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

by Jasper Rees

There were two holidays that summer. To the Glossops she expressed a specific desire to go to an island, so they took a train to the south of France. When they disembarked and made their way onto a peninsula Victoria became suspicious. ‘It is an island, isn’t it?’ she asked nervously, and was only reassured when they boarded a ferry to Porquerolles, one of the Îles d’Hyères. There was another island retreat when she took Grace and Henry with his new girlfriend Steph to Zanzibar, where they stayed by the beach and mooched around the town before moving on to the mainland. ‘Had a fantastic time,’ she told Sammy Murray, ‘just swimming and lying around and had a mini safari in the middle – really good to be together with them all.’62

  She carried memories of Tanzania into her next assignment: for Comic Relief Victoria volunteered to take part in a celebrity instalment of The Great British Bake Off. Michael Ball, who had done it the previous year, encouraged her to sign up and lent her his lemon zester. She spent several days practising a tray bake inspired by the spices of Zanzibar. Her friend Norah Wellbelove, who was staying in the spare room, proposed making rice-paper palm trees: ‘I don’t think she has quite grasped that I have to do it myself on the day.’63 After forty years on television, Victoria found the prospect of being filmed while cooking ‘so stressful … I have a great fear that with cameras etc I will drop my reading glasses into my tray bake and Mary Berry will be rushed to A and E after ingesting my one point fives and die on a trolley in a corridor.’64 The producers also asked for a cake in the form of a self-portrait, so she opted for Kimberley in a yellow beret. When she turned up for filming she was so attuned to the programme’s rhythms that ‘I tried to assist the Bake Off MasterChef style drum and bass edit by making all my moves in a four four beat,’ she told Daniel Rigby. ‘At one point I did actually shout “Cue the music!” which made me and the cameraman laugh.’65 With her competitive streak trumping her instinct to entertain, she took to her tasks with a straight face. ‘I know you’re supposed to say no, no, no, it’s all about Comic Relief,’ she said on camera, ‘but, yeah, desperate to win is the sad truth.’ She gleefully sucked up every compliment and, thanks to her triumphant Kimberley cake, emerged a very chuffed winner, qualifying her for the final, six months hence.

  The bulk of the autumn was once more devoted to promoting That Day We Sang. The Royal Variety Performance was considered, but with Imelda Staunton unavailable it was mooted that Victoria deputise to duet with Michael Ball. She discouraged the idea. ‘There’s something so terribly showy offy,’ she told Nigel Lilley, ‘about directing and writing something and then stepping on to the stage in a frock and saying “Guess what folks – I could have played Enid as well!”’66 Instead she and Michael Ball went on Weekend Wogan to petition Radio 2 listeners for memories of ‘Nymphs and Shepherds’. It was her first professional encounter with Terry Wogan since her ill-fated appearance on his chat show in 1982.

  The footage ended up on the documentary about the making of the musical. Much of the film was about the business of rehearsing and shooting the drama, but woven into it was a portrait of the world in which the musical was set and the story of the Manchester Children’s Choir. Victoria visited the city’s central library to pore over documents and dropped in on Forsyth’s music shop, where as a child she bought her first piano book, written by the choir’s founder. She met the three makers of Thames TV’s This Week film, and for a couple of days she took Michael Ball on a ramble around the Manchester of her youth. The sight of two famous faces touring the city in tandem attracted ecstatic gawpers. ‘We took it in turns to be recognised,’ he says. ‘You realised just what an effect she had on people. They just bloody loved the bones of her, and she was absolutely brilliant with them.’

  While Victoria had long experience of writing a voiceover to footage, she had never been so involved in every pernickety stage of piecing together a documentary before and found the task of sitting in a room with a director and an editor in Salford, latterly in Soho, ‘a bit like folding gravy’.67 She and her co-workers developed a habit of having egg and chips every Friday lunchtime, even on the day in late November when That Day We Sang was shown to the press at the Covent Garden Hotel. She was due to have lunch with Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton afterwards, only to have to respond to a plaintive text and go and buy them their lunch in the Berwick Street chippie. By now she was working to the wire: ‘The time pressure is horrendous, and twice I have had to write commentary and record it just as the commissioning editor is making his way up three flights of stairs to view the doco. Am very glad there’s no lift.’68

  They didn’t finish till ten days before broadcast. Relentlessly Victoria carried on plugging the drama – at a press screening in Manchester, and on breakfast television, The One Show and The Graham Norton Show on which the previous week she ‘watched Julie utterly baffle Nicole Kidman by coming on as Mrs O’).69 At her Christmas party Michael Ball added his voice to the carol singing until he was finally asked to give someone else a chance. Victoria Wood with All the Trimmings was repeated on Christmas Eve. On Boxing Day That Musical We Made and That Day We Sang were broadcast on BBC Two. Victoria was delighted to receive many congratulatory texts from friends and colleagues. The rave she savoured the most was from the conductor John Wilson, who praised the music. ‘Meant a lot to me,’ she told Nigel Lilley, ‘as no one ever much mentions it and he was comparing me to Sondheim which is a great compliment.’70 Rashly she then decided to google That Day We Sang ‘and was hoist on my own petard as a headline from Telegraph popped up – Sweet but Saggy … so that served me right.’71

  Victoria’s most local review happened when she was talking outside the front door to her neighbour, who was expecting a visit from her son. He happened to be the Hollywood director Christopher Nolan: ‘He came up the drive and she said “oh this is Victoria she’s just directed something for TV …” at which a look of utter horror and disdain came over his face – he felt obliged to say “how did you get on” and I said “They’ve offered me the next Bond film” which he did manage to crack a smile at.’72

  25

  THE BOGEYMAN

  ‘The wig is only itchy cos of being bald as normally of course one would have it gripped to one’s own hair or a stocking cap … would go bald if not for press/anyone with a phone outing me.’

  Email to Jane Wymark, 2 October 2015

  Victoria began 2015 with a cleansing weekend in Budapest, where she and Norah Wellbelove soaked in the city’s healing thermal waters. January brought the ritual of decluttering. Filing cabinets were reorganised, bookshelves and cupboards rationalised. Gleefully she responded to a request for an item to auction in support of the Duke’s Playhouse in Lancaster, where in 1980 she made some of her earliest appearances as a comedian. She filled two boxes with memorabilia and sent them off. ‘I don’t suppose Tom Stoppard nips to the Oxfam before he sharpens his pencils,’ she told Jane Wymark, ‘but then he’s an intellectual.’1

  Then came the final of The Great Comic Relief Bake Off, recorded in front of an audience of amateur bakers. Victoria brought in ‘a cake I spent many hours faffing over’ which would be submitted to a blind tasting by Mary Berry.2 She planted a clue as to her sponge cake’s authorship by decorating it with an image of a hunched elderly waitress carrying two soups and was unabashedly thrilled to be anointed the winner. The heats were shown during Comic Relief week a month later, and even in victory she stayed competitive. ‘Celeb Bake Off has been a bit rubbish so far,’ she told Daniel Rigby. ‘Very low standard of baking and comedy – I have a feeling that when mine is shown next week they will have edited us to look like we couldn’t do anything when actually everyone was trying very hard.’3

  She watched the shows in between stints back at her desk. ‘Am at the bin staring despairing stage of trying to write something new,’ she told Nigel Lilley in mid-February.4 Victoria’s last unfulfilled ambition was to make a feature film, and she now had an idea which grew out of the tiniest acorn – a joke she had cracked at the Theatre R
oyal Drury Lane when recording I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue in 2012. Asked to nominate film titles suitable for the elderly, she had suggested ‘Cakes on a Train’, which conjured up something cosier than the action thriller Snakes on a Plane. Her stint as a Bake Off contestant was also among the list of ingredients, but as she started to write she mainly drew on a lifetime spent devouring cheap and mediocre television. She imagined a Sunday-night show called Chuffed! which would mulch together several of the British viewer’s obsessions into one truly naff package. In each episode a steam train would travel through a historically resonant part of the countryside, while on board a cook would be filmed preparing a dish. Meanwhile, members of the public would make their own version of the dish, which would be judged once the train pulled up at the station platform. There would also be live entertainment from local troupes – trampolining, brass bands, a Segway display. ‘It’s a little round Britain travel programme,’ says the jaded producer. ‘We’ll edit it into nice little pieces, we’ll chuck music all over it like a bucket of potato peelings off the back of a cross channel ferry.’

  Victoria peopled this world with types she knew well from her years making documentaries: a commissioner of factual entertainment who under her pashmina is as hard as nails; a male director who would far rather shoot a history of firearms called All Guns Blazing; a seen-it-all make-up artist who can think of nothing beyond her own working needs. At the heart of the drama is Pam Pickles, a decent but utterly humourless woman in her fifties who accidentally becomes the breakout star of Chuffed! She runs cookery courses and is looking forward to a happy retirement with her globetrotting husband Tim. When Chuffed! ’s original cook departs in a hurry after a viral sex-video scandal, the producers urgently need to unearth the next Delia. Pam is talent-scouted at short notice and, despite her early awkwardness on camera, the viewers warm to her straight-talking authenticity. ‘Praise is a lovely warm bath I know,’ she tells one amateur chef, ‘but in the end that water cools off and we all have to get out and stand shivering in a cold bathroom.’ For all the absurdity of the mangled concept, the show is a huge hit. Overnight Pam becomes a celebrity who is asked for autographs everywhere she goes, causing her grumpy husband to feel like a spare part. To stave off his jealousy, Tim is invited to take photographs for the book accompanying the series but is soon caught smooching with the food stylist. The live finale of Chuffed! descends into chaos with two of Pam’s fellow presenters coming to blows while Pam calmly announces her husband’s betrayal and, with her co-presenter, sings ‘I Am What I Am’ from La Cage aux Folles.

  Once before Victoria had tried to dramatise the end of a long marriage. Her untitled script, written in 2008, was shown to no one and deposited in the bottom drawer, but she now salvaged several elements from it. Like Sally and Tony from the previous script, Pam and Tim live in a Hertfordshire village, have two grown-up sons in North America and neighbours who bestow ludicrous names on their children – in this case Fabian and Salome. Pam like Sally works in home catering; Tim like Tony seduces a younger woman. Whereas in the previous script Victoria engineered a reconciliation between the sundered couple, this time she took a different path. In the end Pam calmly accepts that she and Tim have long since stopped caring for each other and the marriage cannot be salvaged. In the final moments Pam’s career continues with a new show called Steaming Ahead, while Tim miserably trudges around the shops with his new wife and baby.

  Victoria used the script to satirise various irritants of the world around her. The television channel rates Pam according to consolidated audience appreciation figures measured out in pie charts and diagrams: ‘Her performance in week one was eighty one percent nervous, with eleven percent wooden, three percent boring and five percent could not categorise her performance.’

  ‘Writing goes on,’ Victoria reported after a month at her desk. ‘Dead slow but I have to put everything in a first draft just to see what the story is … same old but I know it will be OK in the end.’5 Among the things she lobbed into the pot was a colourful gallery of characters. Her co-presenters included a disgraced Tory MP, a professional northerner who likes real ale and jug bands (a nod to her university friend Bill Lloyd), and someone clearly modelled on Michael Ball. Simply known as the Talent, he is ‘Mr Musical Theatre, the unthinking woman’s crumpet’ who is often mobbed by middle-aged female fans and has a tubbiness issue. Victoria hoped that Michael Ball would play him and told him about it as she wrote.

  By now ‘Little Mickey Ball’, as she dubbed him, had joined the smallish throng of intimate friends in whose company Victoria felt safe and comfortable and even daring. He persuaded her to do the ice-bucket challenge. One weekday afternoon they caught up over lunch at the Ivy. ‘We came out,’ he says, ‘and said, “What shall we do? Let’s go and see something.” We looked across the road and went, “Have you ever seen The Mousetrap?” We got two tickets and just wet ourselves. By the second half word had got in because the performances certainly rose.’ A much more outgoing celebrity, he peppered her with invitations. In March he asked her along to a pop-up production of Sweeney Todd, where he promised to introduce her to Stephen Sondheim. She was double-booked so had to say no. ‘And he wouldn’t know who I was anyway,’ she told Nigel Lilley.6 As Michael Ball’s guest she attended a reception at Buckingham Palace hosted by Princess Anne for the Motor Neurone Association. She found it ‘a lot jollier than I thought it would be and we could wander about and look at the Canalettos’.7

  Victoria took a break from writing to pay a visit to Dawn French and her husband Mark Bignell at their home in Fowey. It proved to be a little test of their long friendship, as she was soon asking to move bedrooms and, having just won Bake Off, disparaged the cake in the local tea room. ‘This is Vic at her most lovely, most loving, very happy to be with you,’ says Dawn. ‘But honestly quite demanding!’ They laughed and had late nights and, as Victoria had only ever been to Cornwall once to perform in St Austell, Dawn drove her up to the rugged north coast to walk on one of the big surfing beaches. She soon noticed that Victoria, who normally strode ahead, was hanging behind. ‘She was a bit grumpy, had a hat on. I said, “What is your problem?” She said, “I don’t like beaches.” I just laughed and laughed and I knew I was risking her temper and then she laughed and then we were all laughing, so much so that I did this impression of her to her several times after that. I said, “I don’t like beaches? What the fuck are you talking about? There’s no such thing, is there? I’ve never met anyone like you, Vic.”’

  On her final day in Cornwall Victoria spotted Dawn’s husband brandishing a metal detector. ‘I’m going to find some doubloons,’ he told her. She asked if she could come too, so he lent her a spare, trained her how to use it and they disappeared for hours. She boasted to Nigel Lilley of finding ‘a 50p piece and a 1921 penny and a sewage outlet pipe’ and inserted a reference to metal detecting into Cakes on a Train.8 Days after her return both Victoria and French and Saunders were included in the Royal Mail’s celebration of comedy greats, issued on April Fool’s Day. There were ten stamps. On hers Victoria was depicted twice, looking for her friend Kimberley in the foreground and, behind, singing at the piano in The Angina Monologues. A set of postcards was sent by the Royal Mail, which she stuck up in the kitchen.

  By mid-April she was far enough ahead with Cakes on a Train to think about casting with Hilary Bevan Jones, who was to produce it. Aside from Michael Ball, roles were earmarked for Daniel Rigby and Conleth Hill, and Victoria hoped Julie Walters could be tempted to play Pam. She pitched it when Julie made a very rare visit to Highgate. ‘Julie liked the idea,’ she enthused, ‘so I got very excited.’9 ‘She just told me the story,’ says Julie, ‘a mad caper about a Delia Smith-type woman. I didn’t know whether I could do it.’

  Meanwhile, as she plotted her new drama, Victoria was drawn back into the world of That Day We Sang when invited by Manchester International Festival to speak on its behalf at a fundraiser hosted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osb
orne at 11 Downing Street. It prompted her to think of developing a third stage production, after MIF and the Royal Exchange, that would fold in elements of the television drama – to Nigel Lilley she pledged to ‘have a think about how to combine the best of both versions’.10 As for the drama, after copiously promoting the DVD release on radio and daytime television, she was hopeful of BAFTA nominations for That Day We Sang that, when they came, were confined to sound and production design. Victoria concluded ruefully that ‘people just didn’t count it as serious drama … I’m sad for Michael and Imelda but it’s just how it goes. Onward and upward.’11

  Onward and upward meant appearing in a new Sky One expanded version of Fungus the Bogeyman. She took it on as ‘a little get out of the house break’, and she liked the idea of working with Timothy Spall, fresh from his Oscar nomination for Mr Turner.12 But she was not encouraged by the read-through of a three-part script which greatly expanded Raymond Briggs’s story of a green monster whose job is to scare humans. Nor did she warm to the scriptwriter who ‘came up to me and said “it’s so great to be able to give gags to someone like you and know they will land” to which I was very tempted to reply – “Yes, when I am getting those gags?”’13 In fact, they were supplied by a new writer hastily drafted in to revamp the scripts. Victoria, who was to play Bactoria Snotsoup – the name was a sort of fungal compliment – was offered the chance to have her say by the director Catherine Morshead. ‘I’m hoping I don’t turn nice,’ she replied, adding a few notes on some of her dialogue.14 The shoot felt chaotic and dragged on longer than she anticipated: ‘I beg and plead every day for a schedule … Producer has taken to avoiding me as the problem seems to lie above his head.’15 At least she bonded with her co-star: ‘Tim Spall and I entertain ourselves talking about old telly … in silent moments one of us will suddenly go “Arthur Haynes!” or “Mr Pastry!”’16 To play a rich suburban villainess who assumes human form, she put on a thick Birmingham accent, and spent ninety minutes in make-up having her hair teased into extravagant ringlets by Chrissie Baker. Her fate at the end of the drama, as her wicked schemes are thwarted, was to have her mouth glued up.