerner introducing himself as Steve Pemberton of The League of Gentlemen. ‘She had quite a startled look on her face that I bowled up to her without any of the niceties,’ he says. ‘I said, “How are you? Good to see you.” It was as if she was a friend of my mum’s.’ Afterwards the two parties stayed up talking in the hotel bar and paid a late-night visit to the lakeside statue of Freddie Mercury. The League frankly admitted that they were de-
votees of her sketch collections and that Pauline from the Royston Vasey job centre was a straight lift from Mens Sana in Thingummy Doodah. It was to be the start of an occasional relationship.
The day Victoria got back, her work ethic forced her to write through to the morning to make up for lost time. She was ambivalent about embarking on another regime of all-nighters – ‘it just buggers up the next day so I’m not sure it’s worth it’ – but simply couldn’t stay away from her desk.61 A month on from Montreux she reported that ‘eps have been going very well, even though Geoff was away and I had more domestics to do, but on the other hand I didn’t have to be married all evening, I could just work, so it evened out’.62 According to Geoffrey, ‘We thought the children never twigged that she’d had no sleep, but as the weekly pressure of her hair-shirt regime began to take its toll she found it harder to keep family life together.’ In fact, her nocturnal writing sessions earned the disapproval of Grace, now ten. ‘She did it enough for me to notice and think, you shouldn’t be doing this,’ says Grace. ‘There was one specific time when I told her not to stay up all night. She went, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I said, “No, I really don’t want you to stay up all night.” And I made her snacks. I said, “You have to eat this at one, you have to eat this at two, and you have to go to bed.” It was things like toast that wasn’t going to last six hours. I hadn’t really thought this through.’
Rather than heed such pleas, Victoria now created a rod for her own back. It became apparent as she mapped out plotlines on a magnetic wall chart that the new dinnerladies would need to stretch to ten episodes. She started to work on a more thought-through story for her characters. Having given Tony a non-specific cancer in the first series, she consulted Rob Buckman, nowadays an oncologist in Toronto: ‘What could he have that makes him feel he has got away with it to a certain extent, but that next time he could die?’63 He suggested a diagnosis of stage B bowel cancer. She also commissioned a researcher to look into the finer points of divorce, food poisoning and how to fire a canteen worker. In the end, none of this research was used but, as she plotted, an idea was floated from on high that Tony Blair should appear in the millennium episode. Instead of falling in with this idea, Victoria upped the rate of jokes at his expense. Dolly now complained about him every other episode. (‘Tony Blair! It used to be the police taking these criminals from place to place – now it’s anyone with three rear seat belts and a driving licence.’)
For several months, with only the most necessary distractions, Victoria retreated to her office to come up with five hours of comedy. The process proved more exacting than anything she had yet attempted. Each first draft might take twelve hours ‘when I’m working at speed. That’s when I know what I’m doing.’64 But every draft spawned rewrites. Some scripts were thrown away; others she asked Geoff Posner to bin. ‘The trouble with doing ten episodes,’ she told him, ‘is that the first draft is fine and you feel really pleased with yourself, but by the time you have clocked up the second and third lots, it’s knackering. But I am steaming ahead as fast as I can.’65 The process was lonely too. She found herself wishing for ‘one other person that knew everything I was doing that I could talk to about it. I can’t imagine sharing the writing. Just the sharing of the burden of the thinking it through.’66 After she voiced her gathering despair at one meeting, it was put to her by someone who should have known better that she farm out some of the work to co-writers. ‘Vic did a face that looked down and smiled and said, “I don’t think so,”’ says Geoff Posner. Her crisis of confidence lingered for so long ‘that I left it past the point where I could jack it in. It’s a horrible situation to be in.’67 As she wrote she kept the episodes to herself – Posner had to ask for a plot outline of the millennium episode to take to the BBC’s press launch. When she did send him scripts she forbade him to share them with the cast, as she said they would only start learning what might later be changed.
Victoria stopped for a week at the end of April to prepare for a couple of fundraiser shows at the Millfield Theatre in Edmonton for the children’s primary school. It would be hers and Geoffrey’s first appearance on the same bill since 1983. ‘Back together by unpopular demand,’ she told Jane Wymark.68 Between scripts, Victoria organised a fiftieth birthday party for Geoffrey, marred somewhat by the caterer ignoring the order for wholefood only. The mishap was retooled as a joke for dinnerladies when the pittas delivered to the canteen are wholemeal. ‘What do you think this is,’ says Tony, ‘the Labour Party Conference?’ As a present she booked a weekend in August at the Oslo Jazz Festival, only for the headliner to be indisposed. They spent the evening in their hotel room watching films on TV.
In August the casting process began while the scripts were still being written, pushing the family holiday to Mallorca back to the very end of the summer. So Victoria approached recording in September in a state of extreme fatigue. The night before the first rehearsal she told David Firman that she needed to rewrite an episode to accommodate a vocal version of the theme tune: ‘When I am going to write “millennium” I’m not quite sure. But this totally serves me right for being a smartarse and trying to do ten episodes in the time normally needed for six.’69
It was a sign of her exhaustion that she started to complain about Geoff Posner. ‘Geoff I’m sure does like me and thinks I’m very good at what I do,’ she told Richenda Carey, ‘but there has been no acknowledgment since January that I am working on a huge project, at times very difficult.’70 In auditions, and as decisions were made about shooting, she felt like an underling and eventually sent off a fax saying s
o: ‘It is EXTREMELY rare for me to kick up about anything, and I did feel wobbly about it … My big fear, and this is an old childhood thing, is that people will shout at me when I say what I mean and tell me they don’t like me. But I cannot go on getting upset with Mr Posner, moaning to G, and then carrying on smiling and going along with it. It’s not honest.’71 Posner, who in her lighter moments she referred to as Poz, treated these stresses as a mark of her perfectionism. ‘I was in the firing line but that’s my job,’ he says. ‘The grumbling was because she felt under much more pressure to get it all right.’
Victoria’s workload increased even further by a request from the BBC to write a sketch for their millennium celebrations. For a comedy compendium titled The Nearly Complete and Utter History of Everything they wanted a two-hander for her and Thora Hird, the only stipulation that it be set during the last thousand years. Victoria was worried about doing a sketch on film ‘having only ever done them in front of coach parties’.72 She dashed it off and sent it to her agent after she got home from the first dinnerladies rehearsal: ‘I hope they like it, if they don’t we’ll just have to forget it because I don’t have time to do another one, strangely enough.’73 Then she stayed up and made more adjustments to the first episode.
‘Catering’ was a cluttered episode in which decorators cause the canteen to close when they accidentally wedge a ladder across it. ‘If you feel you are standing around with not much to do,’ Victoria warned the principals, ‘then don’t worry.’ She promised good exposure for each character in six of the ten episodes, ‘and four where they do the equivalent of Emily standing in the Rovers asking for a medium sherry’.74
After six months at her desk, Victoria felt ‘excited about starting at last, and a bit disappointed I haven’t totally finished the writing’.75 When they met at the LWT rehearsal rooms in south London she was shocked, even angry, to discover that Maxine Peake had quietly shed five stone. For this Victoria had only herself to blame. ‘You are going to get typecast,’ she had advised the young actress. ‘You’re big, you’re northern.’76 A fat suit was ordered to restore Twinkle’s frame to previous proportions, and references to her fluctuating weight were added to the script, but there was no hiding the change: in one early episode Twink appeared in a crop top baring a svelte midriff.
The new episodes had titles, but also dates. ‘Catering’ was set on Friday 9 April 1999. It opened with Bren and Tony poring over a staff rota wall plan, as if Victoria’s meticulous plotting had bled across into the script itself. There were complications in the staffing rota for the cast too. Julie had other commitments, so Petula Gordeno was written into only half the episodes. Celia was in all of them, but Philippa’s affair in the first series had proved so underpowered that Victoria wrote her love interest out of the script. As usual Celia had to put up with teasing. ‘I liked you in glasses,’ Dolly says to Philippa after a makeover. ‘They diminished your nostrils.’ When Celia arrived late at rehearsal in a fiery state thanks to Tube chaos one day, she found her wild rant all but transcribed into the script for the millennium episode ‘Minnellium’. Anne Reid and Duncan Preston were kept much busier, with ructions in the private lives of Jean and Stan which would end with them joined together in romance. (‘I can’t say either of them looked best pleased,’ Victoria told Richenda Carey. ‘Actors!’77) Meanwhile, Anita grows attached to a blow-up male companion she calls Malcolm. Minor characters who had sparkled in the first series were brought back for more – among them Kate Robbins as gormless Babs who comes from Urmston, and Sue Devaney as the bouncy, beaming secretary Jane, always ordering twelve rounds of white, low-fat spread. New characters were brought in for the dinnerladies to bounce off. A burly breadwoman called Glenda overshares information about her bladder-stapling surgery – there were hints that she may be a transsexual, prompting one viewer to send Victoria a reprimand. In an episode titled ‘Christine’, a new dinnerlady insults all her colleagues with her plain speaking. (She was played by Kay Adshead, a trusty veteran of As Seen on TV and Over to Pam.) This was Victoria venting her anger with infuriating passive-aggressive New Age types. ‘I might have to smash you in the face with a tin of beans,’ Bren tells Christine. ‘I’m not joking.’
Bren wasn’t joking for much of the second series, and sometimes seemed to be visiting from another sort of show altogether thanks to a will-they/won’t-they plotline about her romance with Tony. The rest of the cast have a bet on about how soon they’ll kiss and have sex, while Victoria put Bren through agonies of doubt, misery and low self-esteem. At the very moment Bren and Tony smooch under the mistletoe, Victoria even had an ex-husband walk in. There were several such bombshells: Tony’s cancer, Anita’s secret pregnancy, an unwanted Christmas baby left on the fire escape, Stan’s grief at his father’s death, Dolly revealing her son lives with a marine biologist called Marcus, Jean’s rage at her husband abandoning her for a dental hygienist in Cardiff. The series sometimes threatened to turn into an explosive issues-led soap.
Victoria had touched on melancholy themes in her bleaker songs and sketches. The logical outcome, even though this was a sitcom, was that she now actually had to cry on camera. On the day of recording the Christmas episode she sought advice from Julie. ‘I remember Vic rushing up to me and saying, “How do you cry? I want to cry at the end of it. How do I do that?” I said, “You have to kind of feel it. If you can’t feel it through the words, you’ve got to psych yourself up in some way and produce it, but you have to feel it in the moment.”’ Meanwhile, in another episode Bren is blisteringly rude about Juliet Stevenson’s snot crying in Truly Madly Deeply. Among other namedrops were various comedians – Ben Elton, Billy Connolly, Rory Bremner. To Twinkle she gave a sarcastic put-down – ‘Oh ha ha, Alan Partridge’ or ‘Oh ha ha, League of Gentleman’. On one level these were public jokes about public figures; on another they were private nods to friends and acquaintances or, in the case of Juliet Stevenson, a fellow parent at Grace and Henry’s primary school.
Other elements of the show were more familiar – jokes about Morecambe Bay and Pam Ayres, Woody Allen and Kiri Te Kanawa. The talk of babies and birth meant a reprise for favourites from Victoria’s stand-up show. ‘I’ve got a haemorrhoid but it’s quite a dinky one,’ says Anita after giving birth. ‘My cousin had three big ones, sort of in a cluster.’ There were lashings of sex gags, and they were growing filthier. ‘You want to pump that Malcolm up a bit,’ Stan says to Anita. ‘You don’t want him going down on you.’ There was a double en-
tendre about what George Michael, another Highgate neighbour, might get up to in a public convenience.
The shoot took the whole of the autumn. Halfway through, rehearsals moved to the National Youth Theatre’s premises in north London. There were moments of strain. Victoria felt bruised when Geoff Posner suggested the first episode was ‘undirectable’. She worried there was not a single close-up of Bren. ‘No I am not queeny really in that respect,’ she confided to Jane Wymark, ‘but I do think when one has the main part, albeit in an ensemble piece, one should be top of the pecking order when it comes to being favoured by the camera. So I had to say that to him.’78 After the second episode she felt stung on hearing that Duncan Preston thought he was being underused and sent him a three-page letter explaining ‘how no one can have a huge share, and it is after all focused on Bren and Tony’.79 She told Paul Roberts that sending the fax, ‘for me, was a bit like invading Poland’ but that since doing so ‘I have felt fine’.80 She then sent a load of tongue twisters Duncan’s way to keep him occupied. The stresses were not helped by yet more sleep deprivation, despite which Victoria did not stint on the morning routine of breakfast, musical-instrument practice and the school run. One week she was cheered that Steps were rehearsing in the next room and secured their autographs for Grace. ‘It’s a lovely job and I’m glad to do it,’ she reminded herself. ‘I’ll be even more glad when I can just be Bren and not the poor writer.’81
The writing never really stopped. One night she took
the children up to stay with their old nanny then went home to write from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m., then got up for two full days’ recording of ‘Gamble’, the pre-Christmas episode. The episode included her kiss with Andrew Dunn ‘which I found very difficult to do for real, and Celia had to take us in a corner and direct us’.82 After the recording she and Geoff Posner drove up to Manchester to meet the Black Dyke Band, who were booked to play the theme tune, arranged by David Firman, live in the studio for the Christmas episode. The celebrated ensemble was led by the trumpeter James Watson, whom Victoria took to instantly: ‘I told him I used to play the trumpet but that I hadn’t played since I was seventeen, and he held out his trumpet and he said, “If you can play a scale on that I’ll give you a pound.” So I did, and he did.’83 For ‘Christmas’, after the cast reading on the Monday, she stayed up all night to fix the script, did two more pages for Wednesday, then found it was too long and ‘just cut my own lines to save moaning’.84 She also wrote lyrics for a sung version of the theme tune to play over the credits of ‘Minnellium’.
The company said goodbye to Julie in mid-November just as the second series started broadcasting on BBC One. Victoria saved the biggest rewrite for this final episode, which was recorded out of sequence owing to Julie’s availability. ‘Toast’ was set on 29 February. As the canteen is threatened with cuts and then closure, Bren puts her film knowledge to good use by entering a quiz show called Totally Trivial (hosted by Henry Kelly, who had also played himself in ‘Winnie’s Lucky Day’ in As Seen on TV). Then she is diverted to the deathbed of her mother, who reveals her real name is the same as her daughter’s – Brenda Furlong. In a touching finale of pure wish fulfilment, Victoria laid to rest the theme of maternal abandonment. ‘I’m sorry I’ve not been a very good mother,’ says Petula as she dictates her last will and testament on video and leaves a jiffy bag of cash, enabling Bren and Tony to begin a new life in Scotland as the canteen closes. Once more she stayed up all night after the Monday rehearsal. ‘But something was bugging me, couldn’t tell what,’ she told Richenda Carey.85 On the Thursday the cast and crew gathered at Victoria’s home to drink champagne and watch that night’s episode broadcast live. It was, she said, ‘an acknowledgement of all we’d done together’.86 She was unhappy with the Friday recording and, after watching a tape of the episode with Geoffrey, rewrote it on Saturday morning before the company gathered to shoot dinnerladies for the thirty-second and last time. ‘When the cast assembled for notes I told them I thought it was bad last night, and that we could really pull it off tonight if they got themselves together. Which they did.’87 After this final demonstration of her implacably high standards, at the wrap party she presented her co-workers with another bespoke plate, this time with tart and custard. There was a nice extra bauble for Victoria that month, as dinnerladies won the Comedy Award for Best New Comedy Programme.