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

by Jasper Rees

  At the same time Victoria grew concerned that The South Bank Show’s film should not be based wholly around Housewife, 49. At her prompting the director Daniel Wiles, an LWT veteran, approached Tiger Aspect to ask if the empire documentary might also be featured. ‘Confidentially,’ came the reply, ‘it turns out we’re having some tricky moments on Victoria and we don’t want them to take their eye off the boil [sic].’19 Instead Victoria suggested including yet another project that she had crammed into her schedule.

  Ever since the end of the run at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, Victoria had not given up on Acorn Antiques: The Musical! Earlier in the year, when Julie Walters and Celia Imrie were both nominated for Olivier Awards and the latter won, Victoria was already thinking ahead and hoping ‘to see if it’s got a life away from its connections’.20 In its original form the show was far too unwieldy to send out on tour, so she formed a radical plan: to amputate the first half. ‘It’s the cleanest cut that you can do. I couldn’t bear it that it was too long. I really wanted to make it shorter.’21 She asked Trevor Nunn if he minded, and he didn’t. So in rare spare moments in the first half of 2006, Victoria took the second half of the show and started to refashion it. Without anyone to stop her, she grew ruthless. ‘In the cold light of day I was able to deconstruct it and take out the numbers I didn’t want in. I don’t have to give a song to Neil Morrissey.’22 Among the casualties was ‘Have You Met Miss Babs?’

  Her other big idea was to take the next logical step and, rather than sit behind someone else’s shoulder, direct it herself. ‘I haven’t directed anything before. Not officially,’ she said as she embarked.23 To ease herself into the role, with Nunn’s blessing she decided to base her production on the original and enlisted its assistant choreographer Sammy Murray to co-direct. The musical director she selected to work with was a bright young protégé of Gareth Valentine’s called Nigel Lilley. At the end of August the three of them, with the choreographer Stephen Mear, assembled to hold auditions. Nigel, who ‘sort of knew Vic’s stuff’, was taken aback by the impact of her gigawattage on actors: ‘What you quickly realised is people tended to act slightly weirdly around Vic and she wouldn’t always make it easier for them. People in auditions are nervous anyway and then they’ve got their ultimate icon sat there.’ One actress took the biscuit by announcing she would sing the words of ‘Macaroons’ to a tune she’d made up herself.

  They saw actors of all ages, shapes and sizes. The most critical search was for an actress who could pin on Julie’s overall. An idea pinged into Victoria’s head when Ria Jones, auditioning for Miss Bonnie, asked if she could take her heels off: it was the kind of spontaneous thing Julie would do. ‘Welsh,’ Victoria wrote in her casting notes as a reminder. ‘Mrs O?’24 ‘Half of it is if Vic likes you,’ says Sammy Murray. ‘She liked Ria.’

  Once the rest of the roles were doled out, Victoria’s relentless schedule found her boarding a plane to New Zealand, where, in the series’ oddest sequence, she sat in an Auckland radio studio, a witness in headphones as a shock jock argued with a Maori. ‘The British betrayed us, Victoria!’ said the Maori. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ She said nothing because, as she travelled around the globe, she came to an understanding that there was no one thing she could say about the British Empire. The last leg of the documentary was the most demanding of all. After two days filming in Auckland and the Bay of Islands, the crew took off at three in the morning, arriving eighteen hours later in Alice Springs, where, that evening in the middle of the outback, Victoria conducted a sensitive interview about the Aborigines’ relationship with the British. The following morning they travelled to Melbourne. There was just enough slack in the schedule for Victoria to pay a flying visit to the house of Clifford Last, who emigrated to Australia and became a respected sculptor: ‘The taxi driver jumped out of the car and knocked on the door for me. This guy came out and I said, “I’m not really a mad person, I just want to take a photograph of this house because it belonged to a sculptor called Clifford Last.” And he said, “I bought this house from him.” He didn’t know anything about his mother.’25

  After Hobart, which was the final stop in Australia, there was a long flight via Johannesburg to Zambia, where the film fetched up at the Victoria Falls, which she had nearly visited when filming for Comic Relief in 1995. Behind her right shoulder the body of water with which she shared a name was reduced to a seasonal, bathetic trickle. ‘The more I’ve gone from country to country,’ she said to camera, ‘the less I feel able to do some clever end-of-documentary smarty-pants summing up.’ Then, drawing on her last reserves of intellectual energy, she did just that in a compact monologue that deftly mulched the history of the British Empire and its aftermath into two and a half minutes. ‘All these threads come together, and they’re knitted into a big sort of shapeless moth-eaten old woolly that is the empire,’ she concluded. ‘And some people are very fond of it, and some people want to chuck it in the bin. I don’t know. I’m done. I’m going home.’ Back in London the opening section of the entire series was shot in Victoria Station.

  ‘Have just got back from the third leg of my Empire documentary filming – v full on,’ she told Rosalind. ‘I feel I’ve been away a bit too much from the children this year, not that they complain, but I feel it myself.’26 Although Victoria moaned about it, the tightness of the schedule was created by the competing demands of Housewife, 49 and Acorn Antiques and her desire to be away from the children for no longer than a fortnight. ‘We had to tell a big enough story to warrant us going to these places,’ says Ben Warwick. ‘A lot of the time we had to shoot more sequences than we needed. I couldn’t lighten the load for her, and I could see her getting more and more tired. She really was on her last legs. It was incredibly difficult to keep our relationship as buoyant as it had been before. The stresses accelerated the realisation that we’d done what we could do together.’

  As the edits came through across the autumn, Victoria got down to writing the voiceover for the documentary, using as her template the responsive observational style she’d established on Great Railway Journeys. In October she returned to The South Bank Show with an interview filmed in the Novello Theatre. A good proportion of the questions put to her by Melvyn Bragg went over areas dealt with in the previous profile a decade earlier, including her early encounter with Joyce Grenfell. She was even asked the same question as last time – if Pat and Margaret were two halves of a self-portrait. The following night her episode of More Dawn French’s Girls Who Do: Comedy was broadcast. Recorded nearly a year earlier, it covered the same ground but with a much more intuitive line of questioning. Privately Victoria grumbled about Bragg’s inflexibility as an interviewer and was soon in touch with Daniel Wiles to request another go at it. ‘I felt very depressed after the interview,’ she wrote. ‘Pat and Margaret is 12 years ago – I’ve got nothing to say about it. Same with stand up comedy, and working with Julie … I’m so excited about what I’m doing … and I’ve got so many plans for next year – and I just felt I didn’t really express myself well in the interview.’27 Another encounter was scheduled for her lunchbreak in a pub round the corner from Acorn Antiques rehearsals, which the South Bank Show crew also filmed.

  At the age of fifty-three, in the American Church in Tottenham Court Road, Victoria took charge of a rehearsal room for the first time. She made a short speech in which she impressed on the cast – full of unfamiliar faces who tended to look upon her with reverence – that she had one golden rule. ‘I spent hours writing the script,’ she told them, ‘and if you put another word in, I’ll get really annoyed.’ Ria Jones, like everyone hoping to bond with her, was struck by her shyness and seriousness: ‘I thought we’d be cracking lines from As Seen on TV. But no. She was quite nervous.’ Victoria’s nerves manifested themselves again a few weeks later when the company did their first run-through in front of a small audience of invitees. ‘Halfway through act one,’ says Nigel, ‘Vic ran up to the piano and said, “Why is everything s
o slow?” I was mortified. It was her composition and she probably felt exposed about it.’

  There were seventeen numbers in all, three of them new, including a touching duet for a pair of middle-aged gay shopkeepers. The big new showstopper was ‘Manchesterford’. Like the cheerful song of the same name from the West End show, it welcomed the audience to the cosy vintage setting of the musical, but everything else was different. The clue was in the opening lines:

  Come on boys we’re going to paint the town

  We’re going to take you to … Manchesterford.

  Come on ladies won’t you come on down

  Well here’s another clue … Manchesterford.

  It’s not Chicago but there’s no embargo on the va va voom

  It’s the spot that’s got the lot and it’s twinned with Cheadle Hulme.

  Stephen Mear and Sammy Murray were tasked with coming up with a dance parody of Chicago, the hit Kander and Ebb musical. Picked out by a spotlight, Ria Jones came on in fishnets and a single Marigold, limbs gyrating raunchily, to be joined by a podgy troupe in sheer black. Victoria encouraged her new leading lady, who was a more natural showgirl than Julie, to play to those strengths, while advising her not to go hunting for laughs. ‘You’re a natural at comedy timing,’ she told her, ‘but let the audience decide you’re funny, not you.’

  In early December the production moved up to the Lowry Theatre in Salford. When the band played with the company for the first time the moment came for the actor playing Miss Berta to sing ‘Remind Him’. ‘It was all going really well,’ says Nigel Lilley, who was unaware of the song’s provenance, ‘and then Vic lost it during that song.’ She lost it again, this time in frustration, when bluntly lecturing the cast after a disappointing dress rehearsal. For the most part she bonded with the company in the hotel bar. ‘She’d start telling the stories,’ says Ria Jones. ‘We’d all be gathered around her and hanging on her every word.’

  Housewife, 49 was broadcast on ITV on a Sunday night in December. Victoria was pleased with the slot – ‘I didn’t want it to get swallowed up in Christmas,’ she told Rosalind.28 Despite competing against BBC Sports Personality of the Year, it was seen by eight million, which was a lot for the multichannel age. ‘It really mattered to her that it got a big audience,’ says Piers. ‘It was thrilling when those figures came through.’ Emailing that night, Richard E. Grant put a finger on what the success must mean to her. ‘CONGRATULATIONS VIC!’ he wrote at midnight. ‘Your Calendar Girls really showed ’em.’29 His was the first of many raves. She emailed back to thank him at three in the morning from her hotel in Manchester. The following evening brought the first preview of Acorn Antiques, when Victoria began to relax only when she heard the audience start to laugh. She had launched two hits – one featuring her first serious acting role, the other her debut as a director – on two consecutive nights. She had become much more than the nation’s favourite funny lady.

  Just before Christmas, Victoria performed her final duty for The South Bank Show with a tour of Nella Last’s Barrow. When Daniel Wiles and his researcher were travelling the three miles from the station to the hotel they happened to spot Victoria pulling her suitcase along the road: ‘We stopped the taxi and said, “Hi, Vic, climb in.” And she said, “Oh no, I like the walk.”’ Despite the national spotlight she had directed onto the town, she went largely unrecognised apart from that evening in the hotel where she and the crew were having dinner. A party of thirty women from the WI twigged that she was in the restaurant and asked if she’d say hello to them. ‘She just went to pieces,’ says Wiles. ‘She said, “If you come in with me, I’ll go.”’

  Acorn Antiques stayed at the Lowry for four weeks. In January 2007 it embarked on a vast tour, Nigel Lilley and Sammy Murray travelling with the production to bed it in each week. Not every venue it was booked into was equally well set up to house it, but the DNA of Acorn Antiques, where things not working is in the fabric of the comedy, meant solutions could be improvised. The cast sometimes grumbled. ‘It was quite a challenge sometimes to say, “This is what it is,”’ says Sammy. ‘I would always go, “Victoria’s fine with it. End of story.”’ After each performance Victoria was sent a show report which she zealously policed for any sign of overrunning. ‘She wanted act one to be an hour fifteen,’ says Nigel. ‘If it went up to one seventeen, she’d ring.’ A frequent visitor as the show travelled up and down and across England, she was thrilled to witness a riotous reaction at the Hippodrome in Birmingham. There was a special guest at the Saturday matinee in Richmond. ‘Vic was really excited that someone was going to be in,’ says Nigel. ‘We thought it was going to be Julie. In fact, it was Trevor Nunn. She really wanted him to see her work as a director. He was incredibly generous and that meant an awful lot.’ One night when the show was in Brighton she went out with Stephen Mear: ‘When you got to know her you’d forget how famous she was,’ he says. ‘I stupidly took her to a gay bar, and she leant over to me and said, “Stephen, I think I’m going to have to go home now. I feel like Cilla Black.”’

  It was her status as a national treasure which ASDA sought to exploit when, twenty years after she and Julie appeared in an advertising campaign for the supermarket, they asked Victoria back to front another. The pitch of the agency was that ASDA’s bread is as authentic as the people who bake it on site, and they conceived the idea of Victoria working as an ASDA baker. Manchester was considered as a location before a branch near Gateshead was chosen. The original plan was for Victoria to clock in at seven each morning and do a ten-hour shift, and she’d be filmed on two cameras by director Patrick Collerton. ‘What I quickly realised,’ he says, ‘was she was working ferociously hard and she was giving a show, more or less. About an hour and half in she was starting to flag.’ The performance she gave was as ‘Victoria Wood’, cheekily interacting with the staff and the customers. After four days there were twenty hours of film from which eight adverts of varying length were made. The first was launched immediately. The last showed Victoria scraping flour off the work surface as the other bakers knocked off for the day. As she looked around and noticed everyone had left, a caption appeared on the screen: ‘Thank you Victoria from all of us at ASDA.’ The supermarket’s bread sales enjoyed an instant boost. Not long after, Victoria’s sister Rosalind was between jobs. ‘If dosh would help please let me know,’ she wrote. ‘I got a lot for my ASDA ads and what’s it for if not to help family …’30

  Victoria’s final duties as a historian of the empire was to write and submit several thousand words to the publishers Hodder & Stoughton for the book to accompany Victoria’s Empire, as the series was now called. It was published concurrently with the series, which was broadcast in May and prompted a flow of letters, she told Lesley Fitton, ‘from ancient men typed wonkily saying v fussily that the Brits were not the first to use slavery etc to which I can only say “I KNOW! I SAID THAT IN THE FRIGGING PROGRAMME!”’31

  Of her exhausting forays into the past, Victoria remained prouder of Housewife, 49, which that month was up for BAFTAs. Betty Jackson, consulted about what to wear, managed to persuade her into a navy-blue frock with a plunging neckline and yards of chiffon. Victoria travelled to the ceremony with David Threlfall, who had not been nominated: ‘I said on the way there, “You’ve got two BAFTAs, haven’t you?” She went, “Five.” I said, “There’s no need to brag about it, old boy!”’ She had two more by the end of the evening: one for best single drama, the other, to her genuine surprise, for best actress. The judges put her performance ahead of Anne-Marie Duff, Samantha Morton and Ruth Wilson. ‘It’s a relief to win,’ she said in her acceptance speech, ‘because I was engaged on a no-win no-fee basis.’ At the afterparty at the Natural History Museum, Victoria carried her awards around in a plastic bag. ‘She stayed for a bit,’ says Piers Wenger, ‘but she really wanted to get home. On some level, although she massively played it down, she was really thrilled. It was the one achievement that right up until the end of her life she would say, “God,
that was a good night, wasn’t it?”’ Her assistant Cathy Edis had a different perspective when she came in to work the next morning and found two BAFTAs on the kitchen table. She asked how the celebrations went: ‘Vic said, “Oh, I just came home and went to bed.” She had no one to really applaud what she’d done.’ Later, Victoria expressed a debt of gratitude she felt she owed to David Threlfall by giving him one of the awards. ‘You’re what it says on the front of this,’ she wrote in the card as she presented it to him. When he turned it over it said ‘bee’s knees’.

  The following month Victoria accepted another less public award at the Royal Academy of Music, where she was presented with an honorary fellowship – a rare accolade for a non-musician. She sat bashfully among the graduates who, along with her proud trumpet tutor Jim Watson, cheered as her citation was read by John Suchet. ‘When she ambled up to deliver a brief vote of thanks on behalf of those honoured at the close,’ says the principal Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, ‘she delivered a part-piece of supreme virtuosity. It was so funny and affectionate and perfect, we all felt we were in heaven.’