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

by Jasper Rees

  By now Victoria’s focus was narrowing onto her musical as it forged separate paths towards stage and screen. To Nigel Lilley, who would work on each of them, she declared herself ‘very excited about both versions now!’38 Hilary Bevan Jones introduced her to an experienced cinematographer, and she went to Manchester to inspect the model of the Royal Exchange set. She had casting approval for the theatre production but mainly kept her distance as she concentrated on casting the television drama. Victoria’s first thought for Tubby was Conleth Hill, the sinuous Northern Irish actor she had admired since seeing the West End hit Stones in His Pockets in 2000. The BBC held out for a bigger name so instead he was cast as the puffed-up Frank Brierley, with Sophie Thompson as his wife. As for Tubby, eventually Victoria fell in with Nigel Lilley’s idea from six months earlier and the most popular male lead in musical theatre was sounded out.

  ‘They sent me some script and the songs, and I really worked my arse off,’ says Michael Ball. ‘I was so nervous, but I just knew this character and I was desperate to do it.’ As they worked on dialogue, Victoria impressed upon him her abhorrence of paraphrasing: ‘I got the words wrong and she said, “I don’t think that’s what I wrote.” She almost had a physical reaction.’ According to Nigel Lilley, it was ‘an audition that wasn’t an audition. They needed to suss each other out. Afterwards she was walking down the street going, “Michael Ball is singing my songs!”’ ‘He’s v lovely,’ she wrote glowingly later that day. ‘Not starry.’39

  As for the rest of the cast, Victoria stayed loyal to actors she trusted. Vincent Franklin, the original Tubby, returned as Enid’s un-

  pleasant boss/lover. Dorothy Atkinson, from Housewife, 49 and Mid Life Christmas, was the kindly choir mistress Gertrude Riall. Daniel Rigby was cast as Mr Kirkby, a wounded veteran of the trenches who gruffly takes young Jimmy under his wing. In her most sentimental coup Victoria found a role for Ian Lavender, the last survivor of the Dad’s Army Home Guard, as the commissionaire who turns a blind eye when Tubby, like a midlife Romeo, climbs up a ladder to declare his love to Enid.

  The production required a budget of £2 million, only some of it to be supplied by the BBC, so Victoria and the producers travelled to Manchester, where she was ‘to be pimped out as truly northern’.40 The trip bore fruit when Peter Salmon, having been there at the show’s conception, dipped into a discretionary fund for such projects on the proviso that the production have a Mancunian footprint. A distributor gave them an advance, and they received some private equity. ‘Getting that last couple of hundred grand together was really hard and frustrating for us,’ says Hilary Bevan Jones, who by now was so emotionally invested in the project that she agreed, with Victoria, to reduce her own fee.

  Victoria spent the autumn haring between London and the north. She made a hectic overnight visit to Scarborough to see Vincent Franklin in a play. One evening in October she did two charity events – one speaking about her schoolfriend Lesley Schatzberger’s charity Jessie’s Fund at a privately held auction, the other a short stand-up set as the headliner in aid of Breakthrough Breast Cancer at the Roundhouse. The latter, she told Jane Wymark, was ‘40 yrs on from John Cage and his music circus!’41 She was whisked on the back of a motorbike between the two. She couldn’t resist an invitation to record two episodes of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. ‘Such an exhausting day,’ she said. ‘A mixture of being in the writer’s room for Sid Caesar and an old folks’ home. Was there from 10 30 till midnight.’42 She sang ‘Bob the Builder’ to the tune of ‘I Dreamed a Dream’, provoking a raucous ovation before she’d even finished. In the game of changing a title by the addition of one word, she namechecked an old New Faces contestant by suggesting ‘Les Dennis Miserables’. Asked to propose a film to be enjoyed by senior citizens, she nominated ‘Cakes on a Train’.

  There was more singing the next day at the read-through of That Day We Sang at the Royal Exchange. Being the only person in attendance who knew the songs, Victoria tentatively volunteered herself. ‘None of them in my key,’ she told Jane Wymark. ‘It was like a horrid mixture of Molesworth and Susan Boyle.’43 At short notice she stepped in to host another opening night at the London Jazz Festival and had a fun evening out at a Russell Brand gig in Hammersmith Apollo, where after the show she ran into Morrissey in hospitality: ‘Morrissey insisted on getting in my car and I had to drive him to Claridge’s and then apparently (Lucy was watching from upstairs window) Russell ran after the car begging us to stop but we never heard him … celebs eh!’44 Her own celebrity was wielded as a big blunt instrument at Broadcasting House when, to increase the pot of funding, she and Hilary Bevan Jones pitched a documentary about making Tubby and Enid. When they got to the meeting the person who could green-light the project was not in the room: ‘Hils went and whispered to someone that if they didn’t get the head of Docs in the room NOW then I was going to go mad. (I was quite innocently sitting there not knowing she was using me in this way).’45

  In regular commutes to Manchester Victoria met up with the Hallé Children’s Choir and its choir mistress, and once more sat through hours of children’s auditions. She chose a young actor called Harvey Chaisty to play Jimmy, the junior incarnation of Tubby, while another boy tickled her by doing a bit of Kimberley and won a part. Locations were scouted in Manchester, Liverpool and Huddersfield, whose town hall with splendid organ pipes was deemed the closest facsimile to the Free Trade Hall where ‘Nymphs and Shepherds’ was recorded in 1929. ‘It’s all a bit bonkers trying to prep this musical, and rehearse dancers, and choose urchins and find musicians who have to come from outside the M25,’ Victoria reported to Richard E. Grant.46

  In this hectic timetable she stole one day off, dashing to and from Paris on Eurostar as a belated sixtieth birthday treat courtesy of Nigel Lilley and his partner. They visited a museum, took a trip on the Seine, had lunch and drank champagne. ‘J’aime beaucoup la Musee D’Orsay,’ she wrote gratefully. ‘Je ne trouve pas la punctuation francaise sur mon keyboard. Je ne regrette riens. Victoire.’47

  In December the cast and musicians of Tubby and Enid recorded the songs in a London studio, where Michael Ball found her an open-minded collaborator. ‘It wasn’t a difficult sing,’ he says. ‘When we started doing it, there were only a couple of musical things where I would say, “Could I go up a third and try a harmony here?” Nigel would go, “You can ask her. I’m not going to.” She said, “Let’s hear it.” If something didn’t work and she didn’t like it, she’d absolutely say no. If you could contribute something and she loved it … you wanted to please her. You wanted that smile.’ Then song and dance rehearsals began on a sound stage in Salford. While in Media City Victoria was invited by Radio 4’s Front Row to choose a single word to be illuminated in giant neon above a building there. She thought about picking ‘Chips’ but eventually alighted on ‘Happy’. ‘It relates to what I try to be,’ she explained to the presenter John Wilson as she hit the switch, ‘and what I try to convey in my work and what I think my job is. It’s to do with my responsibility to the audience.’

  Victoria’s own moment of personal happiness came at the December wedding of Jonny Campbell and Beth Willis at Wiltons Music Hall in east London. Invited to give an address in the ceremony, somewhere in her schedule she found time to adapt Marriott Edgar’s comic poem ‘The Lion and Albert’, popularised by Stanley Holloway in the 1930s. She repurposed the story of a boy coming to an unfortunate end at the zoo as a nuptial narrative called ‘Whitney’s Wedding’:

  There’s a famous seaside place called Blackpool.

  You’ll have the next line on your lips –

  It’s noted for fresh air, and also for fun

  And mugging, and drag acts. and chips.

  And Blackpool’s the scene for my story,

  A wedding, one morning in May,

  When Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom

  Gave their only child Whitney away.

  They’d worried she’d never get married,

/>   That the way to her heart would stay barred.

  Cos she only liked sitting ont sofa,

  And Strictly, and Bake Off, and lard.

  A few days later she was at the press night of That Day We Sang at the Royal Exchange, where she had been an ever more frequent visitor. Having already consented to various cuts and edits, as she saw the production take shape Victoria offered some notes ‘that were like keyhole surgery,’ says Sarah Frankcom. ‘At the dress rehearsal she was very serious, at the preview she’d thawed a bit and at the press night she sat in the first gallery and just smiled the whole way through.’ It became one of the theatre’s most successful Christmas productions.

  By Christmas Victoria was exhausted. ‘Have just had a meeting about a doco I might do,’ she told Nigel Lilley on the 23rd. ‘I’m so tired I could barely listen or look interested.’48 After Christmas she took off to New York for a few days with Grace and Henry.

  In January 2014, after many years of waiting, Victoria began at last to direct a full-length television drama. She was all too aware that it was going to be a challenge. ‘I don’t have the experience with cameras,’ she told Sammy Murray, ‘but we will all work together and that’s what I like about filming anyway – the collaboration.’49 On the first day of the shoot Imelda Staunton as Enid marched determinedly up a residential street in Liverpool singing along to playback as the camera followed her on tracks. The song, ‘Do It’, was composed especially for the drama. They didn’t quite finish the schedule that day, but the producer Paul Frift called a halt. ‘Vic hadn’t been slow and we only needed one more shot,’ says Hilary Bevan Jones, ‘and Paul quite rightly said, “Stop, show the crew that we’re not going over every day.” Other directors might have had a complete fit, but she could see the logic. She was a total team player.’

  Filming six days a week with early starts, Victoria was kept extremely busy. Every day she would get back to her rented flat near Canal Street at eight o’clock and pore over the rushes from the day before. ‘Not much time to lift weights,’ she told Jane Wymark.50 On a relatively small budget the production had to capture the look of the 1920s and the 1960s and incorporate colourful fantasy song-and-dance sequences. It was extremely cold filming the exteriors. ‘Happiness Street’, the other new song she composed especially for the drama, featured a cheery quartet of singing and dancing urchins – to dress the Liverpool alley where it was shot an art department trainee was on his hands and knees obscuring yellow lines under freezing mud. There was a positive sign of things going well: when ‘The Berni Inn’ was filmed on the sound stage in Salford one of the sparks, baring his builder’s bottom on the floor as he prepared for the next shot, was singing the tune. ‘Vic was so chuffed,’ says Hilary. ‘The whole crew were in love with this show.’ Victoria had another high when the production moved to Huddersfield Town Hall to record the finale with the Hallé Orchestra and the Hallé Children’s Choir. It was ‘quite a scary day as we only had the Hallé for that day and they knock off prompt after so many hours! But we got it all.’51 By habit an energetic texter, afterwards she made a rare phone call to Nigel Lilley. ‘She was strangely emotional for Vic,’ he says, ‘and on a bit of a high. She never thought she’d get her music recorded by a symphony orchestra.’

  The shoot for That Day We Sang, as it was once more titled, was a culmination enfolding everything she’d learned in the forty years since a New Faces judge told her she had no future. Having always hankered to call all the shots, Victoria was now directing her own feature-length script, set and mainly filmed in Manchester, for which she had written the jokes, the lyrics and the music. The result was bliss. ‘Vic was just doing the job really, really well,’ says Imelda Staunton. ‘This was her stuff, she knew how she wanted it to look, how it was going to sound. She knew exactly how she was going to shoot everything. She was so, so happy because every element seemed to work, and she knew we could all deliver it.’

  Throughout the shoot Victoria got on extremely well with Michael Ball, who, she reported, ‘has enthusiastically embraced his inner and outer Tubby and has 2 puds every lunchtime. We may have to put a piece in his trousers by week 3.’52 He had even less experience as a TV actor than she did as a TV director. ‘We just clicked,’ he says. ‘We were very, very tight on set. I would pick up quite quickly on when she would need a hug or be made to laugh. She would say how hard it is sometimes to be the one everybody comes to, to make sure everyone’s got respect for you. She would feel intimidated. Hilary was very, very good at guiding and calming her.’ As well as the catchphrase conferred by Jane McDonald, they had a running joke about an extra who furtively snuck into every shot. They nicknamed her Rosemary West.

  An intense schedule landed Victoria with a chest infection on the last day, which made for an uncomfortable journey home. ‘Have totally run out of steam,’ she told Nigel Lilley a week later. ‘Could not have kept up that pace much longer but am missing charging about in the cold having a laugh.’53 She spent her recovery period watching films as part of her BAFTA-judging duties. In early March, at a lunch at the Park Lane Hilton Hotel to mark the retirement of Sir Marcus Setchell, she made a short speech on a gynaecological theme in tribute to the doctor who had delivered Henry Durham and Prince George. (The latter’s mother was also in attendance, though Victoria held back from the throng pushing to meet her at a small reception beforehand.) ‘She made some very hilarious observations about what it is to be a woman,’ says Kirsty Young, who found herself sitting next to Victoria. The connection they had struck up on Desert Island Discs seven years earlier was not to be revived: ‘It was almost as though we hadn’t had that very intimate exchange. She was pretty closed, and I thought, that’s interesting – that just happened at the moment it happened.’

  For much of the rest of the year Victoria was in an edit suite. Every day she made her way to Wardour Street in Soho to sift laboriously through all the takes on huge high-definition screens and assemble them into a ninety-minute film. She soon found herself having meetings with audio techies about the arcana of dubbing, mixing and smoothing out the sound. ‘Some of these gents deal only with music,’ she marvelled, ‘some with vocals, some only with sound that has been pre mixed, and some can only be sent bits of sound that have nothing to do with each other. All these things have to be sent to the right person in the right order at the right stage in the editing process or lord knows what will occur.’54 She’d come a long way from Happy Since I Met You, her first drama shot on film in 1982. After six weeks of editing she watched everything they’d put together on a television and was sufficiently underwhelmed to ask for costly tweaks – ‘though how expensive can it be for someone to turn up the brightness – it’s very quick when you do it at home’.55

  She then turned to composing the score. ‘Normally,’ she conceded to her musical supervisor, ‘the director wouldn’t be writing the music!’56 In April the score was orchestrated by Chris Walker and recorded with lashings of luscious brass. ‘I am slightly dreading the end of the film,’ she admitted to Richenda Carey, ‘as up to now I’ve been able to keep working on it and improving it – with the titles and the music and the grade and the sound mix and after Wednesday it will just be in its box – done.’57 The following month she went to the Serpentine Gallery for a party thrown by one of the film’s investors, where ‘If We Were Fred and Ginger’ was shown in a silent loop. ‘Can you lip read?’ said someone who spotted Victoria with her eyes glued to the screen. ‘I don’t have to,’ she replied. ‘I wrote it.’

  With the drama in the can, next up was the documentary about the making of the drama. A film crew had been there to record Victoria as she met the Hallé Children’s Choir, attended recordings and dance rehearsals, and captured some of the actual shoot. She now found herself sifting through eighteen hours of footage. ‘Crikey it’s so hard to watch,’ she told Jane Wymark. ‘I hate watching myself anyway (none of me will go in the finished film I have at least that privilege).’58 Then came the business of choosing a prod
ucer-director. Having enjoyed total control as a director of the drama, she was reluctant to cede it and specifically sought someone ‘who can get on board with how I want it to be and not try and be creative on their own behalf’.59

  In July there was an invitation to be an onstage guest of Monty Python, promoted and produced by Phil McIntyre as they reformed for a run at the O2 Arena. As it involved being in a sketch with a bag on her head Victoria turned it down. David Walliams gladly deputised. She went along to the show and, while enjoying the spectacle, found the principals ‘curiously disengaged I thought – not warm – only Palin and Idle really gave it any performing welly’.60 She also declined an invitation to return to the stage from Michael Codron, who was making his swansong as a West End producer and dangled a role in Mr Foote’s Other Leg about an eighteenth-century actor. ‘I don’t really like acting!’ she replied. ‘I much prefer running about in my own clothes bossing people about. I have so many things I want to write and produce, and it feels like time is short as every project takes so long to get off the ground.’61