by Jasper Rees
Victoria was far too preoccupied with Mrs Last. Having begun on the first draft in July, she submitted it in October, provisionally titling it Nella’s War. ‘I was completely bowled over by it,’ says Piers Wenger. ‘As a fan it had everything I had dreamt of. Reading it was like sitting down to watch the Christmas special but only you would be allowed to see it.’ Many of the scenes which made it into the final drama were already there, but there was a lot of clutter, faithfully carried over from the diary. What was already in place was a sense of Nella as a woman struggling with depression, or ‘nerves’, and her fear of the petty snobs and casual racists who run the WVS, led by the kindly but patronising Mrs Waite. As her confidence grows, Nella’s seething rage at her husband intensifies. Victoria also revelled in Nella’s humour, which was encouraged by Mrs Waite to boost morale. None of her jokes being recorded in the diary, Victoria made some up: ‘What’s the difference between the dog that does you know what on the front steps here and Hitler? No? Hitler lifts his arm up!’ This didn’t reach the final script, while comic dialogue more clearly in Victoria’s style did. ‘God help any plane you’re flying,’ someone says to a young RAF recruit. ‘You can’t aim a forkful of mash to your mouth without an accident.’
As she handed in the draft, Victoria made it clear that she wanted to work once more with Gavin Millar, with whom she had remained in contact since he directed Pat and Margaret. ‘Piers and I were a little bit dismayed, because he was very old school,’ says Damien Timmer. ‘We would test the waters, but it was clear she wanted Gavin.’ Further drafts – the second was completed by early November – were forwarded to Millar for comment. Although it wasn’t his official job title, for the next nine months Piers Wenger became Victoria’s script editor: ‘I was desperate to be that person to her. She was amazingly trusting of me, given that we had never worked together before. I don’t think she ever actually asked me what my job was.’ The role he performed was similar to that played by Robyn Slovo in Pat and Margaret: to conduct an unstinting search for the emotional heart of the story. Sometimes with Damien Timmer, he started going to Highgate, where Victoria got on her hands and knees to spread pages from the various drafts on the floor of her office as they sought a viable structure.
A professional relationship flowered into a friendship. It deepened as they set off on a series of cold wintry field trips to Barrow, which, despite having lived nearby in Morecambe, Victoria had never previously visited. Her first period drama now allowed her to channel a passion for historical research. Staying in a hotel in the Lake District, they visited the local records library to find out more about the Last family and knocked on the doors of people who remembered Nella. Among them was Nella’s old neighbour, now in her eighties. Victoria quizzed her about an incident in the diary in which Nella’s GP asked her to take in a newborn baby whose mother was ill. ‘I said to her next-door neighbour, “What about that baby?” She said, “That never happened.” I thought, well, if that never happened, what else never happened? So I just had to pick my own story of my own version of what happened. In the end you’re trying to keep the essence of what you felt when you read it.’11 Victoria took this as permission to make up diary entries rather than quote verbatim. They also visited the pebble-dashed semi where Nella lived during the war: ‘I said to the rather baffled man who let me in, “Did you know this house was bombed?” He said, “Yes, I did, because one day I came in and shut the door and the ceiling fell in.”’12 Their moment of highest excitement came when locating the Lasts’ first marital home, where they found a sign, painted over, in which the words ‘E Last and Son’ could be faintly discerned. ‘That was such an electrifying moment,’ says Piers. ‘We went back to the hotel and talked and talked and talked.’
Meanwhile, for background Victoria pored over the minutes of Barrow WVS meetings, old newspapers, wartime radio bulletins and 1940s editions of the Radio Times, which advised her what the Lasts would have been listening to. Much of it she knew from her father’s collection of 78s. ‘I didn’t want to just say, “Get me some Glenn Miller and Vera Lynn.” Actually Nella Last couldn’t stand Vera Lynn. She couldn’t stand Gracie Fields or George Formby.’ These aversions made their way into the script. So, for a while, did an in-joke about Arthur Askey, the wartime comic who was a judge on New Faces. Partly to seek their informal blessing, Piers tracked down Nella’s three grandsons, one of whom confirmed Victoria’s hunch that Clifford Last was homosexual.
As with Pat and Margaret, the demands of rewriting tested Victoria. ‘She got a bit tired and fed up with it at one point,’ says Piers, ‘and I had to have a bit of a conversation about that. She was very hungry for rigorous and detailed feedback. She said, “I just know if I rewrite it ten times, it will be ten times better when we make it.”’ In fact, there were nine drafts, to work on which she resumed her old habit of sometimes writing all night. In the early hours she would drive the two miles from Highgate to Primrose Hill and post a disc through her producer’s letterbox. By March 2006 the drama’s title had changed to Housewife, 49.
While she was preoccupied by the Second World War, another approach captured Victoria’s attention, this time from the production company Tiger Aspect, who were keen to collaborate on a documentary. Victoria had her mother’s obsession to thank for the initial pitch, which seemed underdeveloped. ‘They said, “Do you want to go all round the world to places called Victoria?” I said, “Oh yeah!” And then I thought, that’s not a programme; that’s just a holiday. I said, “It’ll have to be about something.”’13 That something turned out to be the British Empire. Thus far her knowledge of it was confined to what she’d learned at primary school – ‘that we were the hub and lots of “darkies” were proffering goods to us. That was how I was taught about the empire. And so I thought, what is the empire? That became the nub of it.’14 She started on her own reading while being fed research by Ben Warwick, who at her request was hired as director and producer. ‘I’m not interested in dates or statistics,’ she told him. ‘I’m interested in people.’
Their fifth collaboration was to be their most ambitious, and gruelling: over half of the entire shoot would be spent travelling. With Housewife, 49 in pre-production, in April 2006 Victoria flew to Ghana to join the crew in Accra. For company she had her friend and make-up artist Chrissie Baker, whose task was to make her look presentable in the sapping humidity of the mosquito season. ‘I wouldn’t advise anyone planning a menopause to come here,’ Victoria joked on the voiceover. ‘I feel like a complimentary hand towel in an Indian restaurant.’ Ben Warwick soon discovered something that Victoria had known since making her Great Railway Journeys film in 1995: even as the focal point of a travel documentary she was much happier observing than mingling and engaging.
The theme of this first journey took Victoria further than she’d ever strayed from her comfort zone. She visited an inland river where chained captives were washed before they were sold into slavery, then looked round a coastal fort where they were held in dungeons. She conducted interviews with local curators and met two New Yorkers who had severed family ties to move to Ghana to reclaim their roots. More cheerfully she had dinner with a smiling Ghanaian comedian and watched a game of football on a patch of scrubland named Victoria Park, over which a bust of the other Victoria presided. After two days in Ghana and a night in Heathrow, the crew flew on to Jamaica, where they all fell ill. One day, filming in a rainforest at the site where rebel slaves signed a peace treaty with the British, the only umbrella was held over the sound equipment and a stoical Victoria got a soaking. According to Ben Warwick it was here that ‘she realised what was going to be needed to get through this series with respect for those who’d suffered under the Brits’. The production experienced its third different climate within a week in St John’s in Newfoundland, where the thinness of the original concept was exposed when Victoria stopped at another Victoria Park which had nothing to recommend it. But in Canada she enjoyed a welcome respite from the theme of British guilt.
‘It’s cold, it’s wet, I can’t see anything, I’m in the car,’ she said in the back of a taxi. ‘All I need is my parents arguing in the front seat and it would be like every holiday I’ve ever been on.’
Nine days after leaving it she was back in London, where casting for Housewife, 49 began. Some auditions took place in her home, others at LWT on the south bank of the Thames. Victoria was joined by Piers Wenger, Gavin Millar and a casting director who was briefed to bring in a clean slate of talent. ‘Victoria was pretty clear about that,’ says Piers. ‘She wanted to work with some lesser-known people and some new people.’ She had particular actresses in mind. For the strident Mrs Waite she was eager to get Stephanie Cole, who had once been on the shortlist for her 1989 series of half-hour plays. She also wanted someone specific to play the invented character of Nella’s waspish sister-in-law Dot. ‘There’s this actress, I can’t think of her name,’ she kept saying to Piers. Her frustration mounted until suddenly she remembered in time for Lorraine Ashbourne to be cast. Only one role went to an actor Victoria had worked with before: Sue Wallace, a veteran of Good Fun, As Seen on TV and dinnerladies, played one of the WVS ladies.
The most important search was for an actor to incarnate Nella’s joyless husband, only ever known as ‘Daddy’ in the script. David Threlfall, who came in during a break from Shameless, had seen Victoria in In at the Death in 1978 but didn’t know her personally. ‘She was quite quiet,’ he recalls. ‘Gavin did a lot of the chatting. I thought, Is she going to turn out to be one of those comedians with problems?’ The audition went well enough for him to be called back – his agent told him they wanted ‘to “see if you’ve got a range”. That set me in a rage.’ His rage deepened as he was kept waiting in the foyer and spotted Victoria arrive and enter the lift. He detoured to the gents where he put on a pair of grandad’s glasses and a fake moustache. ‘I looked in the mirror and I was shaking. I was saying, “I’ll give you range, Woody.” We read all the scenes. My moustache came loose. I put it back on. She started laughing. She told me later, “I think we should cast Threlly because I don’t know what we’re going to get with him.”’ Victoria also admitted to him that she didn’t quite have the measure of Nella’s husband, having found on her research trips that the real William Last was by no means the cold fish portrayed in the diary: ‘They said he was lovely and that she browbeat him and that she nagged. I thought, well, I don’t care. I didn’t want him to be a villain. I wanted him to be one of those buttoned-up people who can’t behave any differently from how they behave.’15
While it was emphatically not her marriage that she was writing about, in the story of the Lasts Victoria was able to explore some of her own feelings. During a bombing raid, crammed into a Morrison shelter, Daddy makes a begrudging declaration of love. ‘You’re everything to me,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to die and not tell you – you’re everything to me.’ On a train Nella bumps into her GP, who has escaped his marriage and encourages her to follow suit. ‘You can’t just ditch people,’ Nella says quietly but firmly. (Victoria named him Dr Brierley in memory of her friend Roger Brierley, who had died as she worked on the first draft.) Towards the end, when the Lasts have long since stopped sharing a bed, Nella says, ‘I felt my whole married life had been a dream.’ In the aftershock of separation Victoria sometimes had comparable doubts about her own marriage. ‘You look back at the good bits and the bad bits,’ she said the previous year, ‘and you think, were the good bits that good?’16
In June the cast and crew met for a read-through, followed by two days of rehearsal. They then went north. Most of the filming was done in Huddersfield, mainly because the only way for ITV to meet the costs of a single drama was to piggyback the production facilities of the Granada drama series Where the Heart Is. ‘That was quite challenging for Victoria,’ says Piers. ‘But we all wanted the most money we could get on screen.’ Where she could exercise influence, she did. No one on set policed the production for authenticity with a beadier eye. When a Christmas cake was brought on set encased in icing she reminded the art department that sugar was rationed in the war. Wardrobe was summoned when an actor was wearing the wrong sleeveless pullover.
She asserted herself in other ways. When shooting Pat and Margaret Gavin Millar had politely asked Victoria to stop co-directing behind his back. Now, nearing seventy, he was happy to tolerate it. According to David Threlfall, ‘Vic directed it. Gavin had got older and wasn’t quite as sharp as he was before.’ Victoria and Piers often had hushed conversations on set and continued them every evening on the balcony of a cottage they rented. The unconventional hierarchy was a source of confusion for Christopher Harper, the young actor playing Nella’s son Cliff: ‘She was in charge of everything. It did strike me as strange that I was receiving four different batches of direction. Gavin’s advice was the one that made most sense, but he was third or fourth in command – that’s how it felt. If he told me to do something and Vic told me to do something, I’d have to do what Vic said. She was quite a hard taskmaster. I never really knew when she approved; I just knew when she didn’t approve.’
The one performance Victoria could not direct was her own. The role of Nella Last required the most serious acting she had yet attempted. When making dinnerladies she had had to ask Julie Walters how to produce tears for one scene, but now she was required to cry often. There was some technical assistance from a tear stick smeared in Vicks VapoRub and dabbed under the eyes. ‘But she understood the emotions and the unhappiness,’ insists Christopher Harper. ‘There was no level at which you thought she’s performing – you felt that wave of loss and waste.’ David Threlfall took it upon himself to offer her practical advice: ‘I said to her, “You blink too much.” It’s reflective of an inner state – she’s not quite settled on what she’s doing and I thought I bet I can get her settled a bit more. She just listened and took it.’ With the mobile camera often hovering intrusively near her make-up-free face, it was as if Victoria was acting with one less layer of skin.
Through all this Victoria’s bond with her co-star was warm and light. In one of the most sombre scenes the Lasts visit an angry, invalided Cliff in a rehabilitation home. Before the take Victoria had David Threlfall in hysterics when two nuns walked on set. ‘Oh, hey up,’ she said. ‘Our Lady of the Tea Urns.’ They practised dancing for a scene Victoria inserted at the end to provide some hope and redemption for the Lasts’ marriage. ‘Every so often we’d be filming,’ he says, ‘and I’d just grab her.’ Eventually Victoria summoned Sammy Murray to choreograph something with a little more shape – she taught the pair of them one evening in the car park outside the hotel.
The shoot fetched up in Barrow. The street where Nella lived was filmed, but the more important exterior was the beach on Walney Island which was so bathed in hot July sunshine for a scene set on Boxing Day that no amount of grading to dim the colours in the edit suite quite worked. The density of the heat was captured by a film crew from The South Bank Show. Ten years on from her last profile, to support Housewife, 49 Victoria had agreed to be the subject of a second. On their first day of filming, they found her sweltering in a bun-style wig, lumpy tweed and wraparound shades.
Filming was completed towards the end of July. Victoria went home to recuperate with the children for a week, then flew to India for the second leg of her series about empire. She briefly stopped in Delhi for breakfast, then travelled on to Darjeeling, where she much enjoyed filming a sequence about the tea industry. After Kolkata, there were two days in the bling of Hong Kong, where Victoria asked a fortune teller if she could foresee a relationship for her. Then it was on to Borneo to tell the story of headhunters, orang-utans and bird’s nest soup, which she sampled under duress. Aware that she was exhausted, Ben Warwick fed her information before each section was filmed rather than inundate her with piles of research. ‘I can’t underestimate the impact of just having shot Housewife, 49, where it’s all scripted and you know the shots,’ he says, ‘and then to go to something completely unk
nown – her professionalism was like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’
But there was no guarding against things going wrong. The shoot concluded, anticlimactically, with a bumpy three-hour drive into the jungle at the end of which all there was to film was a shop selling Vim and Cadbury’s. In this wilderness a weary Victoria concluded the episode with a piece to camera that sat defiantly on the fence: ‘It’s not for me to say whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that the British should take over these places like India and Hong Kong and Borneo. But I think you have to admire the courage and the tenacity of the people who first arrived here, all those public-school boys hacking their way through the jungle. Because it is jungle still. You feel if you sat here long enough something would grow up your trousers.’
As she raced between projects, nothing could be less likely to happen to Victoria. Her first task back at home was to view an edit of Housewife, 49, which Gavin Millar furtively sent behind the back of the producers. ‘Dear Vic(tim),’ he wrote, ‘let’s say there’s a certain amount of disagreement about what should be in and what should be out … What we’d really like is you to say what you’d really like. Welcome home. I dare say you’d rather be back in bloody Borneo.’17 Twenty-five minutes needed to be excised. In the process, the director himself was edited out of the process. For the next fortnight the drama’s original progenitors more or less moved into the edit suite in Soho. ‘We have had lots of hoo hah on the WW2 drama,’ Victoria told Richard E. Grant, ‘and now the lunatics have taken over the asylum and me and the producer and another editor have been editing it ourselves, and the director and his editor haven’t been.’18 It was highly unusual for the writer and lead actor to participate in the edit but, according to Damien Timmer, ‘she had no ego at all. She just wanted it to be good. She rolled her sleeves up and she really enjoyed it.’