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

by Jasper Rees

  Her biggest coup – and placed as a statement at the top of the show – was to lure 007 onto the London Eye. Victoria cast herself as a silent temptress, all arched eyebrows and sultry moues under a white fur hat. As she headed for her assignation in the pod, a tall figure lowered his copy of the Beano to reveal the face of Roger Moore. ‘We want it to look glamorous and sophisticated (that’s your job, I’m not much help there),’ she told him beforehand.25 Moore donned a smart overcoat and black leather gloves to send himself up as an ageing Lothario. ‘Do you like Roger the Dodger,’ he purrs, ‘or do you prefer Minnie the Minx?’ The camera cut to the skyline as the two prepare to get down to business. ‘Can I just warn you, Roger?’ says a hitherto silent Victoria in flat northern vowels, ‘I’ve got really complicated pants on.’ She enjoyed her half-dozen revolutions in the pod with a former Bond more than she had anticipated. ‘He was so lovely, and he knew his words, which I didn’t expect. And he was staring down out of the window and there was a pod below us of children, and he said, “If I wasn’t in UNICEF I would flash those children.” It made me laugh.’26

  The original idea was that Victoria would be a Russian assassin seducing her way through 007s. Pierce Brosnan was approached: ‘I wondered if you fancied making any sort of a brief guest appearance. (I nearly typed “gusset” then, which wasn’t the sort of appearance I had in mind at all.) I’ve written a Bond sketch, which I don’t imagine for a moment you would be allowed to be in …’27 His swift agreement came through while they were filming ‘Plots and Proposals’ – he even asked if he and Victoria would smooch. ‘Whoo hoo is what I have to say,’ she replied. ‘Your fax has caused untold excitement here, everyone has rushed out to buy vitamin B and new bras, even John the director.’28 There was talk of flying to Los Angeles to film his bit. All she could tell him was that their scene would be set ‘probably in a hotel room’ and that the money ‘is weeny, so small I don’t have a key on the computer to type it with’.29 In the end her original hunch proved correct. Brosnan’s agent intervened to adjudge that the serving Bond could not be seen to mock the franchise.

  As usual, Victoria wrote more than would fit into the fifty minutes on offer. But where she and Geoff Posner used to ditch the sketches that earned the fewest laughs, with no studio audience she now had to choose before filming. The choice was based partly on her desire for the show to look cinematic. So the contemporary TV parodies, which tended to look cheaper, were culled, among them some of the sharpest and wittiest material Victoria ever discarded. ‘Where the North Is’, a spoof of heart-warming northern medical dramas like Peak Practice, would have starred Victoria as Winnie Bago, a much-loved district nurse who turns out to have no empathy. ‘A Bit of Spam’, written for Michael Gambon, had a laugh at the expense of maverick TV detectives who live miserably alone – Derek Spam’s quirk is that he is an extremely messy eater. There was no room for ‘Delia’s Back to Basics’, featuring advice on how to heat up cheap baked beans and eat them from the tin while gawping out of the window. Bob Monkhouse was to have presented a mock ad for coffins: ‘Hi! I’m Bob Monkhouse and I’m ordering my coffin now, while I’m still alive.’ The most impractical script was a potted history of British women in the twentieth century: ‘And now, a new fifty-two part drama – Bella Taylor Cookson’s – The House of Lolly Goggins.’ On length alone, it was the easiest to drop – thwarting Victoria’s plan to cast Daryl Hannah as Farrah Fawcett Majors. At the last minute a ninety-second song-and-dance number based on The Sound of Music which attacked politically correct casting was painfully axed to save £20,000. ‘With hindsight not the right decision,’ Victoria concluded.30

  It was only in the weeks before filming began that a postmodern framing device emerged. Victoria would arrive to rehearse her Christmas special in a community hall, to discover she was being filmed for a new digital channel called BBC Backstage. The idea rose out of the recent proliferation of branded channels. She imagined a slew of digital channels called things like BBC Knitwear, BBC Upmarket, BBC Wartime, BBC Good Old Days and BBC Braindead. In the community hall the head of digital, played by Hugh Laurie, introduces himself as John Malkovich (‘no relation’). Being John Malkovich having just opened, this was Victoria’s joke about the interchangeability of faceless managers in suits. And because Big Brother aired for the first time over the summer, cameras lurk behind a mirror in the ladies. Nichola Holt, one of the show’s first contestants, is seen peering into it.

  There was another source of her rage against the corporation. In June, just as she started writing, Peter Salmon faced criticism from the board of governors and the media, prompting Victoria to write bluntly to Greg Dyke, the new director general: ‘In seventeen years of working for the BBC [Peter Salmon] is the only executive who has ever bothered to make personal contact with me, to take an interest in what I was doing and how I felt about it … I don’t have to stay if I don’t feel appreciated. (And God knows appreciation has been very thin on the ground) … I think it’s worth saying that my loyalty to Peter has been a huge factor in me attempting to deliver you something special for Christmas night on BBC1.’31 (She was the only person to write such a letter. ‘Greg showed it me,’ says Salmon. ‘It was very touching.’) In a climactic snarl Victoria wrote a scene in which Bob Monkhouse asks for a cup of tea in the rehearsal-room canteen. ‘Do you have a BBC loyalty card?’ asks John Malkovich, who has been demoted to assistant head of tea-bar purchasing. Monkhouse looks puzzled. ‘Has anyone?’

  To populate the rehearsal room, there was an eleventh-hour casting offensive. The idea was to evoke the memory of The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show, with its array of surprise guests. In the most overt nod, Angela Rippon aims a high dance kick at a surveillance camera in the ladies’ loo. Betty Boothroyd, former Tiller Girl and outgoing speaker of the House of Commons, rubs shoulders with Lou Beale from EastEnders and Nora Batty from Last of the Summer Wine, The Royle Family creators Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash, and ‘H’ from Steps. Even Victoria couldn’t reel in the biggest fish of all. She asked Paul McCartney to be a ‘glimpse’ in the special, but he politely said no. ‘I know what you mean about not wanting to be on television too much,’ she replied, ‘in fact I’m thinking of not being in it myself.’32

  The show came together in November. It was ‘like doing five different films in a week,’ she reported, ‘good fun, but the pressure is on to deliver the minutage, with no chance of picking up the next day.’33 To match the look of so many different film styles, the originals were meticulously studied for reference. Victoria’s make-up designer Chrissie Baker was joined by production designer Grenville Horner and costume designer Yves Barre, who had both worked on The League of Gentlemen, and cinematographer Alastair Meux, who John Birkin knew from shooting commercials. Together they became experts in black and white cinema, studying Brief Encounter and A Christmas Carol for hours, and had several long meetings going over storyboards.

  The footage shot in the community hall also called for precision. ‘This fly on the wall stuff has to be so carefully plotted to look on the hoof and still catch all the dialogue,’ Victoria told Jane Wymark.34 The old guard, including several familiars from dinnerladies, were used to her exacting standards. Some guests weren’t. In ‘Brief Encounter’ Michael Parkinson – another link to Morecambe and Wise – was cast as Joe Buggersthorpe, a saucy railwayman inspired by Stanley Holloway. He told his co-stars that there was no need to run the lines as he knew them more or less. ‘Celia and I went white,’ says Richenda Carey, who had spent days learning to mimic the film’s sour station barmaid played by Joyce Carey. ‘We looked at him and said, “Oh, I don’t think that’s going to do.”’ Imelda Staunton, to whom Victoria gave exquisitely tailored dialogue as a hysterical Regency matriarch (‘Suppose? Suppose? You are very suppository, miss!’), knew instinctively what was needed. ‘The most important thing was delivering Vic’s lines absolutely to the nth degree. She knew she couldn’t tell every actor how to say the lines; she knew that she had that
battle with herself. But she was always right. What can you add to what she’s written? Not a lot.’

  Another old habit of Victoria’s was to be painfully shy around her guests, especially if it involved schmoozing over a meal. One night, dinner in the hotel was attended by Alan Rickman, Geraldine McEwan, Pete Postlethwaite, Derek Jacobi, Bill Paterson and Imelda Staunton. Jemma Rodgers begged not to be left to hold the fort: ‘I said, “You have to stay till at least the main course is through.” She literally finished her plate and off she went to bed.’ At the same time Victoria enjoyed using Jemma to play a trick on her co-stars in the make-up truck. ‘I’d come while Vic was being done alongside some huge Dame or Sir and ask if she wanted a tea then when the others assumed I was the runner, they asked for tea as well, she’d say, “Can I introduce you to my new producer?” It worked every time.’

  The trickiest part of the shoot in the community hall was a sparkly Yuletide anthem, reprising the tune from the ‘Brassed Up’ sketch. It featured dancers, a children’s choir, two sexist northern comics and a singing quartet of Robbins siblings in Christmas woollies – Ted, Kate and two of their sisters. Victoria popped out of a giant Christmas pudding in the guise of Ann Widdecombe singing her own praises:

  Ann Widdecombe, Ann Widdecombe,

  I’m woman through and through. (This is true.)

  Exuberant, protuberant,

  I inspire lust with my bust.

  In September Victoria wrote to the shadow home secretary to seek her blessing. ‘The joke hopefully is in the incongruity of the situation, rather than poking fun at you,’ she explained. ‘I only thought of it because you have such a wonderful name, and the tune I was working on had a four note phrase to which, try as I might, I could only put the words, “Ann Widdecombe” … I won’t do it you would prefer I didn’t.’35 Mo Mowlam, she added, ‘doesn’t scan’. In early November Jemma Rodgers wrote to the MP even suggesting she do a walk-on part at the end. Instead Victoria closes the piano lid. ‘What d’you think?’ she says. ‘Dunno,’ shrugs the youthful new head of BBC, Maxine Peake. ‘Don’t really watch telly at Christmas.’

  Once edited together the show was screened to an audience in the BBC radio theatre whose laughter was recorded and added in. Finally, a title was needed. Throughout production there was no name for the show beyond ‘Victoria Wood Christmas Special’. It was only in early December that it became Victoria Wood with All the Trimmings. On Christmas evening her unsurpassable blend of savage satire, loving parody and celebrity cavalcade was shown to the nation. Julie Walters spoke for an audience of more than eight million when, before Victoria went to bed that night, she sent a fax. ‘Brilliant! Brilliant! And I say again – Brilliant!’36 Victoria, who watched it with the family plus Geoffrey’s brother and sister-in-law, wasn’t so sure. ‘When I saw it myself on the night,’ she told Peter Salmon, ‘I thought then it could have been packaged up better and been a bit friendlier, but it’s awfully hard to tell what’s best when you’re in the middle of it.’37 She had anxiety dreams about the viewing figures and, up at Mole Barn after Christmas, ‘couldn’t shake off that feeling that I had somehow let the BBC down by not denting Coro’s figures’.38 Phil McIntyre drove over for tea and assured her ‘you can’t beat the Street etc, and I felt a bit better’.39 Such was her state of worry that she broke her self-imposed embargo to read a positive review and a gossip-column item suggesting Ann Widdecombe had enjoyed it.

  Early in 2001 the BBC were soon in touch to point out that the production had gone over budget. Though a demoralising coda, it didn’t dampen Victoria’s desire to get straight back into bed with them. There was some talk of ‘another dose of Trimmings on Xmas Day’, which thanks to all the unfilmed scripts was already half-written.40 She duly met the new BBC One controller Lorraine Heggessey – ‘she seemed a very nice woman and it was a mile away from being patronised by men in suits’ – but didn’t leap at her suggestion of two half-hours in lieu of a special.41 Instead a proposal came in to front a history of sketch comedy. Victoria decided to say yes because, she explained, ‘I get fed up with people presenting programmes on subjects they know nothing about. I think I know about sketches.’42 There was a pattern here. A year earlier she fronted a documentary about a sitcom soon after finishing her own. Now she was to repeat the process with sketch comedy. It was as if she itched to explain herself after the event.

  To stamp her signature on the programme, Victoria could not resist writing more sketches, to be directed by John Birkin. One was a canny meta-sketch in which she dressed up as a working-class housewife from yesteryear who answers the door to a middle-class couple, played by Celia Imrie and Duncan Preston, asking her to perform an old-school sketch with them. ‘I don’t do subtleties, nuances of character or anything intellectual,’ Victoria says. ‘Or spam.’ ‘Any Proust gags?’ asks Celia. ‘Ooh no, you want Mrs Monty Python for that, at 33 Smartarse University Humour Avenue for Proust.’ Her other sketch was inspired by the recent return of Crossroads, which she disembowelled all over again with another episode of Acorn Antiques. In this version the soap is more of a calamity than ever – every cue missed, most lines forgotten, actors nakedly angry, non-actors flagrantly in shot. And the plot is more extreme. Mrs Overall dispenses tequila and crack and is shot by a burglar. As she lies on the floor an irate Bo Beaumont hollers, ‘I’m sorry! Am I acting with anybody at all? It wasn’t my idea to come back. Sir Peter Trevor [is] all panting for a glimpse of my Gertrude.’

  In her introduction Victoria argued that one of the joys of the sketch is that it’s not stand-up: ‘You’re not standing there by yourself, running the risk of alcoholism, loneliness, depression and varicose veins.’ Notwithstanding, after four years away, in 2001 she was to go back on tour. She spent much of January at the gym ‘trying to get myself fit after the filming and Christmas,’ she told Amie Beamish, ‘but I’ll start writing it soon.’43 They met up a few days later in Birmingham, where Victoria got back in the swing with a cabaret booking. Another cabaret was booked for Harrogate in March.

  As the date approached, Victoria could no longer ignore mounting pain and tiredness, which impaired a half-term trip to Florida, not helped by Brits in waterparks forever saying ‘hello, Bren’. She started to feel ill on the plane home but ‘thought I had just picked up a virus in Mickey Mouse land (foot and mouse disease)’.44 On a visit to Phil McIntyre’s office he summoned his doctor who diagnosed a chest infection and suggested she have a scan on a lump in her stomach. Two days later she struggled down to Geoffrey’s office in Kentish Town. ‘There was an insistent knock on the front door. She was bent double and said, “You’ve got to take me to hospital – I can’t walk, I can’t move.”’ They hurried to their GP, who sent her in an ambulance to the Whittington Hospital, where she was given a scan. ‘I had this huge fibroid,’ she explained, ‘but I didn’t notice it because I just thought I’d got bigger, because I’ve got such an odd body image because of having an eating disorder.’45 She had never been in hospital before other than to give birth and, once the painkiller had done its work, her comic instinct asserted itself: ‘When I was sitting waiting for a scan next to a woman who had come from Holloway prison, between two policemen, I thought this is quite funny.’46 Advised to stay in overnight, she was put on a drip, which she accidentally wrenched out while tidying her cubicle. She asked for it to be reinserted – ‘but they never connected it to anything, so for the next 24 hours I had the thing that hurt but not the thing that was supposed to help. I thought, this is really mad.’47 Without asking for one she was given a private room, but she soon panicked that on an NHS ward she remained a sitting duck for the press. Geoffrey contacted Marcus Setchell, who had delivered Henry, and she was soon moved to the Portland, where she had an emergency hysterectomy. After five nights she went home to continue her convalescence, while Victoria’s publicist Neil Reading issued a short statement, triggering an avalanche of get-well-soon cards. ‘Don’t forget to be kind to yourself,’ wrote Julie Walters before leaving
for the Academy Awards – she was nominated for her performance in Billy Elliot.48

  Recovery was supposed to take six weeks – her doctor addressed a letter to her insurers to that effect. Victoria gave herself three. By mid-March she was ‘feeling much better, possibly because I have been reading Endurance, about Shackleton’s doomed trip around Antarctica … Made me feel the odd operation was neither here nor there.’49 A week later when her management arrived to discuss rearranging her tour, the meeting was ‘v jolly in that they had expected me to be bent double in a nightie, they were pleasantly relieved to see me quite nimble and clothed and compos’.50 Most of the original dates were cancelled and others were moved to July and early September, when Victoria had hoped to take the children on another adventure Down Under. That tour was regretfully sacrificed.

  By early April Victoria was trying to write stand-up, though not always succeeding. She distracted herself by clearing green algae from her roof terrace and garden: ‘Every day when I was writing the show I’d think, ‘Just do a bit more and then you can get out the water blaster.”’51 She happily ducked out of the BAFTAs when All the Trimmings was nominated, encouraging Jemma Rodgers and John Birkin to accept the award if the show won (which it didn’t). Rehearsals for the new show were attended by Betty Jackson, who clothed Victoria more stylishly than ever with knee-length coats in navy gabardine and red leather. ‘They have three sets of measurements for me,’ she told Richenda Carey, ‘a less bosomy set from when I was doing the allnight dinnerladies run, the fibroid set when I was bigger round the middle, and my usuals.’52 She hired a new tour manager – Emma Cope had just finished touring with the League of Gentlemen. Her first warm-up, postponed from April to May, was a charity performance at the Stables in Buckinghamshire. More practice gigs followed within striking distance of London, and fresh material was dropped in piece by piece which she wrote on the fly between costume shopping, songwriting and Henry’s trumpet exam. One day she drove to Ealing for a wig fitting and saw a huge poster of herself: ‘I thought oh give us a break, I’ve not even collected the bloody wig yet.’53 The image, shot back in February, was a straight close-up at her behest – ‘I am tired of standing up trying to look like a comedian,’ she reasoned. ‘If people don’t know by now what I do then let’s just forget the whole thing, I will just run tombolas.’54