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

by Jasper Rees

  Get festive, get restive

  Dunk me in the duvet like a big digestive

  Just humour a late bloomer

  Stuff my Christmas stocking with a big satsuma.

  The song was recorded in a studio with a big-band orchestration by Steve Sidwell, who had composed the soundtrack for Victoria’s Empire. At first they tried recording it to a steady click track to make it easier to sync up with the camera shots further down the line. ‘It just didn’t work; it wasn’t funny,’ says Nigel Lilley, who was supervising. ‘So we had a quick crisis meeting and then started at one tempo and every verse we bumped it up by two or three. Suddenly it was hilarious. Vic was happy.’

  In July the production spent an unsunny week shooting ‘Lark Pies’ in Wiltshire. To bond the cast and crew, John Rushton organised a quiz night in the pub – Victoria was so eager for her team to win she urged one ignorant actress to desist from answering questions. The village was populated with more extras than had ever crowded into a Victoria Wood sketch, and there were even more when the production moved to the ground of Brentford FC, the only football club they could find who would allow them to film the Midlife Olympics on the pitch. Victoria was disappointed that the stands could not be filled with cheering crowds, but she and her colleagues spent most of the shoot in hysterics as they tried to wrangle locally sourced participants in national tracksuits to compete in made-up events.

  In August work on the Christmas special was suspended while Victoria plunged once more into her past. Talent was to be revived at the Old Laundry Theatre in Bowness-on-Windermere, run by her friends Roger Glossop and Charlotte Scott. Their annual arts festival had been running since 1992, and normally they welcomed shows from outside, but this year they wanted to mount their own production and came to Victoria, who was persuaded by the successful revival at the Gatehouse Theatre: ‘The audience really liked it, and I thought, oh, it seems to hold up in some strange, naive way.’39

  Initially Victoria decreed that she wasn’t the right person to direct it, but her involvement deepened after an approach from the Menier Chocolate Factory, the fringe theatre near London Bridge with a track record of hit transfers to the West End and Broadway. She proposed the theatre come in on a co-production that would take the show from Windermere to Southwark. Both theatres put it to her that the original play was too short at only seventy-five minutes. Whereas previous attempts to persuade Victoria to lengthen Talent had fallen on deaf ears, now she was more amenable: ‘I said, “If I can get the running time to one hour thirty, do you consider that reasonable for your ticket price?’ They were happy with that. So then I got really interested because it was new material. Then I did want to direct it. You get what’s in your head and on the page onto the stage without filtering it through somebody else. It’s just easier.’40

  Victoria composed new songs to bookend the show and beefed up the male roles. The play now began with a compère welcoming the audience to Bunter’s Piccadilly, ‘three times winner of the North West Clubland Middle Size Club of the Year’. He introduces a long-haired male vocal trio in lurid frills and platforms called Triple Velvet – exactly the kind of act Victoria competed against on New Faces. Then Julie enters, now a star in a bell-bottomed catsuit, but as she sings it becomes clear that this is a fantasy sequence and she hasn’t made it at all. The lights change and on comes a gnarled manageress to prepare the house for the evening’s entertainment. To her Victoria gave the best joke in the rewrite as she remembers dancing at Bunters in the war with a Yank stationed at Bury. ‘We won a talent night here, funnily enough,’ she says. ‘They weren’t giving cups out, cos the metal was going for Spitfires.’

  Victoria left the body of the play untouched: ‘I was a bit tempted. But I thought it’s not fair. If that play was written by somebody who was twenty-five, then that’s what it’s like. So I decided not to mess with it.’41 At the very end, Julie’s shy, fat friend Maureen comes out from her shadow to lead the company in a Sondheim-esque song about nursing ambition and overcoming social awkwardness. Its catchy final chorus collapsed the distance between Maureen and the teenage Victoria:

  Your life – just give it some welly

  Don’t just slump with the telly

  Take a tip from Minnelli

  And never sit alone in your room!

  The show ran for two weeks at the Old Laundry from late August. ‘Our show is up and running and doing good business in Bowness,’ Victoria told Jane Wymark. ‘It will go differently I’m sure in Southwark, as I don’t think mentions of Douglas (Isle of Man) and Kendal’s (dept store in Manchester) will be greeted with the same shrieks of delight.’42 To plug the London run Victoria reluctantly consented to appear on television. ‘Oh my lord the One show,’ she exclaimed to Rosalind. ‘I thought that sort of telly had gone out years ago – I did it as it has 7m viewers.’43 At the Chocolate Factory the production was met by ho-hum reviews – the consensus was that, while the performances were pleasing and many gags still landed, the play would have been best left unexhumed. Victoria instructed Lucy Ansbro to call the minute ticket sales dipped in case she needed to do extra publicity but heard that ‘everyone was v happy and no one needed to do anything’.44

  The highlight of the run for Victoria came when Julie Walters attended as her guest and, for the very first time, watched the stage play written for her in 1978. ‘That should perk them up a bit,’ she told Jane Wymark.45 They went at the end of a week filming for the Christmas special. Victoria called the sketch ‘Beyond the Marigolds: What Mrs Overall Did Next …’ Framed as the portrait of a ‘busy working actress’, Bo Beaumont spends a week looking for opportunities to work in one of the new TV formats, which were lined up like bottles on a wall for Victoria to shoot at. Bo’s encounters with Anton du Beke, Delia Smith and Torvill and Dean find her unsuited to the indignities of celebrity participation. ‘The thought of this awful pompous actress that plays Mrs Overall,’ says Julie, ‘I found it very funny as ever and I said, “Yeah, I’m there.”’

  It was her first meaningful appearance on screen with Victoria since dinnerladies ten years earlier. The deal was complicated by Julie’s commitment to the Harry Potter films. By the time it was shot, Tony Dow had lost his director of photography: ‘So I got two lightweight cameras, got rid of most of the crew and said, “We are going to have a week of following around two of the great women in show business.”’ Victoria cast herself as Bo Beaumont’s dowdy, doting helpmeet Wendy. No more than a voiceless figure at the end of the phone line in Acorn Antiques: The Musical!, now she is seen sharing a bedroom if not a bed in Bo’s apartment ‘on the borders of Paddington’. The intriguing relationship between two middle-aged women was partly inspired by a visit to Kirkcudbright in 1976 with Victoria’s university friend Robert Howie, whose aunt depended on a female companion. To Julie the set-up felt ‘utterly believable. I think there probably was a bit of fiddling a long time ago, but it’s long gone is what I imagine.’ Eventually the docile Wendy shows her cards. ‘She’s my life!!’ she screams after one probing question too far from Colin, a discreet reporter played by Jason Watkins.

  Most of the film was shot in the fly-on-the-wall style of the As Seen on TV documentaries, but Tony Dow took inspiration from Georgy Girl to film Bo as she sashayed through a street market in her signature white suit. At one point he suggested Julie big up her performance. ‘You’re the first director who’s ever said that to me,’ she replied. She had a rare attack of nerves when they arrived at the ice rink in Queensway but, once assured that Torvill and Dean would keep her safe, she improvised new ways to fail on ice and Victoria struggled not to corpse in her reaction shot. ‘The mutual respect was enormous,’ says Tony Dow. ‘Vic thought Julie was amazing, but Julie went, “This is the one person who’s made me funny.”’

  To Victoria’s chagrin, Julie’s agent would not let her appear without a fee in a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of the show. The idea of the film was ‘to screw extra wig and costume money out of the
BBC’, which meant there was a second camera crew watching Victoria at work throughout the shoot.46 She called it What Larks! and, with Tony Dow, cobbled it together with hastily shot pieces to camera and a spry commentary. The last piece of footage for both programmes was captured in October at the Bloomsbury Theatre, which was booked when it became clear that the finale would work best if Victoria performed ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’ to a live audience. For an extra treat, they would be shown the rest of the special. At the insistence of the BBC, and much to Dow’s annoyance, their laughter was recorded for use in the broadcast.

  For two days at home Victoria practised to the big-band arrangement. To get her audience in the mood she asked Ted Robbins to do a warm-up and told her well-worn story of Ted flashing his bum at a recording of Wood and Walters in 1981. Then, after an introductory spiel about all the Barrys and Fredas who would be watching at home, she sat down to perform her iconic anthem to an audience for the first time since Parkinson in 2000. The song was some way beyond her vocal range now, so for the rousing finale she spoke the lines rather than sang them. In the first take she had to stop two thirds of the way in for a technical issue. ‘I thought this going to go one of two ways,’ says Nigel Lilley, watching nervously on a monitor backstage. ‘It was one of those moments where I saw her drill down into wherever she went, that place she went. The massive focus. And she was just astonishing. She went back and she nailed it. It was quite a high-wire act.’ At the end, Victoria swivelled round and slammed both feet on the floor to bounce up and take a deep bow from the waist as the audience, as ever, went nuts.

  The disagreements were not over. As early as June John Rushton had told the BBC that ‘Victoria has invested all her efforts into a programme specifically dedicated to a Christmas day transmission’.47 Confirmation now came that it would go out on Christmas Eve. The final decision rested with BBC One controller Jay Hunt, who had already annoyed Victoria by suggesting ‘Beyond the Marigolds’ be extracted and lashed together as a separate programme. An emissary explained the decision to Victoria, who reacted ‘really terribly’, according to Lucy Ansbro. It was not so much the decision itself that grated – ‘Xmas Eve is not what I was promised but actually it’s a good slot,’ she told Sammy Murray – so much as the distant manner of the communication.48 ‘I’ve still not met the person in question,’ she told the Guardian some months later. ‘If somebody’s got a problem with something I’m doing I think they should step into the same room or email me or telephone me, and not send a winged monkey to talk to me about it.’49 Although The Royle Family, preferred for the Christmas evening slot, was also produced by John Rushton, Victoria’s personal relationship with him did not suffer – on New Year’s Day she drove down to Hastings to celebrate his birthday with his family.

  Meanwhile, her vexations continued back at the Menier Chocolate Factory, where in November Victoria joined the cast to take a bow on the final night of the run. Afterwards she emailed the theatre’s artistic director David Babani. Her hope was for the production to tour and, while she was aware he had explained the position to Lucy Ansbro, she was annoyed not to hear back from him directly. It soon emerged that the set had been destroyed after the last night. ‘We’re all busy,’ she grumbled to Nigel Lilley. ‘I’m trying to make a programme out of bits of left over pastry, am still finishing the main programme, am script editing someone else’s drama and planning about eight other things, when I’m not busy falling downstairs – how come he’s the one who can’t answer an email?’50 (The fall happened at home. She bashed two ribs and took herself to Ireland for three days to recover.) At a subsequent opening night party Babani approached and asked Victoria how she was. ‘Still waiting for your phone call,’ she said, and turned away.

  Such was her toxified wariness of decision makers in high places that her defences were up when the only BBC controller she had fully trusted got in touch. Peter Salmon was now based in Manchester as the BBC prepared to move much of its operation to Media City in Salford, where he was also on the board of the newly created Manchester International Festival. Its dynamic Scottish director Alex Poots was eager to commission a piece of work from Victoria. When Salmon provided the introduction over lunch in Kensington Place she vented about BBC management. In its short life – there had been only two programmes so far – MIF had ventured to blur the distinction between high and low art. ‘Why would you bother wanting me to make a piece?’ she said to Poots. ‘Why would you take lunch with me?’ he replied. ‘You could work with anyone.’ ‘There is this thing,’ she did eventually concede, ‘but I’m sure you won’t be interested.’ And she mentioned a documentary about a children’s choir she had seen as a student: ‘I’ve always wondered what happened to them.’ But for now she felt no urge to fall under the sway of this new suitor or take the conversation any further.

  Christmas approached. The annual invitation went out by email. ‘Mince pies at my house Tuesday 22nd from seven … friends, kids, mothers in law all welcome …’51 While the Christmas party for friends and neighbours was set in stone, since the divorce the day itself had taken on a different flavour. Some years Victoria made an effort to gather all four Wood siblings. On Christmas evening Harriet Thorpe would visit with her children and they indulged in an annual viewing ritual. First up was Harry Secombe on ITV’s religious series Highway introducing a bevy of female amateur choristers in Eighties fashions singing ‘Who Will Buy?’ from Oliver! as they march around a newly opened shopping centre in Ipswich. After that came Fanny Cradock Cooks for Christmas. Both were rich in unintended comedy, and Victoria never, ever tired of feasting on them.

  Having wanted to avoid ‘VW overload’, that Christmas she was on television more than ever before. Victoria Wood’s Mid Life Christmas on Christmas Eve was followed by What Larks! on 30 December, which ended with a shot, recycled from an unused sketch, of Henry and his mate on the sofa staring nonplussed at the screen. But four nights before Christmas there was Victoria Wood Seen On TV, a ninety-minute trawl through her career in which friends, collaborators and celebrities paid tribute to her genius. It included quotation from an exhaustive and analytical interview Victoria gave about her career, filmed in a library on the South Bank earlier in the autumn. At home on the sofa she watched her career flash in front of her with Nigel Lilley for company. ‘That felt very special,’ he says. ‘I got to watch the original Acorn Antiques with her and she’d point out the bits where they were corpsing. She said she’d never watched ‘Swim the Channel’. I remember her being very proud of it. And she was howling at everything.’

  23

  LOVING ERIC, ERNIE, EUNICE, TUBBY, ENID, JOYCE AND BARRIE

  ‘Well, you can smile, but that’s how people go to hell unfortunately.’

  The Giddy Kipper, 2010

  The prospect loomed of Victoria’s second child leaving the nest. Early in 2010 she drove Henry north for his interview at Leeds College of Music. ‘I thought in my biased motherly way he did look a bit more on the ball than all the other shambling depressed looking hunched hooded figures,’ she concluded. ‘At least Hen cracks a smile once in a while.’1

  It was a season of farewells. When Victoria sang at a concert to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Stables Cleo Laine revealed in the green room beforehand that John Dankworth had died earlier that day. Victoria performed ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’, backed by Dankworth’s band playing Steve Sidwell’s arrangement. She was asked to take part in a Melvyn Bragg tribute as The South Bank Show ended its run on LWT. By way of valediction to Talent, the Glossops invited her for a week in the hills above Malaga. They took the sleeper from Paris and stayed in a hotel run by an old friend who had been prop maker at the Crucible, but their plan to go walking was thwarted by February rain.

  Soon after returning Victoria flew to New York for a week. Her goal was to supplement the information on Joyce Hatto which had been amassed over the previous year on her behalf. The research looked into every peculiarity of the Hatto story, eventually filli
ng two ring-bound folders with facts about her career, her husband’s fiendish deception and its sensational discovery. Kerry Gill-Pryde of Left Bank Pictures had already visited William Barrington-Coupe, better known as Barrie, at his home in Royston, and eventually Cathy Edis went too. A morally evasive figure who had once been in prison for tax fraud and had a history of lying with breathtaking ease, he was now keen to be involved in the musical side of the drama. Meanwhile, whenever she had a moment Victoria pursued the story too, interviewing the novelist Rose Tremain, who was taught by Hatto as a schoolgirl, and Jeremy Nicholas, a music journalist who became bound up in the story. When directing Talent she invited two women to the Menier Chocolate Factory who as girls in Royston had known Joyce Hatto well.

  Her objective in New York was to meet those who had participated in the exposé, as well as the author of the optioned New Yorker article, the idea being to give the story an American dimension and curry finance from HBO. It was ‘quite scary trotting round the city, sitting in cafes to meet people I had never spoken to and had no idea what they looked like – people who didn’t have a clue who I was either …’2 She was ready to get going when she got home: ‘I have been thinking terribly hard about what I want the story to say – the plot itself is easy – she gets famous, she dies, she gets found out – but when the protagonist dies before the end of the story that’s not so great dramatically so I need to take another line on it, which I think I’ve got now.’3 A month later, on the way to visit Grace in Cambridge, she passed through Royston and drove into the road where Barrington-Coupe still lived: ‘And stone me he was on the frigging pavement giving me a very sharp look as I hastily but casually drove past.’ She tailed him as far as she could by car but ‘didn’t dare pursue on foot as he would have recognised me’.4 Her quarry wormed his way so far into her consciousness that one day when making notes she accidentally called the script ‘Barrie and Freda’.