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

by Jasper Rees

  Manchester audiences were also on Victoria’s side as they welcomed her home when That Day We Sang opened at the Opera House. There were only ten performances, with two children’s choirs doing five shows each, so Victoria chose to stick around for the whole run. ‘Have to be there with cattle prods,’ she said.31 At the rare sight of unsold house seats in the stalls she was straight on to the resident producer. Many of her friends – including Imelda Staunton – travelled to see it.

  ‘It is lovely to know people like the show here,’ she enthused. ‘They are very warm towards it and after the grind of Nymphing and Joycing it’s a relief.’32 Jenna Russell had to pause in the middle of ‘Enid’ when the rhyme of ‘sex tricks’ with ‘Scalextrix’ triggered applause (to achieve the rhyme Victoria happily misspelled the brand name). After two performances Vincent Franklin wasn’t getting a laugh on a particular line, so Victoria told him to restore the H that he was dropping from the word ‘handsome’. ‘The next night,’ he says, ‘we nearly had to stop the show.’ The most reliable ovation was for Victoria herself, who would wait until the lights were about to go down and slip into her seat, only to be applauded by the whole theatre as she came back in after the interval. She was ‘very upset when people clapped,’ according to Alex Poots. ‘It would be “don’t make so much fuss”. Deep down she was thrilled.’ Afterwards fans waited at the stage door in huge numbers.

  ‘It was a really happy time,’ says Nigel Lilley. ‘She was firing on all cylinders.’ The joy was briefly interrupted when Victoria learned of plans for Radio 4 to record the show live which, fearing the sound of clunking sets and thumping feet, she swiftly blocked. Towards the end of the run she went to a party at the Mint Hotel thrown for Snoop Dogg, who had just performed as part of the festival. At one point she nipped outside and was snapped by paparazzi. ‘You don’t want me,’ she told them. One of Snoop’s bulky bouncers manning the door begged to differ. ‘Lady,’ he said, ‘we heard that you’re the shit.’

  After the run the festival expressed enthusiasm for sending That Day We Sang out on a tour. ‘I can’t see how the logistics would work with the choirs,’ she told Alex Poots. ‘I also feel it would lose something of its appeal.’ But she didn’t rule out a future for the show: ‘I would love it to have a further life … but I think we should be looking at finding TDWS a home.’33

  For the moment she put these considerations aside as, the day after the run ended, she flew to Cape Town to be in a BBC adaptation of Mary Norton’s book for children The Borrowers. Having accepted the job at short notice, she received her schedule only a week before her departure. She was cast as Granny Driver, who is obsessed with flushing out the little people that live under her floorboards and borrow her possessions. After the intensity of Manchester, she was attracted by a compressed schedule of only six days on set and splendid accommodation. The Nelson Hotel, she told Lesley Fitton, was ‘like the one where Agatha Christie escaped to … but the cocktails are cheap!’34 Her drinking companion was Shaun Dooley, who played her son-in-law and, on their one day off, accompanied her on a trip down to the very bottom of the continent. When they came to the Cape of Good Hope they found that every other visitor had fled a howling sandstorm: ‘She looked at me and went, “Shall we go on the beach?” We could barely see anything, the waves were going crazy and we just played like kids, lifting our coats above our arms to lay into the wind. We were falling over and giggling. It took us hours to get cleaned up.’

  Back in the UK Victoria went to Stoke-on-Trent for the final performance of dinnerladies after two and a half years of sporadic touring. Though it was a commercial success, she itched to get another version commissioned that would be a romantic comedy centred on the relationship between Bren and Tony. Having already tried a couple of writers who were too busy, she approached Peter James, whom she knew from her early days at the Sheffield Crucible. He proposed setting the play on the plane as Tony and Bren fly off on their honeymoon, with flashbacks to the canteen, but the problem of compressing all their dialogue into a coherent play proved ‘an impossible mission,’ he says. ‘There was too much material there and she really didn’t want to cut anything. We never got down to a script.’

  In August Victoria was a guest of Richenda Carey and John Foley in Languedoc, went to Salzburg with Grace, then worked on a sixth draft of the Hatto script. ‘Trying to please everyone at the BBC as usual who all have different ideas about what the story should be,’ she told John Rushton, ‘but I’m hoping this will be the draft that gets things moving and hopefully then it might shoot next spring.’35 As draft followed draft, Victoria narrowed in on the relationship between Joyce and Barrie. In early versions of the story she had focused on the sudden inflation of Joyce’s fame via internet chat rooms and the exposure of the scam through digital sleuthing. She deployed her New York research by adding in a couple of American characters. But these were all stripped out. ‘In the end,’ she said during the shoot, ‘it took away from what the basic thing is which was two people in a co-dependent relationship and the effect they have on each other – that’s the story.’36 The key question she asked herself arose from William Barrington-Coupe’s claim, when visited during the research, that ‘Joyce knew nothing, nothing about it’. Victoria decided that, on the balance of the evidence and for the purposes of her drama, this could not be true and set about imagining the circumstances in which the hoax might have happened: ‘They have expectations that are bigger than they can manage and then they become disillusioned. The feeling that they were owed something at the end of their lives – that’s the motivation for the scam in my story. They invented the Joyce Hatto that she should have been.’37

  Victoria looked forward to 2012. Loving Miss Hatto was to be her next adventure. ‘It looks like I will be directing my drama about a mad lady pianist,’ she told Amie Beamish. ‘I have been working on it for ages on and off and the BBC have just given us the money.’38 Meanwhile, a year after purchasing it, she hoped to get Swiss Cottage finished. Then in late October a shadow fell across the future with the discovery of a cyst that proved cancerous, causing a series of operations under general anaesthetic to remove potential growths in her lymph node. Yet she wasn’t entirely immobilised. One procedure she delayed in order to compère the opening night of the London Jazz Festival at the Barbican, which involved much boning up on the performers. She felt robust enough to record the voiceover for The Talent Show Story, a five-part series for ITV, and go up to Sheffield to see Nigel Lilley conduct a production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company. ‘It didn’t feel that ominous,’ says Henry, who was back at home having suspended his music course to take up an internship with a music producer in Muswell Hill. ‘It was like, uh-oh, it’s cancer. It looks like it’s going to be OK, but we just have to get through it.’ Grace, who was in Cambridge for her final year and applying for music colleges, sensed that her mother found the ordeal ‘very hard. She shared what she had to but given the choice I think she would have shared absolutely none of it.’ Victoria took Grace to the Comedy Awards in December – having had to skip two other awards ceremonies, ‘I don’t want rumours spreading that I’m at death’s door,’ she explained to Sammy Murray.39 Victoria’s sisters were informed, and very few friends. At the Christmas party she drew aside Norah Wellbelove, who assumed she was going to announce she had a man. ‘I’ve got something but it’s not a man,’ Victoria replied, and asked her to help keep Henry fed as she embarked on a daily course of radiotherapy. ‘It’s all fine really but effing boring,’ she told Lesley Fitton, with whom she saw in the new year in Harpenden, ‘so could do with some distractions.’40

  The distraction was Loving Joyce Hatto which, for budgetary reasons, was to be shot in Dublin. In mid-December Victoria was still intending to direct it and sent out a lengthy planning memo to Andy Harries of Left Bank Pictures. They started to talk about casting. ‘I don’t think we should move on Joyce till we have our Barrie,’ she argued.41 When Jim Broadbent turned it down, she was happy to turn to Alfred M
olina and was pleased that Left Bank liked her idea of Francesca Annis for the title role, which came to her having seen her in Company at the Crucible. Victoria packed plenty of production meetings into her first week of radiotherapy in the new year. But as she started on a low dose of chemotherapy she asked to meet Harries: ‘She was sitting in my office waiting for me early. She said, “I’ve got cancer and it’s serious. I don’t want to not direct this but I’m not sure I’ll be able to.” It was deeply shocking.’ At a meeting she also notified Radford Neville, who had been producer on The Borrowers and whom she recommended for Loving Miss Hatto: ‘I thought we’d be talking about casting, suggestions for director of photography. She pointed towards her tummy area and said that she was ill.’

  When the BBC’s head of drama announced a new Victoria Wood project the details were kept vague. Within days she had withdrawn and as a replacement proposed Jonny Campbell who, with a baby on the way, had to rule himself out. ‘I don’t really know any other directors that well,’ she confessed.42 Eventually Andy Harries suggested Aisling Walsh, who had shot an episode of Wallander for Left Bank. Victoria decided against viewing her previous work: ‘Better not send me any – might hate it! I’ll take her as I find her!’43 Before handing over the reins, she promised both her leads she would work with them before the shoot. That proved impossible.

  She went alone to her many hospital appointments. ‘I can’t be bothered to put a good face on it and be jolly,’ she admitted to Peter Bowker. ‘The big blessing is that Henry is at home and is very sweet and that is a comfort.’44 Luckily he was at home when, with only a week of radiotherapy left, Victoria felt sudden pain and swelling in her leg. An ambulance took her to the Whittington Hospital, a blood clot was diagnosed and she was sent to the Royal Free for yet another operation.

  As she convalesced at the London Clinic Victoria received several visits from Chris Beetles. They had met some months earlier to toast his old comedy partner Rob Buckman, who had died from unknown causes on a transatlantic flight. Beetles’s medical background now inclined Victoria to open up: ‘She liked my visits because she could moan about having to go on blood thinners. She hated the intrusion and indignity of it all in a why-me way and talked very frankly. One time she broke down and cried. What triggered the tears was the idea she’d be on warfarin for the rest of her life. I moved to hug her and she waved me away and composed herself. She wasn’t going to have my paternalism make her feel less strong and independent.’ Geoffrey, now in the loop, was among those who arranged deliveries of books for her to read. She described her hospitalisation to Amie Beamish as ‘a hellish 3 wks the last week of which was me being wheeled about to finish my treatment which is daily … the treatment flattens and has various tedious side effects’.45 She was delighted at least to have not lost any hair to chemo, but mostly she found lying in bed very boring, according to Henry, who cheered her up with daily visits: ‘She never seemed comfortable, physically, mentally, from not having anything to do, but she was always trusting of the process and determined to see it through.’

  While she recuperated Piers Wenger kept an eye on Hatto casting decisions on her behalf. By the end of February Victoria was back at home and reluctantly reinserted herself into pre-production. ‘I’m not sure how sharp my brain is,’46 she warned Radford Neville, then a fortnight later: ‘I can’t work many hours in a day but doing as much as I can.’47 She managed to do some late rewrites, which she found draining. ‘I can only walk really slowly,’ she told Sammy Murray in mid-March, ‘and I waver like an old lady when groups of school children come barrelling along the pavement.’48 By the end of March she had enough energy to go to Dublin for the cast read-through, before flying home to attend the Broadcast Press Guild awards at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, where she was thrilled to hook up with the Eric & Ernie gang. ‘We already knew we’d won,’ says Beth Willis, ‘so we were very relaxed and celebratory. I was on maternity leave and it was one of my first days out – Vic blissfully and gigglingly pointed out I had lactated on my dress … She was on great form.’ She had another fillip that month when, as the culmination of a long series of conversations about adapting the ‘Miss Read’ books for television, Damien Timmer of Mammoth Screen optioned them.

  Victoria was in Dublin for most of the Hatto shoot and sat by a monitor to watch the action unfold. ‘I’m not sure if I even should have been there or not,’ she mused. ‘It was odd not really having a job but I felt I wanted to have some sort of relationship with Rad the producer who had only come on board cos I was directing – as had Francesca and Fred – so I did have to turn up.’49 In fact, her presence obliged Radford Neville to sit next to her and act as a permanent firewall between the writer and her replacement as director. ‘I became a diplomat,’ he says. ‘It was frustrating for Victoria because she was expecting to be completely at the helm and had to take a backseat. Sometimes she got a little bit grumpy.’ Victoria as ever was policing not only her dialogue but the accuracy of the period design, though she made an effort wherever possible to bite her lip. ‘Producer and I are in tune,’ she reported mid-shoot, ‘and when I see or hear something that’s just plain wrong he nips in – but we try to keep those to the really important things.’50 She loved the two older leads: ‘Fran is playing a blinder – really clever and moving – and Molina is great too – they are both so nice to be with.’51 Both gave sparkling and charismatic performances that drew out the subtle and intriguing flavours of Victoria’s script, as did Rory Kinnear and Maimie McCoy as the young Barrie and Joyce.

  Two days after her fifty-ninth birthday, Victoria was back in Dublin to see the first cut. As edit succeeded edit, she offered notes and thoughts but generally hovered in the background like any other executive producer. The story she had chosen to tell grew from her empathetic interest in human foibles. The only script she ever wrote from someone else’s idea, with much the longest gestation, was perhaps her most intricately crafted drama. It was also the least overtly personal, yet even here there were chimes from the hinterland of her own past. The image of the widowed Barrie pouring out two drinks, then returning one to the decanter, evoked the opening lines of ‘Love Song’, composed in 1978 (‘Made your breakfast this morning, just like any old day / And then I remembered, and I threw it away’). Revered by her pupils but antisocial and probably depressive, the older Joyce Hatto was not dissimilar to Helen Wood. As for the younger Joyce and Barrie – she ambitious but riddled with nerves; he constantly there to stiffen her spine – they shared something with the young Victoria and Geoffrey, the Start-Rite kids who once upon a time had bravely taken on the world.

  24

  THAT DAY SHE DIRECTED

  ‘And then you have a choice

  To dare to find your voice

  And sing.’

  That Day We Sang, 2011

  When she was still recovering from her illness, Victoria went to the West End to see a production of Sweeney Todd that had originated in Chichester. As she enjoyed catching up with the conductor Nick Skilbeck, their shared past caught up with her. A decade earlier he was her accompanist when she transformed herself into the monstrous Stacey Leanne Paige, who was somewhat based on the cruise ship crooner Jane McDonald. Victoria was in the dressing room of Michael Ball after the show when word came through from the stage door that the real Jane McDonald was approaching.

  Victoria swiftly concealed herself in Imelda Staunton’s adjoining room, where she overheard a speech that she may as well have written for Stacey Leanne: ‘What can I tell you?’ McDonald told Ball. ‘You were absolutely marvellous! This is Sue, hair and make-up, she goes everywhere with me. You, you are just like me – you gerrit. Yeah, you gerrit.’ Michael Ball could not resist the temptation to introduce them. Victoria awkwardly asked McDonald if she’d taken offence at Stacey Leanne. ‘No, no, I’ve not seen it!’ she replied cheerfully. ‘She was very nice about it!’ Victoria reported to Sammy Murray.1 The memory of the encounter would be a building block as she formed a new friendship. ‘
That would be our little catchphrase together,’ says Michael Ball. ‘You’re like me, you just gerrit.’

  After the Loving Miss Hatto shoot, and with no work of her own planned, Victoria looked for opportunities to be active. One soon arrived courtesy of Harry Enfield, who with Paul Whitehouse was making a fourth series of Harry & Paul. He had written three sketches featuring an irksome pair of minor royals who are patronisingly out of touch with the real world. He thought of Victoria, after working with her for the first time on Comic Relief the year before. ‘She was just so funny in it and just so on the ball,’ he says. ‘Even when the camera wasn’t on her she was totally in character all the time and observing everyone. I thought, well, I wonder if she’d be interested? I went to see her at home and she said, “Yeah, I’m up for doing anything at the moment. I’ve just recovered from cancer.”’ ‘Minor Royals’, three sketches filmed in north London one day in late spring, united the two major royals of British sketch comedy. Harry Enfield suffered from ‘this huge bag of nerves working properly with her and kept on fluffing up my lines. She didn’t need any notes and never fluffed a single thing.’ Victoria’s royal spring continued. With Harriet Thorpe, Jonny Campbell and Beth Willis she watched the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant from a riverside restaurant, then on the day of the jubilee she had friends round to drink Earl Grey-infused London gin with rhubarb and strawberry syrup topped up with champagne.