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

by Jasper Rees

  Despite feeling physically and mentally ‘wrecked’, and out of condition having had so little time for exercise, she had only a day to learn the vast amount of words she’d written for The Nearly Complete and Utter History of Everything.88 Unlike much of the rest of the show, in which male comics did sketches about the deep past, Victoria set hers in a salon. It was ‘chosen for ease and simplicity. Thora can sit down and not learn any lines, and I can make it up as I go along and wear a wig.’89 As the customer, Thora Hird read her few lines very slowly off cue cards. As the hairdresser, Victoria prattled about her three gay husbands and her cat Robert De Niro. They had to do three takes, and ‘died on our arses,’ she told Michael Parkinson. ‘The whole thing was received in baffled silence … but the wig was bloody marvellous.’90 It was shown on the second day of 2000.

  Victoria’s true greeting to the new millennium was seen on BBC One on 30 December. ‘Minnellium’ closed with fireworks exploding through the window at the back of the canteen and the sound of Victoria singing along to the dinnerladies theme tune – her first new song for television since All Day Breakfast in 1992. In counterpoint to the fireworks, the low-key lyrics painted a wistful picture:

  All the dreams that you had when it all lay before you

  All the plans that you made, all the things you would do

  All the schemes that you knew time would bring to fruition

  Did they happen? Not so far, at least not to you.

  The episode, instantly repeated, reached a spectacularly large audience of fifteen million, putting the cap on another mighty feat in Victoria’s career as an entertainer: to try her hand at sitcom and conjure up an instant classic. But the personal cost was high. At the peak of her triumph, she was thousands of miles away at a luxury resort hotel in Kenya, where she performed in the open air on a stage adorned with a spectacular sail. The fee for the booking was a ten-day stay for the family, including five days on safari in the Masai Mara, on one of which they rose at four in the morning to go up in a hot-air balloon. The year, the century and the millennium ended with yet another all-night vigil as Victoria and Geoffrey stayed up to see the sun rise over the Indian Ocean.

  ‘Next year,’ she predicted, ‘will be easy compared with this.’91

  19

  TRIMMING

  ‘I feel sorry for poor old Debbie McGee. What has she done wrong in this world really? She fell in love with a bald magician. We’ve all done that.’

  Victoria Wood At It Again, 2001

  ‘For the first time – the bare bosoms of … Celia Imrie, Victoria Wood, Julie Walters (all hidden by tea urns, sieves and pianos but they don’t need to know that).’1 Early in the new century, Victoria felt a craving. The previous April, the Rylstone and District branch of the Women’s Institute released a calendar to raise money for leukaemia research. Eleven Yorkshirewomen allowed themselves to be photographed wearing no clothes and soon became an international news story. Victoria still yearned to make a feature film and, when she read that the ladies were being romanced by a film company, decided to see if she could persuade them to entrust her with their story.

  Rylstone was barely any distance from Mole Barn. A local builder she employed spread the word along the dale and she was soon declaring herself a fan to Moyra Livesey, aka Miss May: ‘It’s a gift of an idea for a writer, especially a Northern female writer, and believe me, I wouldn’t treat it casually: done properly it would be moving and funny, hopefully. And with bosoms thrown in for added value!’2 Victoria enthused to her agents that they were in a fairly strong position ‘because I am (I think) so obviously the ideal person to write the screenplay and take one of the parts …’3 Victoria wrote to all the calendar girls, blaming her absorption in dinnerladies for not having had ‘such a blindingly wonderful idea’ sooner.4 Her serious pitch reminded them that ‘my best work has always had that combination of humour and sadness. I don’t think really you can do anything true to life without both … Sometimes,’ she concluded, ‘you feel a project has your name on it. I feel it has everything as a story … and I want to do it!’5 While Victoria waited to meet them, she could not help tipping off her friends. ‘It is something you just might want to do,’ she told Julie Walters.6 She was giddy at the prospect of baring her ‘la las’, she told Celia Imrie. ‘It would be funny to have them up on the silver screen after all this time, wouldn’t it?’7

  It soon became apparent that there was a schism within the calendar girls. Some had no idea that others had been negotiating with a film company for far longer than they initially suspected. The excluded group welcomed Victoria’s interest. ‘They thought she was absolutely ideal,’ says Moyra Livesey, who invited all eleven ladies to meet Victoria and Phil McIntyre in her kitchen. ‘She spoke for about half an hour. She mentioned people she hoped to be involved. It really sounded good.’ Phil McIntyre added that the women would be co-owners of the film. The same evening Victoria had a pricklier encounter with the other group. One of them brought their son, a solicitor who, Victoria reported, ‘needs to look to his manners’.

  A few days later, fearing the rival company backed by Disney’s international distributor Buena Vista had the upper hand, Phil McIntyre offered £75,000 for the rights, plus a third share of profits and a third ownership of the film. Victoria could write quickly, so the film could be in production by the autumn, and without any American interference. But the core group led by Angela Baker, whose husband’s illness and death was the catalyst for the calendar, could not be lured. Victoria was ‘bitterly disappointed,’ wrote her manager. ‘In the eighteen years I’ve known her, no other project has overwhelmed her as this one has done.’8 He made a final offer of a non-returnable fixed fee of £250,000 whether the film was made or not. A media lawyer advised the calendar girls that this was the most generous offer he had seen for a British film of this scale. Six weeks after first having the idea, Victoria gave up the chase. ‘I pulled out because it was dragging on,’ she told Julie. ‘So I’m not doing much at the moment, which makes a lovely change.’9

  The focus in the household was on navigating secondary-school entrance for Grace. No sooner did she get into her preferred choice, a state girls’ grammar in Hampstead Garden Suburb, than they were apologetically asking Victoria about a possible fundraiser. There were other claims on her. She turned down an invitation from Sam Mendes to do a summer residency in the intimate Donmar Warehouse. One request she could not resist was a plea for help from the Masara family she had filmed in Zimbabwe in 1995. A forlorn letter from Forward Masara broke the news that his father had died. She sent £1,500 via Comic Relief, who cheekily requested another sketch.

  In March Victoria made her belated debut on Parkinson. It was a chance to lay a nagging memory to rest from twenty years earlier, when a researcher from the talk show went to Morecambe to pump Victoria for anecdotes and she had clammed up. Now, with the entire programme given over to her, she was full of stories about the dysfunctional world of Birtle Edge House, her feelings of failure until she met Julie, plus peeing in pint glasses backstage at the Bush. ‘I feel I’m not coming out of this very well,’ she said after telling another yarn against herself. The memories were polished into glinting gems which Victoria delivered as a kind of sit-down stand-up routine. To project a sense that this wasn’t another stage performance, Geoffrey suggested a switch from her regulation Betty Jackson suit. Instead she bought a black leather jacket and had ‘a few extra blonde bits put into my fringe for luck’.10

  The show called for her to perform three songs at the piano. Having barely written any in several years, she chose ‘Andrea’, quirkily arranged by David Firman, and the bittersweet theme tune to dinnerladies, which, lacking a second verse, was slightly exposed as a full-length song, before finishing on ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’. ‘It was quite a strain,’ she told Richenda Carey, ‘not just the interview, which had to cover so much ground, and not having any umming or erring, but the songs, two of which were with the band, and I hardly ever sing wi
th a band.’11 Broadcast a day later, it reached an audience of seven million. Victoria and Geoffrey were not among them as they dashed away for a weekend in Paris where, to avoid compatriots, they froze on the top deck of a river-cruise boat. Soon after she got back there was a letter from the Bush Theatre, chuffed at their mention and asking if she’d put in a good word with their landlords Bass the brewery, who were planning refurbishments. ‘I personally didn’t mind weeing into pint pots,’ she duly wrote, ‘but no doubt most performers would prefer a lavatory. Any chance?’12

  Then the Radio Times asked for a list of her favourite sitcom scenes for its survey of great comedy moments. The only show from which she made two selections was Dad’s Army. The classic sitcom was at the forefront of Victoria’s mind because she had agreed to front a documentary about it. ‘She was very hard to convince,’ says the producer Gerard Barry, ‘but I eventually got her to accept lunch, and there received a grilling about my own knowledge of Dad’s Army. Hers was, of course, encyclopaedic.’ Having prepped by watching forty episodes, in April she reported for duty in Thetford in Norfolk, where the sitcom’s exterior scenes were filmed. On the first night they had dinner with the writers David Croft and Jimmy Perry, and Victoria was thrilled to josh and share stories about the history of sitcom. During the three-day shoot she togged up in Home Guard khaki and got behind the wheel of Jones the butcher’s delivery van, which she drove jerkily onto the A11. ‘Now I have to warn you,’ she said from the driving seat, ‘this could be the only documentary entirely made in second gear.’ In her pieces to camera, delivered as if off the cuff, she praised Dad’s Army’s vanishing virtues. ‘It’s celebratory and it’s positive and it’s innocent,’ she argued, and ‘full of wit, pathos, character, slapstick, farce, overplaying, underplaying.’ And because it was set in the past, it could never age. ‘Wish I’d thought of that,’ she concluded. In hymning Dad’s Army she was making a case for dinnerladies without once mentioning it.

  A couple of weeks later her sitcom was up for two BAFTAs. ‘I really don’t want to go,’ she moaned. ‘Geoff is doing a barmitzvah, and I haven’t got any clothes, and we won’t win, and whinge whinge …’13 Dinnerladies didn’t win. Having guest-edited the magazine only a year earlier, and just submitted her list of sitcom scenes, she shared her dismay with Richenda Carey at seeing her show described in the Radio Times as ‘not a sit com, just a load of people doing stand up’.14 That month nine million watched Don’t Panic! The Dad’s Army Story.

  Peter Salmon at BBC One had made it clear at the start of the year that he was eager for more comedy from her pen – ‘series, mini-series, specials. Whatever! Even a Christmas 2000 treat would be welcome.’15 In May Victoria went in to discuss making her first Christmas special in eight years, though she was not yet certain what it would be. ‘I know it will have music and sketches in it,’ she mused, ‘but the finer details escape me at the present.’16 All she knew for certain was that she wanted to do without a stand-up monologue and an audience – ‘the days of the studio audience and the big expanse of lit floor have gone for ever,’ she argued in a confidential outline – and to work with a new producer.17 She wrote to tell Geoff Posner of her choice and met several candidates in June: ‘One I liked a lot, though she was very nervous, and a bit gauche.’18 Jemma Rodgers, who had produced two series with the League of Gentlemen, learned that Victoria picked her because ‘she wanted to change what people perceived her as. She definitely wanted to go darker.’ As they began to discuss the show, she had to get used to Victoria’s method of circling round an idea. ‘Once it’s written we’ll all know what it’s about,’ Victoria explained. ‘Something will happen when I start writing, and till then we’ll both be in the dark to a certain extent.’ Mainly what she was aiming for was ‘something that hadn’t been done before’.19

  Plenty of new television tropes and styles presented themselves as targets. Adaptations of novels by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens abounded in the 1990s, so Victoria set about scripting note-perfect parodies of A Christmas Carol and Pride and Prejudice. The new cruise-ship superstar Jane McDonald was a sitting duck, prompting Victoria to write a mini-docusoap about sea-borne crooner Stacey Jane Leigh, a massive egotist who boasts of having ‘a good big dose of plain Lancashire humility’. Later she renamed her Stacey Leanne Paige.

  There was a more personal inspiration for other sketches. Having helped to restore the fortunes of Carnforth station in Great Railway Journeys, Victoria wrote a loving treatment of Brief Encounter. ‘I’m Celia Johnson (I’m so like her as you know),’ she informed Celia Imrie, ‘and you are the friend Dolly, and you get your skirt ripped off by a train and come in in just your furs, jacket hat and underskirt (don’t worry, no bloomer work).’20 In order to salvage something from the calendar-girls debacle, she imagined the WI going about their business, but with a twist. Her handwritten draft said it should be ‘based totally on ER … The accents and acting styles are American. The look is authentic English middle class.’ She had originally wanted dinnerladies to be filmed like the high-octane medical drama. As an ailing tea urn was given emergency resuscitation by WI ladies speaking in wobbly American accents, the bizarre clash of styles would belatedly come to fruition.

  As for music, there was a period piano duet for Hilary and Valerie Malory, both dressed to the nines and shot in the style of The Billy Cotton Band Show. Victoria wrote the sketch – and the tune in the style of Winifred Atwell she called ‘Keyboard Collywobbles’ – to perform with Anne Reid, who in some trepidation went to Highgate to practise timing the dialogue to the music. ‘Brassed Up’, which took the mickey out of stubbornly sexist northerners, enabled her to revisit her youth as a trumpeter in Bury’s military band. She had taken up the trumpet again in recent months – Jim Watson of the Black Dyke Band had been giving her lessons and in due course they took to playing ‘very hard duets … what I don’t know is if after I’ve gone he reels out of the room going “Fucking hell I could hardly keep a straight face.”’21 The sketch told of the Associated Fettlers and Warp and Weft Adjusters Silver Band, facing extinction thanks to the demise of the fettling industry. Victoria cast herself as a fettler’s daughter made good, who proposes to save band and town if only she can join. The role required plenty of trumpet practice. ‘They play the second eight bars,’ she wrote in the script. ‘Woman joins in, plays to the end, duetting with first trumpet – all very beautiful and moving. The men are quietly impressed.’ She gave her character the surname of Eckerslike – her nickname for Peter Eckersley.

  It was to be the most expensive show of its type the BBC had ever made, in which Victoria’s hope was to flood the screen with big names. ‘I have a long list of people I would love to use in this special,’ she told Richenda Carey, who yearned to be one of them. ‘All I can do is write a load of stuff and then put the best people in it, and hopefully there will something that only you can do.’22 As ever, first on the list was Julie Walters, who was free for one day only and was put down for two decrepit crones: Scrooge’s housekeeper Mrs Humbletypop and a cockney pensioner smiling pluckily through the Blitz on a 1940 newsreel. Victoria played her daughter; in the same sketch Henry Durham would make his screen debut as a capering urchin in a gas mask. Not to be upstaged, Grace Durham dressed up as a bonneted extra in the Austen spoof ‘Plots and Proposals’.

  Such was Victoria’s status that she could dream of approaching almost anyone. ‘We are on full actor alert on Monday, Alana Rickman and Ricardo E Grant,’ she wrote before shooting ‘Plots and Proposals’ at Squerryes Court, a stately home in Kent.23 They were joined by Imelda Staunton, whom Victoria had befriended in Kenya at the turn of the millennium. Victoria didn’t quite reel in everyone she wanted. Early cast lists had Michael Gambon as Scrooge. Judi Dench had to pull out. The withdrawals were often caused by the logistical headache of assembling so many busy stars when budgetary constraints called for constant changes of date and location. When Frances de la Tour was suddenly unavailable, Victoria reluctantly cast hersel
f as a Regency sexpot. As Geoff Posner once had, Jemma Rodgers was forever persuading Victoria to be in more sketches. ‘It’s all very well to give the best parts to the Dames and Sirs,’ she told her, ‘but people want to see you.’ Popular celebrities made up the numbers. A mob-capped Delia Smith bangs on about recipes, while Alan Titchmarsh plays a mutton-chopped gardener.

  This gathering needed an unflappable director. Jemma Rodgers suggested John Birkin, who had experience wrangling stars on French and Saunders and was highly organised, insisting on plotting out scenes with storyboards. ‘Working with a new director is very jolly,’ Victoria enthused.24