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

by Jasper Rees

  After a quick visit to Grace in Verona, in November she was back in the north-west thanks to an approach from BSkyB. In a bid to lure household names to the network, it conceived Little Crackers, an anthology series in which comedians would script a short film chronicling an incident from childhood. Victoria was happy to take part on two conditions: she wanted to direct her own film and, despite the specificity of the brief, had no interest in writing overtly about her own childhood. Such was the channel’s eagerness to brandish her name that they agreed to bend the rules.

  Initially Victoria thought of salvaging a flashback scene from her untitled 2008 script in which two teenage friends on a bus go to meet a boy, who was somewhat based on Bob Mason. While shooting Eric & Ernie she talked about this idea with Beth Willis: ‘She had a whole story which she’d planned in massive detail, and then when she went to write it she just hated it.’ The ten-minute script she submitted instead was all that was left of The Giddy Kipper, also from 2008. Again, Victoria repurposed a flashback scene which showed her protagonist Eunice at primary school in the early 1960s getting into trouble for being funny in class. She now built a story around that lonely little girl, living with her father on a remote hill in Lancashire, while down in the village the nasty girls taunt her. ‘You’re a giddy kipper and you can’t behave!’ they sneer, parroting the hatchet-faced Sunday-school teacher who berates Eunice for her individualism: ‘I don’t have giddy kippers in my class, do I? We don’t push chairs away when people are about to sit down, do we?’ Briefly, when delivering eggs to the big smart house in the village, Eunice enters a wonderland of warmth, comfort and Christmas cheer. Later, as she trudges home in the gloaming, she imagines the dancers she’s seen on the big house’s black-and-white television capering in colour alongside her and her parents in the sunlit fields.

  Having always hoped to shoot the longer script herself, Victoria now had ten minutes and £100,000 with which to make her debut as a film director. There was more casting of child actors to be done in Manchester, while the adult actors she drew from Housewife, 49 and Mid Life Christmas. Lorraine Ashbourne played the unkind teacher. Sammy Murray was enlisted to play Eunice’s mother in the fantasy dance sequence, which she choreographed and presented to Victoria at Pineapple Studios. The shoot was done over four days in the Ribble Valley ‘where they did Whistle down the Wind which I’m taking as a good omen,’ Victoria told Rosalind.20 She was characteristically obsessive about buying the best warm wet-weather gear which, as a cosseted actor, she had never needed. As for the basics on directing, over a drink in her local she pumped Jonny Campbell for tips. ‘But she knew,’ he says. ‘She didn’t need me to give her any steers. Taking creative control was the next inevitable stage for her.’ She also asked Tony Slater-Ling, the director of photography on Eric & Ernie, to shoot the film and show her the ropes. ‘She told me she was quite nervous about the technical aspect,’ he says, ‘but she had a natural instinct in terms of the visual. She just adapted quickly. I got the feeling that it just became another string to her bow.’ Sky’s head of comedy Lucy Lumsden visited on the second day and found Victoria in clover: ‘I sat next to her in a muddy field in the freezing cold. There was a definite feeling that she couldn’t be happier.’

  There was as much joy creating a deliciously sentimental soundtrack inspired by the American composer Leroy Anderson, whose ‘Forgotten Dreams’ was arranged and recorded in Angel Studios by Nigel Lilley with Jim Watson on trumpet. A disproportionate amount of the session was taken up with giggling as Victoria tried to nail a short whistling solo. ‘Film … went very well for me,’ she reported. ‘Four day shoot, 2 day edit, half a day to record music, day to put it on, a few hours to grade pictures … A steep learning curve!’21 A couple of months later Victoria was distressed when Watson, her much-loved former trumpet tutor, died suddenly of a heart attack aged only fifty-nine.

  While on set Victoria insisted on filming a short piece to camera explaining that the film was ‘not exactly my story but it is my world and it is my landscape and it is, in a lot of ways, my childhood’. To Rosalind, who was best placed to spot the clues, she said ‘it’s about a little girl in a farmhouse on the moors in 61 delivering eggs in a village’.22 While not directly autobiographical, The Giddy Kipper was emotionally true to her formative memories – the absent mother, the distracted father, the solitary house on the hill, an unkempt girl saved from unbearable solitude by Bunty and the spirit of her imagination. Aglow with nostalgia and shaded by melancholy, with bright glints of observational wit, The Giddy Kipper was fathoms deep, and it was very beautifully filmed. Although the reach was modest, its audience witnessed Victoria’s conquest of yet another discipline. After this short apprenticeship, she looked forward to a bigger challenge: to direct Loving Miss Hatto.

  Broadcast a week before Christmas, The Giddy Kipper was her second appearance on Sky that month. Victoria also emceed for a night of comedy featuring female comedians and performers she selected herself, among them Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan, Vicki Pepperdine, Julia Davis, Jessica Hynes and Harriet Thorpe, with whom she presented ‘Coffee Palaver’. Broadcast live to cinemas, The Angina Monologues was put together with the British Heart Foundation, who asked her to help spread the word that women are vulnerable to coronary heart disease. The Theatre Royal Haymarket was secured and thus one Sunday night Victoria returned to the first home of Acorn Antiques: The Musical! She began writing the material on the set of Eric & Ernie and, more than a decade on from dinnerladies, invited Geoff Posner to direct and edit it, and trade sly winks with her in rehearsals.

  The all-female bill, Victoria said in her opening remarks, was a sign of progress: ‘If we’d tried that twenty years ago, we’d have been over by an about quarter to eight. It would have been me, Jo Brand and Danny La Rue.’ Off and on several times throughout, she made reference to her son leaving school, being single, taking in a lodger, and the recent pairing on Strictly of Anton du Beke and Ann Widdecombe. One joke, about what happens when a woman puts on beige body-shaping underwear (‘it makes you look like a big old dog chew’), was purloined from her untitled 2008 script. Because she knew she could rely on it as a set closer, Victoria finished with the only joke she and Geoffrey wrote together, about the dyslexic boyfriend with a sex manual looking for her vinegar. At the end she cued up ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’ to a tremendous roar. ‘If I lose track, could you join in?’ she told the audience after a few bars. ‘I have lost track now saying that.’ It was her intention to make this the song’s final farewell.

  Before Christmas Victoria nipped back to Morecambe to shoot her bits for the making-of documentary that doubled as a tribute to Morecambe and Wise. Thanks to Eric & Ernie, she had a new set of firm friends to invite to mince pies and carols round the piano in Highgate. She spent the holiday ‘mooching, doing jigsaws and watching crap telly (some with me in it tee hee)’.23 For the third Christmas in a row, the BBC deployed her as a seasonal treat. Christmas Day brought out a new Radio 4 version of Pat and Margaret, involving many friends and collaborators – Andrew Dunn, Thelma Barlow and Imelda Staunton were in it, and it was adapted by Richenda Carey’s husband John Foley. Other than giving her permission, and signing off on the script, Victoria kept her distance. Then, to glowing reviews, Eric & Ernie and its companion documentary were shown back to back on the first day of 2011, to round off a fulfilling year in which, as performing in her own work grew ever less important to her, she honed new skills as a director and as a producer.

  Victoria returned to her desk in January to write her play with songs – she insisted it wasn’t a musical – for Manchester International Festival. After half a year away from it, she also had another pass at Joyce Hatto. ‘So I have to run two projects at the same time,’ she told Lesley Fitton, ‘which should at least fill the gap left by Henry.’24 There was time somewhere in all this to join the cast of a Comic Relief spoof of Downton Abbey. The sketch united Victoria with other great practitioners of sketch comedy – Harry Enfield as
the Earl of Grantham and, as the Dowager Countess, Jennifer Saunders, who wrote the script and allowed Victoria the odd ad-lib in the starchy Penelope Wilton role. ‘Don’t I know you from Lark Pies to Cranchesterford?’ she said to the limping footman. In all her contributions to the charity since 1987, this was the first time she appeared in someone else’s script.

  She kept Nigel Lilley updated with progress reports on the new play. ‘Just so you know I have had a very brain aching time working on the first draft,’ she wrote in early February. ‘I THINK I know what I’m doing now, but that only happened the day before yesterday – so I don’t have much useful to say about the music.’25 With the press launch due in mid-March she hurtled towards the end of the draft.

  The plot Victoria fashioned from the Thames TV documentary was about Tubby and Enid, a shepherd and a nymph for whom one shining moment in childhood has been succeeded by a lifetime of anti-climax. They meet when a crass local magazine programme rounds up some old choristers for the fortieth anniversary of the recording. Tubby Baker, who (like Stanley Wood) sells insurance, is all chortles and nerves; Enid Sutcliffe, a PA, is reserved and dowdy. Via the broadcast they are reunited with fellow choristers Frank and Dorothy Brierley, whose bickering and petit-bourgeois status anxiety are no great advertisement for matrimony. Tubby makes awkward overtures to Enid only to discover she nurses a confident hope that her boss, with whom she has been having secret trysts for years, will leave his wife one day soon. Meanwhile, there were flashbacks to 1929 and the formation of the choir when the enthusiastic young Jimmy Baker, the only son of a destitute single mother, is not yet tubby nor worn down by disappointment. Tubby communes with his self as his young life is transformed by membership of a children’s choir. The play ends with the climactic recording when Tubby and Enid declare themselves to each other.

  As Victoria wrote she came to understand that, as well as the children’s choir, the adult characters should also sing. So at speed she wrote half a dozen songs, calling once more on all her compositional skills. In ‘The Berni Inn’ the Brierleys reveal the absurdity of their pretensions. ‘Was That Me?’ was a yearning memory song in the style of Sondheim, ‘If We Were Ginger and Fred’ a lilting romantic fantasy about the life not lived. In ‘Come Away with Me’ Tubby and Enid croon in romantic harmony. Chris Walker, who had orchestrated Acorn Antiques: The Musical!, was once again sent demos of Victoria singing them.

  In May she and Piers Wenger spent four days in La Gazelle d’Or near Taroudant – her first visit to Morocco since her trip with Geoffrey in 1984. Her platonic friendship with Piers was the closest Victoria would come to replacing that relationship. ‘Despite the depth and intensity of the friendship,’ he says, ‘I don’t think I ever got over the thrill of getting to know her. We shared many of each other’s ups and downs, but the friendship was also predicated on a lot of laughs – getting to share jokes in person with the person whose jokes you had loved on TV became a lifeline to me. I felt like the luckiest person alive a lot of the time. I had spent a lot of my life feeling a bit lonely, and I think that to some degree Vic had been the same and we filled that space for each other. So I just felt grateful to her. I really, really wanted to make her happy, for her to thrive and for her talent to be appreciated as much as I did.’

  Even in one of the most exclusive hotels in Africa, Victoria did not entirely down tools. ‘V peaceful hotel in huge gardens,’ she told Rosalind. ‘Worked in the mornings and lay about the rest of the time.’26 She readied the next draft of Joyce Hatto so it could be sent out by Left Bank Pictures to hook a commission from a broadcaster. As with every draft, her first reader was Piers, even though he was now at Channel 4 and had no professional stake in the script. ‘Piers gives brill notes and has v good ideas about story,’ she reported to Jane Wymark.27 Back home she checked up on the builders’ progress at Swiss Cottage, then visited Grace in Verona, taking Henry who had progressed from long hair to a mohawk to no hair at all. ‘Shaved head and glasses give him look of eighties lesbian in some lights,’ his mother informed Lesley Fitton.28 The month also brought two visits to BAFTA ceremonies. Eric & Ernie was nominated for several craft awards, from which Peter Bowker’s script emerged victorious. Then came the main event. ‘We have two nominations,’ Victoria told Amie Beamish, ‘but we’re not very hopeful.’29 Denied the prize for Best Single Drama, Victoria and her fellow producers barely dared to dream in the Best Actor category. Daniel Rigby, who nine months earlier had been lugging his life around in a rucksack, was up against Jim Broadbent, Benedict Cumberbatch and Matt Smith, the new Doctor. As producers of Doctor Who, Victoria’s colleagues felt less able to leap up when her lodger’s win was announced. His acceptance speech trawled through a long list of names before alighting on a visibly moved Victoria, who, he said, ‘has shown me a thousand kindnesses she never needed to’. ‘She was like a proud mum,’ says Beth Willis, ‘and it was the best night.’ They all stayed in Highgate, and for the next couple of days Jonny Campbell haunted the house in a borrowed dressing gown, losing to his hostess at Scrabble as his hangover slowly wore off. ‘Vic was very competitive,’ he says. ‘If I ever did win, she’d want to play again.’

  A couple of weeks later the month-long rehearsals for That Day We Sang began in London at Copperfield Studios near Borough Market. The night before, the cast were all invited to a party in Highgate, including the young boy cast as Jimmy, whom Victoria remembered liking in the Eric & Ernie auditions. Soon other children were coming down from Manchester to join in as Victoria wrote little bits for individual choristers to perform. With a large choir to accommodate it was a complicated show to stage, limiting the scope of Lez Brotherston’s designs, so, to add another dimension, film was to be projected onto an upstage screen. She reported on her progress to Jane Wymark: ‘I am doing a lot of very confident blocking “yes you go off there …” and stage management are doing a lot of correcting. “Actually Vic that’s a wall …”’ That was not the impression of Vincent Franklin, who was cast as Tubby. ‘She knew exactly what she wanted,’ he says, ‘had a really clear idea of how this is going to work. She could lose it if people weren’t working hard: she works hard and you better work hard.’

  The tight-knit triumvirate from the Acorn Antiques tour was reconstituted as Nigel Lilley oversaw the music and Sammy Murray, who had much more experience of running rehearsals than Victoria, co-directed. Once the company moved to Manchester Opera House for the technical rehearsals, she also became Victoria’s voice on the ‘god mic’, with which the director addresses all on stage from the stalls. ‘She never wanted to pick it up and speak loudly into it,’ says Sammy. ‘I saw a side of Vic I hadn’t seen before. She would worry what the company thought of her.’ This didn’t stop her bossing the rehearsal room when she wanted to. Alex Poots was torn off a strip for doing his emails at the back during the final run-through, which she thought the height of bad manners. Nor had she outgrown her habit of instructing actors how to speak her dialogue, which was an alarming surprise for cast members not used to her ways. ‘If you weren’t getting the musicality the way she heard in her head,’ says Jenna Russell, cast as Enid, ‘she let you know. She was a hard nut to crack. But once you were playing by the rules of her writing, that’s when she opened up.’

  As with other leading actors whom she had befriended and confided in – David Threlfall, Ria Jones, Daniel Rigby – Victoria locked on to her two leads. To Vincent Franklin one afternoon she suggested a visit to the Imperial War Museum in Salford, followed by chips at Harry Ramsden’s. On another they sat in their separate flats and watched Ironside while dissecting it over the phone. She sat in Jenna Russell’s dressing room during the run and often urged her to ‘look after your marriage and make sure you spend a lot of time with your kids’. To her fell the job of singing the show’s comic showstopper, an angry tango in which Enid throws off the dull image conferred by her lifeless name:

  For Enids never get seduced,

  Your inner Enid rules the roost

&
nbsp; Your sex life will not be your claim to fame.

  You won’t inspire a Byron, be a temptress or a siren

  A courtesan, a diva or a dame.

  You won’t have a stock of sex tricks

  You won’t hum like a Scalextrix

  When Enid is your name.

  ‘Enid’ was Victoria’s most brilliant song about female desire since ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’. Twenty-five years after its composition, she now brought her signature tune out of retirement. The occasion was a concert in tribute to Jim Watson at the Royal Academy of Music, which she was to host, and she rehearsed one day after lunch with only her principal actors listening. ‘She said, “I’ve got to practise something to play this weekend,”’ says Vincent Franklin. ‘Jenna and I sat on the edge of the set with our legs dangling and just looked at each other as we had a private performance.’

  Victoria, who had loyally attended many concerts at the Academy, confided to its principal Jonathan Freeman-Attwood that ‘she’d never been more terrified. There was something about Vic,’ he says. ‘Her jaw used to drop when she heard young talented musicians from the Academy – she was really emotional about it.’ As she prepared to compère a gathering of the world’s greatest trumpeters she fretted about adopting the right tone. ‘I knew I shouldn’t really do much stand up as then the gig would have been about me,’ she told Jane Wymark, who was in the audience with Henry, ‘but I knew people would be disappointed if I didn’t crack the odd joke.’30 So she crafted a series of comic in-fills. She introduced the trumpeter who played the solo line on Goldfinger at nineteen. ‘Which is great,’ she said. ‘To a mother of a nineteen-year-old boy I would be more impressed if you’d emptied the dishwasher.’ For her valediction to Barry and Freda she was accompanied by a small brass ensemble of dazzling sassiness from the Academy playing Steve Sidwell’s Mid Life Christmas arrangement. Rehearsing with the band, she told the audience, ‘was a bit like being mugged in rhythm from behind’. Then she cued up the song with a couple of her old sex gags. Edited down to four minutes, it turned into a technical challenge, as she couldn’t hear herself on the foldback speaker, but the audience’s joyous applause – as she said farewell to a beloved musician and a beloved song – told its own story.