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

by Jasper Rees

  For the summer half term, Victoria was looking forward to a family holiday in Barbados, despite the knowledge that her mother was close to death. Helen Wood had long since elected to stay in bed after a couple of falls and spent her last years devouring hundreds of books – in Victoria’s phrase, she avoided ‘books that had the temerity to be written post 1867’.55 Towards the end she had a form of dementia which caused her spiky personality to soften. She tried to remember poems she’d learned as a child and even read hymns, though she rejected Rosalind’s suggestion that she see a priest. ‘I just like the words,’ she replied. ‘I don’t believe there’s an afterlife.’ She duly died at the age of eighty-one on the last Sunday in May. Victoria had a show in Wellingborough that night and was due to fly on the Monday. According to Rosalind, she was reluctant to deny the children their holiday, though, in a fax dashed off by hand, she told Richenda Carey that she travelled with her sisters’ blessing. ‘Sisters say go on holiday – so I am – show went well … she died in her bed at least and peacefully.’56

  The day after returning home, Victoria flew to Leeds Bradford Airport to make it to the funeral at the crematorium in Skipton. Her brother Chris, who had barely seen his mother for forty years, was invited by his sisters to read out an article of hers for the Costume Society magazine. The songs recorded by Stanley and Helen were played. There was a surprise deputation from the Mape family, none of whom the Wood sisters had ever met. ‘The funeral went very well,’ Victoria reported. ‘We ignored my mother’s request to have no one but family at funeral.’57 Privately she confided to Geoffrey, who was unable to attend, that ‘she felt slightly guilty and embarrassed about how little she felt emotionally about her mother’s death’, while she conceded to Rosalind that she wished she’d been there to help organise the funeral. Helen’s death sparked a conversation between Rosalind and her younger sister that would continue for years: ‘I felt that Vic was too hard on our mother and tried to suggest that her behaviour was because of her own harsh upbringing in a big family. She was probably a bit neglected herself. While Vic did soften, she still felt strongly that Mother loved having babies but didn’t like children very much.’

  Helen may not have believed in an afterlife, but she was granted one anyway when Victoria paid instant tribute to her by writing her into her set as an eccentric and stoical figure:

  She said you should put up with everything, which is a very northern thing, it’s a very Lancashire thing. And that’s how she was brought up, to put up with everything. Because she was brought up in the 1920s, very poor, little tiny house in Moss Side. She said to me one year they were so poor they didn’t have a coat. None of them had coats. She didn’t have shoes. None of them had shoes. She didn’t have sense of humour. That was just her.

  She called the show Victoria Wood At It Again. The title came from Sunny Side Up, the radio sitcom she wrote in 1977. (‘I had a marvellous catchphrase,’ says an ex-ventriloquist. ‘He’s at it again.’) Anyone reading the tour programme beforehand might have sensed that Victoria was preparing to be autobiographical. There were no joke ads or fake articles, just the transcript of an illuminating conversation with Richard E. Grant, an ardent fan who knew much of As Seen on TV by heart. They occasionally met for lunch at the Crypt café under St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, where he would quote her lines at her or imitate her signature gesture of pushing up her sleeves. ‘She asked me to officially interview her,’ he says, ‘having previously shared and compared our oddball childhoods, the common denominator of which was a profound sense of loneliness within our families. Being an outsider, looking in, was something we unexpectedly shared.’ She thanked him by baking a sugar-free fruitcake and sending it in the post.

  The through-line of Victoria’s career in stand-up demanded that she draw on her recent medical history. ‘I’ve been asked to take over in the Vagina Monologues,’ she wrote in an early draft. ‘I don’t know if I’ve got enough material.’ She had barely walked onstage before she was mentioning her menopause and, for the first time in public, her eating disorder. ‘The madness of women is what a lot of it’s about,’ she explained several weeks into the tour. ‘It’s nice to say, “Yes, we are barmy and poor old men have to live with us.”’58 She moved on to describe the discovery of her lump and the array of indignities visited on her once she was in hospital – suppositories, undressing in front of others, internal inspections. Her surgeon recommended a bikini-line incision. ‘Do you wear a bikini?’ ‘Oh, come on,’ she replied. The line was greeted by a rush of knowing laughter – by now Victoria’s audience were almost as familiar with her body, and her ongoing issues with it, as she was. They were less prepared for a frank description of her pubic arrangements. The lights came down on the first half before she could go the whole hog and bare her scar.

  It was not exactly her own hysterectomy Victoria was describing, and yet it wasn’t not hers. ‘I’ve never let it get so near to my own experience before,’ she said. ‘This is very based on what actually happened to me. I wasn’t scared to do it any more. I wasn’t trying to hide behind something. I’ve got nothing to prove, and I wanted to grant myself the freedom to talk about what I wanted to talk about. It’s not a confessional, and it’s not therapy; it is just jokes, but it is very rooted in what I’ve just been doing.’59 Gone, as a result, were the capering yarns featuring made-up friends, and gags about royalty, although some regular riffs survived. Her convalescence gave her a way in to describe the latest developments in terrible daytime television. There was some recycling from All the Trimmings – namechecks for ER and Ann Widdecombe (other targets included Vanessa Feltz, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Dimmock, Elaine Paige and, one final time, Pam Ayres).

  The big change was the absence of a grand piano – ‘a total anachronism,’ Victoria had decided.60 She finally achieved her long-cherished ambition not to pepper the show with songs. This meant she was less reliant on Geoffrey’s help. ‘She thought my skill had been getting her on and off,’ he explains, ‘getting her to the piano and back. She was sick of it and wanted a change.’ He did end up being her outside eye in the early performances, and nor could she do without songs altogether. Stacey Leanne Paige, unabashed in her vulgarity, tottered onstage at either end of the second half to love-bomb the audience with unfiltered Lancashire patter about shopping and shagging. The last of Victoria’s straight-talking northern grotesques, she sang a couple of songs, for which Victoria decided to hire an accompanist. She found Nick Skilbeck through the Royal Academy of Music and chose to make a feature of him. Entering for her encore, Stacey Leanne and her pianist hurried on adjusting their clothes, as if just interrupted backstage. In a final burst of energy, Victoria staggered back on in a puce wig and gym gear to close out the show with another of her clowning exercise routines given by flame-haired Pat, trainee instructor at Body Conscious Fitness Facility. Nick Skilbeck wrote the plinky music to go with it.

  Victoria had often struggled with the loneliness of solo touring, so it was a novel sensation to have another performer join her. As the tour continued, he took on a secondary role offstage. ‘We’d arrive at the theatre at four,’ he says, ‘and we’d find a piano somewhere and we would play duets. It was great fun. She had a lot of the music. Then during the tour we would try and fish out other stuff from music shops. “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” was one of our party pieces.’

  She found a second companion in the stage designer Lez Brotherston. Another As Seen on TV aficionado, he first met Victoria as a guest of Anne Reid at a dinnerladies recording and was invited to an early try-out to discuss designing a simple, colourful set for the tour, having recently done something similar for French and Saunders. He quickly became a sympathetic companion on shopping expeditions. Victoria always found talking to assistants excruciating, so he did it for her. On one trip they were in a Bond Street boutique looking for something to go under her Betty Jackson coats: ‘She said, “They won’t have anything to fit me.” I went in and said, “Do you have t
his in a large?” The girl was quite sniffy and said, “Of course we wouldn’t have.” My instant reaction was, “Don’t be so rude. It’s a yes-or-no question.” Vic was utterly gobsmacked. She would have run out of the shop mortified.’

  Victoria embarked on the tour thinking it would be her last, and jotted her initial feelings in a notepad: ‘I don’t want to stop being a comedian – it makes me very happy – and occasionally I do suffer from depression – it’s par for the course with comedians – it could’ve been worse – could’ve been golf.’

  Underlying this train of thought was a fear of becoming irrelevant. ‘I don’t want to get totally out of date,’ she said just as she set off on tour. ‘Which you just wouldn’t know. That’s the sad thing. I’d be going on doing jokes about Sanatogen. I don’t want to be like that. I want to leave when I want to leave.’61 She reassured her disappointed audience she wouldn’t retire till they’d gone home. But there was another disincentive to carry on. ‘Obviously the richest vein of comedy is living with children,’ she said, ‘and I can’t use it. Grace has said, “I don’t want you to talk about me.”’62 Grace was now twelve and, she says, ‘well old enough to pay attention. There were jokes about “my kids” that felt a bit hard to listen to. I’d asked her something like, “Did you mean that? Was that really about us?” and she would say, “No, of course it wasn’t. It was a joke; it wasn’t real,” and I think I wasn’t totally sure where that line was, so I probably drew one of my own. It wasn’t about us, but I think twelve-year-old me was more sensitive and worried.’ Henry, only just nine, found it easier to make the distinction. ‘I knew it wasn’t connected,’ he says. ‘I knew it was a joke.’ ‘I could do a whole act about Henry,’ his mother said, ‘and he wouldn’t mind a bit.’63

  Mainly the show was a portrait of a middle-aged marriage. Geoffrey, or a fictionalised ‘Geoffrey’, cropped up again and again – his Countdown jackets, his vasectomy (‘Didn’t tell me, the bloody liar! Said he was going to the garden centre’). She even imagined the psychological impact of her hysterectomy on his libido: ‘Does your husband’s penis panic and say, “Go back! It’s too big, too big, it’s too big!”?’

  In her initial notes Victoria went further than she would onstage: ‘We were both really busy, so I didn’t really see him and then I got very depressed – and I decided it was his fault. I had read one of those books – Men Are from Mars and Women Are Bloody Marvellous.’ She described visiting a therapist to ‘have a good moan once a week – my husband does this, my husband does that’. Victoria had not actually seen a therapist in several years, but this fictional therapist suggests a trial separation:

  I can’t – because it would be in the papers – and I’d have to be photographed coming out of the house like this – (grin) – or to stop it being in the papers I’d have to do an exclusive deal with Hello magazine – northern comedian bravely faces life of solitude and discusses plans for back garden, and I can’t be separated in Hello because I haven’t got enough rooms in house or enough outfits.

  None of this made it into the show. Instead it closed with Victoria’s description of their attempts to restore romance to the bedroom, thwarted by physical ailments – his hernia, her bunion and bad back, his dismal eyesight, her incontinence. She wrote it at the end of the first week of the tour – ‘it virtually wrote itself,’ she said.64 ‘I knew it wasn’t about me,’ says Geoffrey. ‘And it never really occurred to her that her audiences would think it was me.’

  Victoria travelled up and down England throughout July. In Manchester there was an alarming incident at the Palace when a cage on one of the lamps in the lighting rig broke and a glass bulb skimmed her body as it fell. After that the entourage gained a pair of lighting men, increasing to six the party who, at Victoria’s insistence, convened in the hotel afterwards for sandwiches and drinks. In August the Wood family gathered again for the wedding of Rosalind’s son Mazda. In September, as Victoria prepared for five nights in Nottingham, terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center. ‘I feel weighted down by it,’ she told Richenda Carey two days later. ‘I’m trying to put it out of my mind some of the time otherwise I couldn’t do the show which is after all what people have paid to see.’65 It was at one of these cathartic dates that Nick Skilbeck discovered how it felt to be alone onstage with Victoria and on the receiving end of her public’s tumultuous love and gratitude. ‘The audience as one rose and cheered,’ he says, ‘and she had to take a few steps backwards because it was just such a wave. The most instant, unanimous standing ovation was like a force of energy coming at you. She turned round to me and went “Whoa!”.’ When they came offstage they were both tearful.

  Six days after 9/11 Victoria was back the Royal Albert Hall. She was given another tour of the building, clambered onto the roof and wrote in the venue’s guestbook: ‘This will be the nearest I ever get to working with Vladimir Ashkenazy. Back for the 3rd (and last?) time.’66 One of her many guests was her surgeon Marcus Setchell, who wrote to applaud her gynaecological frankness: ‘Your de-mystifying of the whole operation etc does a great deal of service for other women’.67 Some of these women made themselves known to Victoria afterwards when she went down to sign merchandise. ‘I’ve had at least one hysterectomy a night coming to me at the stage door, offer to show me her scars,’ she said mid-run. ‘And they all say, “You’ve made us feel really good because you’re on stage jumping about and looking fit.”’68

  During the Albert Hall run she appeared on Parkinson alongside Ann Widdecombe. Always meticulously prepared for such appearances, she was expecting to be asked about The Sketch Show Story, shortly to be broadcast, but thanks to crossed wires Michael Parkinson focused on her live show. Caught on the hop, she found herself awkwardly trailing snippets from her act – ‘I was saying in my show … I was doing this thing in my show’ – and was annoyed in hospitality afterwards. Already going through another of her cooler phases with the BBC, she had no qualms about offering the option on her live show to ITV, whose controller of comedy Sioned Wiliam she met over a cup of tea and liked. Her performance was captured over two nights by John Birkin.

  After fourteen shows at the Albert Hall, Victoria permitted herself a drink or two at a small celebration. While the set was being dismantled, she joined Phil McIntyre staffers and some younger guests as they raced on office chairs around the corridor encircling the basement of the auditorium. Even as they shrieked hysterically, Victoria’s competitive instinct asserted itself. ‘I think that might be the happiest I’ve ever seen her,’ says Paul Roberts. ‘We took it really seriously. We let her win. First rule of promoting: the act always wins.’ After the tour ended, there were charity performances for old friends: one at the Old Laundry Theatre in Bowness run by the Glossops, then in Harrogate for Jessie’s Fund, founded by her old school friend Lesley Schatzberger, to help children in hospices express themselves through music. It was named after Lesley’s daughter, who had died of an inoperable brain tumour, and for two years Victoria had been its patron. The performance, along with a Lifeline appeal by Victoria on BBC One, raised £40,000.

  While she joked about a fictional marriage onstage, Victoria tipped off friends about fissures in her real marriage. To Richenda Carey she mentioned ‘frostinesses which don’t go on for long but while they do it’s Ugly Mouths all over the shop’.69 She admitted to feeling ‘very tired, and these last few weeks of me being away have put a strain on the old marriage … complicated … I just need to catch up with myself (photos still not in albums, that will tell you the measure of my exhaustion) and sit with myself.’70 It was a frequent topic in her nightly conversations on tour with Nick Skilbeck: ‘She was sad about it. She spoke a fair bit about it. I felt she was really trying to figure out what to do to make it work. I think that’s why the duets were useful – it was just a great distraction.’

  To some extent Victoria and Geoffrey had had the idea of a successful marriage projected onto them. ‘We didn’t find it particularly easy,’ he says
, ‘that the press had canonised us as a golden couple for whom everything was marvellous. We never denied it, because that would have been foolish, but we certainly didn’t present ourselves as that. On both sides there was some unthinking cruelty.’ Victoria hinted as much when Duncan Preston’s marriage ended in 1990. ‘How Geoff and I have never murdered each other over the last 14 years I don’t know,’ she wrote to him. ‘Apathy probably.’71 In the 1990s she and Geoffrey twice attempted marital counselling. They lasted longer the second time, until the counsellor started saying to Victoria, ‘Now you’ll understand this.’ ‘We’ve got to stop this,’ she told Geoffrey after one session. ‘She thinks I’m the woman off the telly.’ At the root of their difficulties was work and the absences it imposed. The two-year ordeal of dinnerladies placed immense strain on Victoria and those around her. Other than relishing the adrenalin surge of audience laughter, she admitted at the start of the tour to being ‘puritanical about almost everything else – working and getting up and filling every minute, always on at my children. I’m very hard to live with.’72 Over the years the subject of a trial separation, hinted at in Victoria’s draft script, had certainly come up. The squalls increased in frequency, and it became more difficult to recover from them. There was talk of Geoffrey moving round the corner in order to protect the children from domestic tempests but, whenever the subject came up, such a solution felt too radical. ‘I know from personal experience that marriages are hugely elastic, flexible changeable things, they can survive a huge amount if the will is there,’ she told Richenda Carey when recovering from her operation earlier in the year. ‘We have left off taking the final drastic step because of the children, and that has given us enough valuable breathing space to re trench, re group, have a bloody rest from all the aggro, and have another bash.’73