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

by Jasper Rees

  An offer to front a documentary about the history of tea came in. Victoria went to Claridge’s to listen to the pitch from Paula Trafford of KEO Films, who explained her goal was to explore the geopolitical back story of the humble cuppa. With fond memories of visiting Darjeeling for Victoria’s Empire, Victoria said yes. ‘I feel I missed the last twelve months of my life I had so many hospital palavers,’ she told Peter Bowker, ‘which is why I’m doing this doco. It meant going to China and India and getting out of the house.’2

  In June she went up to Swiss Cottage to keep up with the decoration. It was now two years since she had made an offer on it. ‘Can’t wait for the day I just go up to lounge about,’ she said, ‘and not worry about pan rails or dressing gown hooks.’3 The summer house from Mole Barn that had been in storage since 2005 was installed. Grace sat her finals at Cambridge. Henry resigned from his job in order to tour Ireland with a band he was in. ‘I think this is a good time for him to give it a punt,’ his mother reasoned. ‘You don’t know till you try if these things will work out or not.’4

  Throughout all this Victoria was getting used to self-medicating. ‘Could really do with an extra leg Rolf Harris style to stick the needle in,’ she joked to Jane Wymark.5 Instead she was soon reduced to the use of one leg when she tore a muscle at the top of her thigh. Immobilised for three weeks, and finding it difficult to get up from her seat, she had to cancel an appearance on QI and an outing to see Julie Walters at the National Theatre. She managed to make it to Grace’s graduation. ‘I am limping in ludicrous fashion,’ she warned Lesley Fitton as they prepared to meet, ‘but before you see me and go OMG it’s not as bad as it looks but I can’t walk fast.’6 In fact, it was worse than it looked. The healing process was slowed by the anti-coagulant, and she discovered only a year later when she went for a scan that, despite the initial diagnosis of her GP, it was not a tear but a break: ‘So that’s why it hurt so much!’7

  As she started moving again, Victoria made her way to Dublin to see the final Hatto cut. She treated herself to a stay in a spa in Lake Garda, moved on to Switzerland to see the Glossops, then took Grace to Swiss Cottage for the first time. In August she went to a cold and wet Edinburgh for the unveiling of Loving Miss Hatto at the television festival, followed by a Q&A. She spent a few spare days in tiny venues seeing young stand-ups represented by Phil McIntyre Entertainment. ‘She sat right at the front bold as brass,’ says Jonny Campbell, who went with her to one show. ‘Have seen a lot of terrible shows at the Fringe the last couple of days,’ she told Rosalind. ‘It’s all a lot more fancy than when I played here but same old crap shows.’8

  Her other reason for being in Edinburgh was to play a small part in Case Histories, adapted from the Jackson Brodie private-detective novels by Kate Atkinson. After a first series, shown the previous year, the author was keen to tempt Victoria and over tea at the Savoy they quietly expressed their fondness for each other’s work. The part on offer in Started Early, Took My Dog – a shopping-mall security guard who, prompted by events in her past, takes possession of an abused child – called for crying, light running and other physical exertion. ‘She was in pain, her leg was bad, and was entertainingly stoic about the fact she had to stomp across a shopping mall the whole time,’ says Jason Isaacs, the show’s star. It was not the sort of work she was used to. ‘Spent today smacking a crackhead around in a car park,’ she reported to Rosalind.9 For her big emotional scene with Isaacs in which her character came clean, Victoria had to be dissuaded from wearing sunglasses. ‘I think she was slightly off piste acting in someone else’s script,’ he says. ‘We did the scene and it was fine and then we turned the camera round for me and off camera she broke down completely. It was incredibly moving.’ Kate Atkinson was sufficiently impressed to start writing a screenplay about a female detective for Victoria to play and in the interim sent her a proof copy of her latest novel. ‘Thought it was brill,’ Victoria enthused to Jane Wymark, whom she nonetheless urged to stay away from Case Histories when it was broadcast:10 ‘Don’t watch me on the telly – I look like Hitler’s fat limping sister.’11

  To prepare for the documentary Victoria read several histories of tea, which she confessed to finding ‘a bit dull’.12 As usual she asked to vet the director proposed by KEO Films. John Moulson passed muster, and in early September filming began in Harrogate and London, where she hung out with cabbies and visited noted tea-guzzler Tony Benn (although they got on well, their conversation did not make the final cut). She and Chrissie Baker then joined the crew to fly to Kolkata, where Victoria saw a tea-bag machine being blessed and was served by a chai wallah on the banks of the Hooghly. They went on to Assam on the border with Myanmar to watch elephant-mounted tea-pickers at work. An elephant calf ‘went a bit haywire,’ she told Richenda Carey, ‘which was scary for a few secs. Have sat with chaps smoking opium and then watched other chaps in ceremonial dress make tea in bamboo tubes over an open fire which did make me want to say have you never heard of a kettle and teabags.’13 When they were filming in a tea plantation she slipped and tumbled out of sight. She got up laughing and, although the director walked into shot to check if she was unharmed, the footage was too good not to use. They spent two nights in an eco-lodge, where everyone had to wash in hot water delivered in a bucket. ‘Very good for bonding,’ suggested Victoria, who didn’t complain.14 More comfortably, they stayed in a tea-planter’s bungalow decorated, she suggested in a piece to camera, ‘in a style that I would say is 1950s Chorlton – it reminds me a bit of my grandmother’s house’.

  After the crew flew overnight from Mumbai to Shanghai, Victoria listened mischievously as a beautifully dressed tea lady in a tea restaurant presented a ceremonial beverage with an extremely long introduction in Cantonese. ‘Minestrone’s off,’ she translated for the camera. In a museum she was mobbed by schoolchildren demanding her autograph. When not filming she shopped for presents, but the schedule was stressfully dense. ‘Oh my lord we are right in the thick of it now,’ Victoria told Jane Wymark. ‘Director is wilting under pressure and has gone from chewing Nicorette to chain smoking Coke drinking and chewing Nicorette.’15

  It was on the next foreign leg of the trip – after outings to Woburn Abbey and Blackpool – that the director pulled off the programme’s greatest coup. John Moulson knew that Morrissey was a fan of both tea and Victoria Wood so proposed they meet on camera. Victoria was vaguely aware that ‘Rushholme Ruffians’ from the Smiths’ 1985 album Meat Is Murder contained a lyrical homage to ‘Fourteen Again’. Morrissey had attempted to have tea with her in 1990 when she was at the Strand Theatre, but she had been too tired and said no. Now he was pinned down to New York. At the prompting of Piers Wenger, Victoria emailed Peter Bowker to ask for a Morrissey tutorial and received a playlist by return: ‘I guess the fact that he’s agreed to do the interview must mean he’s reasonably well disposed towards me. I can imagine him refusing to disclose where he stands on loose leaf versus teabags though.’16 The night before the interview she and her director went to see him perform at Terminal 5, where in the middle of a song, the music stopped, the venue sank into darkness and Morrissey sonorously intoned the bleak finale of ‘Northerners’:

  Cobbles in the morning mist,

  Park Drive,

  Dead at forty-five

  From a backstreet abortionist.

  ‘He’s doing one of my songs!’ Victoria hollered. Afterwards they went backstage, where Morrissey shyly presented her with a mixtape full of Patti Smith, Nico and other singers she had barely heard of. ‘They really seemed to hit it off,’ says John Moulson. ‘They chatted for about forty minutes about Coronation Street, Jimmy Clitheroe, Alan Bennett. It was quite touching and very funny. He was teasing her. She showed him a picture of something we’d shot in China. “Ooh, someone’s been on their travels.”’ In the interview itself Victoria presented him with a black-and-white tea cosy made by Norah Wellbelove. Back in London she soon met him for a drink with Chrissie Hynde. ‘Any tips on her?’ she ask
ed Peter Bowker.17 ‘I wouldn’t try and compete on the eye liner front,’ he advised.18

  Aside from Morrissey, the highlight for Victoria was going to York to make tea in a NAAFI van for Second World War veterans, who were as thrilled to meet her. The same day she went to Preston to do I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. Her appearance had an unexpected outcome when Graeme Garden asked her to step in at short notice to act as emcee at a festival of slapstick in Bristol. ‘I thought well why the heck not,’ she said. After steeping herself in the material, she declared Buster Keaton ‘my new heart throb’.19

  Four years after she was first approached about the idea, the BBC confirmed Loving Miss Hatto would go out two days before Christmas. ‘I have to say if I had directed it, it wouldn’t look so classy,’ she told Richenda Carey, ‘though it would have more laughs in it!’20 The date of transmission, somewhere in the annual avalanche of new dramas, reflected the anxiety of the BBC’s Editorial Policy department. The script was on solid ground legally, but there were fears that William Barrington-Coupe might sue or that they might be seen to be picking on an old man. Despite widespread critical praise, ‘it somewhat got lost,’ concludes Andy Harries. ‘I don’t know why that was. Housewife, 49 had gone through the roof. Ours just didn’t and I couldn’t work out why.’

  Victoria and Piers Wenger began 2013 with a week in St Lucia, where on New Year’s Day they decided to treat themselves to a glamorous cruise aboard a skippered yacht. ‘When we got there the boat was this really tiny ramshackle thing,’ says Piers. ‘We were supposed to have lunch on the boat, and the guy had brought two mangos from his garden and sliced them up with a rusty penknife that he took out of his pocket. That became a highlight of the holiday.’

  Back in London Victoria had two more shootings days on Victoria Wood’s Nice Cup of Tea, as it was now titled, then wrote and recorded the voiceover. ‘The tea stuff is quite a challenge,’ she confessed. ‘I feel it’s now on my shoulders to come up with some sort of overall theme (done it before with the Empire prog but was hoping not to have to do it again).’21 The job wasn’t completed till late February, which frustrated her desire to push on with her next venture: a television version of That Day We Sang which she would direct herself.

  The previous summer she had first taken the idea to Ben Stephenson, the head of drama commissioning at the BBC, and he now organised for her to choose from a selection of producers. The one she warmed to was Hilary Bevan Jones, whose formidable CV included Cracker and State of Play. ‘Hilary has been dead keen on the script from day one,’ she enthused to Nigel Lilley and Sammy Murray, once again enlisted as musical director and choreographer.22 Her ambition was for Vincent Franklin and Jenna Russell to resume as Tubby and Enid, though she was aware that the BBC might insist on bigger names to justify the budget. ‘Of course I will fight for them both but not to the extent that it jeopardises the project.’23 ‘Is it worth mentioning Michael Ball?’ Nigel Lilley replied.24

  In the hope that it might be shot in the summer, Victoria committed herself to rushing out a ninety-minute first draft in only three weeks. She went to Swiss Cottage to start whittling away at her original script, trimming out most of the scenes involving choir rehearsals that were integral to the MIF production. She renamed her new script Tubby and Enid for the pragmatic reason that a chamber production of That Day We Sang was now in the pipeline at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. The idea was suggested by Alex Poots to the theatre’s artistic director Sarah Frankcom, who was looking for a Christmas show. Galvanised by the prospect of a revival, Victoria took the train to Manchester the very next day. ‘You seem you know what you’re doing,’ she told Frankcom. ‘I think you would need to work with Sammy and with Nigel. If you work with them then great.’

  The recycling of her back catalogue was to become a theme of Victoria’s year. While she was at Swiss Cottage converting That Day We Sang into a drama she met up with Charlotte Scott, and between them they cooked up the idea of a stage version of Housewife, 49 for the Old Laundry Theatre in Bowness-on-Windermere. The Radio 3 broadcaster Paul Allen was asked to adapt it – as a young journalist he had been the first critic to review Talent at the Crucible, where twenty years later he had his own stage hit adapting Brassed Off. Peter James would direct it. Both sat on the Old Laundry’s board of trustees with Victoria. She saw yet another of her old titles revived when Acorn Antiques: The Musical! was staged by an amateur troupe in Sheffield. Though chuffed to hear the songs once more, from a distance of five years she ‘found the plot a bit hard to follow – and I’d written it, so don’t know what the others made of it’.25 The retrospective mood continued that month as she presented Julie Walters with an outstanding-achievement award at the South Bank Sky Arts Awards. Having paid tribute in her speech, Victoria used the presence of press microphones to vent her fury at the viral spread of enhanced reality shows such as The Only Way Is Essex: ‘They put a bunch of real people into situations and get them to act something out. To me that is taking the bread out of the actors’ mouths.’26

  Victoria Wood’s Nice Cup of Tea was broadcast in April, but she had moved on. ‘Let the cards fall where they may,’ she told Richenda Carey. ‘I did my best and it’s just a trivial bit of telly.’27 Meanwhile, there were signs of an impending commission for Tubby and Enid, and even some money for pre-production. Victoria was begrudgingly aware that her script must make its way through the sundry strata of managerial decision makers at the BBC. Having dashed off the first draft, once more she found herself ‘madly racing on with my next draft as I need to get it in to the Big Cheese for the thumbs up – implementing the Small Cheese’s notes’.28

  On 19 May, Victoria marked her sixtieth birthday with the biggest party she had ever thrown. Normally she would drive down to M&S in Finchley at seven in the morning to get her party food and gather a few friends around a brazier in the garden. This time, urged by Piers Wenger to splash out, she booked a Moroccan marquee bedecked with cushions, Indian catering and a young jazz trio sourced by Henry. Guests from all walks of her life were there, including the new circle of younger friends she had acquired on Housewife, 49, the Acorn Antiques tour, Eric & Ernie and That Day We Sang. One abiding image in the throng was of Wood and French and Saunders in a huddle. ‘Couldn’t have liked it more,’ the hostess concluded. ‘And so nice not to have to spend the aftermath clearing up as I do at Christmas. I wish I could have kept the tent.’29

  As Victoria waited for someone at the BBC to read her script she went to Garsington Opera to witness Grace’s professional debut in the chorus and felt huge pride when, subsequently, a casting director approached her and said, ‘You must be Grace’s mum,’ then showered her daughter with praise. ‘Whenever that happened, and it happened a handful of times,’ says Grace, ‘she said that was the nicest thing for her: that people were coming up to her not for her and turning the tables. She loved it.’ That summer Victoria also caught Anne Reid’s cabaret at The Stables. With no wingman to protect her from admirers, ‘it was like being at the petting zoo,’30 she told Nigel Lilley, to whom she soon confided that she was ‘creeping round to the idea of writing another one at some point so want to see what everyone’s up to …’31 She went to Sheffield to see a new musical by Tim Firth, who had written the Calendar Girls film script, and went so far as to tell the Crucible’s artistic director Daniel Evans that she had an idea for a musical, but the conversation went no further. Project ideas continued to bubble up. With Stephen Mear she talked about making a documentary on the history of dance troupes featuring the Bluebells, the Rockettes and the Tiller Girls – they accumulated a stack of books to do research.

  By early August the cheeses at BBC Drama had all read and approved the latest draft of Tubby and Enid and thoughts turned to casting. One of their provisos was that it be cast to the hilt, so Victoria wrote apologetically to inform Jenna Russell that the part of Enid would not be hers. The BBC insisted the script be sent to Emma Thompson to try and engender American interest. ‘I didn’t feel I cou
ld go against that as an idea,’ she told her colleagues, but her preference was for Imelda Staunton.32 ‘If she said yes I would work round her availability as I don’t think we can do better.’33 Imelda had for a time been a close friend of Victoria’s, but aside from occasional encounters the connection had lapsed. ‘I was so shocked to get the script,’ she says. ‘I thought, that’s weird, we haven’t been in touch for years.’ The first she learned of Victoria’s illness was when she visited her garden to talk about Enid. She was back a few days later to work on the songs but was not available for the whole of the autumn, which at least gave the production time to locate a Tubby and some funding.

  Victoria then spent a couple of days back at the Edinburgh Fringe, partly to see her brother’s twenty-year-old granddaughter have a crack at stand-up, partly to catch a play starring Daniel Rigby, who was once again lodging with her for a few months. At the television festival she was taken aback to discover that the controller of the channel That Day We Sang was destined for knew nothing about it. ‘I pounced on Janice Hadlow,’ she reported to Nigel Lilley, ‘and when she opened the conversation with “Victoria – HOW can I persuade you to do something for BBC2?” I realised she wasn’t quite up to speed on the whole Tubby sitch. So I did a bit of gulping and explained there was a script which I was waiting for her to read.’34 Victoria also took the opportunity to pitch the dance documentary: ‘She went mad for that too.’35

  In early September Victoria was in the Lakes to help usher Housewife, 49 onto the stage. The cast, whom she invited to tea at Swiss Cottage during the run, included Andrew Dunn as Nella Last’s husband and Richenda Carey as Mrs Waite. She had no qualms about handing over her own role to another actress. ‘I didn’t feel weird about it,’ she told Richenda. ‘My attachment is to the whole thing rather than the part of Nella. I just love that she is having a further life.’36 In the hope that its life might extend beyond Windermere, Phil McIntyre invested in the production and turned up to the read-through. Once it was in preview Victoria suggested a succession of cuts to Paul Allen, whose adaptation was more faithful to Nella Last’s diary than she had been. ‘She was much more ruthless with material that didn’t always directly lead the narrative to the next plot point or the resolution of a particular scene,’ he says. While praising its ‘quiet cumulative power,’ the Stage found the production ‘never quite overcomes its screen origins’.37 It attracted a strong audience from Barrow-in-Furness, including many who remembered the real Nella, but the play was to have no further life.