Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  Talent was crammed with a staggering amount of personal detail and autobiographical experience. Maureen, the part Victoria played, is 25, the same age that Victoria was when she wrote the play; the girls work at Benson’s, the name of the sweet factory Victoria passed every morning on the way to school; Maureen has Irish blood on her mother’s side; the compère tells Julie she has no act, no experience and a terrible Lancashire accent; Julie has to urinate in a container and leave it on the windowsill due to the poor sanitary conditions in Bunter’s just as Victoria and Walters had done at the Bush Theatre; Julie thinks her unfaithful boyfriend (whose surname is Walters) will be impressed with her for being in a talent show.

  At university Victoria and Gerry McCarthy jokingly discussed that it might be okay for her to sleep with a television producer to get a job, so long as he did not have dirty underpants. Similarly, in Talent, Julie and Maureen discuss the idea of sleeping with a man in order to get a job on television. Julie says she would as long as he did not have bad breath. Julie believes an appearance on New Faces will lead to a life of wealth and fame, just as Victoria had. Among the talent show acts mentioned in the play are dwarfs and wheelchair-bound singers – Victoria encountered both of these at her New Faces audition. Cathy Christmas is the name of a singer described as a ‘Muppet’ in Talent; Carol Christmas competed against Victoria in her second New Faces appearance.

  Acute audience awareness was one of Victoria’s many strengths and it played a large part in her phenomenal success. She knew and understood the frames of reference of the average person, and even in 1978 she was tapping into it. Talent is littered with an accessible roll call of Cilla Black, the Black and White Minstrels, Leslie Crowther, Paul Daniels, Les Dawson, Freddie Garrity, Hughie Green, Russell Harty, Morecambe and Wise, Des O’Connor, Brian Poole and The Tremeloes, Harry Secombe and Lena Zavaroni. Likewise, the only phrases quoted or alluded to are advertising jingles for KP Discos, Palmolive and Tunes. Where other playwrights might have quoted great philosophers, Victoria quoted Larry Grayson and Paul Daniels.

  Other aspects of the play that would become Wood hallmarks included a preoccupation with gynaecological matters (one hysterectomy and a prolapse); the use of the adjective ‘barmy’; nuns as objects of amusement; and a fondness for brand names and rarefication (chocolates are ‘After Eights’, ‘Black Magic’ and ‘Weekend’, a car becomes a ‘Cortina’ and a bra is a ‘Dorothy Perkins half-cup wired’). Victoria loved the straight-faced way jargon and product names are used in conversation. She found the words funny in themselves, and was amused by their incongruity in everyday speech, but they also served the serious dramatic purpose of giving realism to her creations. ‘What is important to me is that, beyond all the product name-calling, there is a real inner life within the characters I create that audiences can almost believe or identify with,’ she said.

  Some critics felt the play’s originality lay in its aggressively female standpoint, but this also limited it, though not in Victoria’s opinion.

  ‘All my comedy is done from a woman’s point of view, which doesn’t mean that it’s not accessible to men, just that it will always have a particular relevance for women.’

  Since so much focus was put on Maureen and Julie, the male characters tended to be nothing more than walking jokes, prompting one critic to describe them as spectres at a hen party. Both Mel (Eric Richard) and the Compère (Peter Ellis) are insensitive and arrogant: echoes perhaps of Victoria’s view of Bob Mason.

  The Compère is a clumsy, chauvinistic, unfaithful lech whose seduction technique consists of putting first Julie’s and then Maureen’s hands on his crotch. A sexual braggart, he has no scruples about committing adultery while his wife is away brass rubbing, and he asks Maureen to bring a tissue to his suggested rendezvous in the back of his car. Just as one-dimensional and offensive is Mel, Julie’s first boyfriend who turns up as the club’s organist. We learn that he left Julie as soon as he found out she was pregnant. He assumed she opted for an abortion, and is unfazed when Julie reveals she gave birth to a son whom she gave away for adoption.

  Talent’s other male characters are retired factory worker George Findley (Roger Sloman) and his 59-year-old friend Arthur Hall (Bill Stewart). They were based on two elderly gentlemen Victoria met in Morecambe but their precise purpose in the play is questionable. They are at the club to perform a magic act that Victoria, no doubt influenced by Geoffrey – the play’s ‘Magic Consultant’ – described in excessive detail.

  After her years of unemployment, frustration and fear of anonymity, one cannot help being dubious about Victoria’s claim that she never intended to act in the play. Her ambition, competitive nature and the fact that she had poured so much of herself into the script makes it difficult to accept that she could happily step aside and be content to watch others performing her work. After all, writing and starring in a play was a way of making the girl who was ‘not needed’ at school indispensable. According to Victoria she only took the role of Maureen because she was playing the piano in the show and it made the play easier to stage.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to do acting, but I’m not what you’d call an actress, I just pull faces. I can do comedy but I wouldn’t do the serious stuff,’ she humbly told Sheffield’s Star newspaper. It seemed as if she could not believe her luck; possibly it was a get-out clause in case she fell flat on her face.

  Talent premiered at the Crucible Studio on 9 November 1978. The first-night audience lapped it up, but the Sheffield critics were less effusive. Tim Brown in the Morning Telegraph described it as ‘a Thirty Minute Theatre of a plot, stretched to one-and-a-half hours’ and he could not resist mentioning Victoria’s ‘ample form’. While Carole Freeman in the Star found the play ‘very funny’, it was its structure she most admired (‘tremendously concise and well shaped’).

  A more generally appreciative view was found in the Guardian, where Paul Allen wrote: ‘In its short and pithy span it incorporates a wealth of human disillusion and more comic one-liners than is altogether fair in a sad, sad story.’ His criticism that the play was sometimes too ‘knicker-wettingly funny’ was unlikely to have traumatised Victoria.

  The mixture of relief and pride she felt no doubt buoyed her along during November and December when she performed her 10 p.m. post-play stand-up act. Because she was energised by the positive audience response to Talent, what could have been a drain served instead as a further showcase for her talents. The shows were split into two individual segments with Geoffrey as The Great Soprendo (‘That Slick Spick with the Spanish Vanish’) taking first billing. Victoria called her 45-minute portion Tickling My Ivories, and described it as ‘an evening of singing, talking, standing up, sitting down again and (possibly) one card trick’.

  Her plans to write a situation comedy, as well as material for Marti Caine’s first BBC sketch and stand-up show, were suddenly abandoned when Peter Eckersley made contact. A former Coronation Street producer, he was then Granada’s head of drama and, like David Leland before him, recognised Victoria’s unique abilities. ‘He went to Sheffield and I remember him coming home and saying that he saw this most wonderful girl and play – it was Victoria,’ said his widow, Anne Reid.

  When Eckersley bought Talent for Granada it marked the beginning of a short but prolific relationship with Victoria, who admired Eckersley tremendously.

  ‘He was the thing that started me off … he was just one of the funniest people and one of the cleverest and just the perfect person for me to meet at that stage because you could bring a script to him that you thought was pretty good and he’d sit there and he’d tear half the pages out and hand it back and you’d think “Oh yeah, that’s much better.” He didn’t do it in a nasty way. He was fantastic.’

  Although undoubtedly excited by the deal, Victoria had to try and push all thoughts of the television version to the back of her mind and focus on the London transfer of the play. There were plans to put Talent on in the West End, but its running time of 80 minutes
was deemed too uncommercial and instead it went to the ICA. The original cast remained intact, save for Bill Stewart and Peter Ellis who were replaced by David Ellison and Jim Broadbent, and Leland once again directed.

  Talent opened for an 18-night run on 31 January 1979. The first national newspaper to publish a review was the Daily Telegraph, and its viciousness must have taken Victoria by surprise. The onslaught was relentless: ‘She will have to do better than this crude and chattermagging little impression of an untalented Northern girl’s attempt to win a singing competition at a club … No amount of fluency from the two fatuous females and comic wisecracks about local life can make up for absence of style and genuine zing and significance in the characters … One or two astringent songs with smart references to the zaggy let-downs of life have just a fifty-fiftyish chance of making it with a sympathetic audience.’ Even the television and showbusiness allusions were condemned for being stale and weighing down the play.

  Fortunately, the Telegraph’s verdict was the exception and the general consensus was that Talent was a hit. ‘I cannot remember many debut occasions when I’ve relished the sheer pleasure of small details of small lives so precisely described and yielding such humour,’ wrote Nicholas de Jongh in the Guardian. He described it as a production of complete conviction that marked the arrival of a natural writer. Victoria Radin in the Observer felt Victoria had the potential to be the country’s greatest female playwright. She admired the vitality of the dialogue, but thought there were too many personal memories pushed into it. As always, Victoria’s weight did not escape comment in the reviews and this time the Sunday Telegraph obliged with the comment that her talent was ‘as ample as her frame’.

  That a play so anchored to the North, should be so well received in the capital genuinely surprised Victoria. It need not have. The standard of writing and depth of perception was great enough to transcend regional and international boundaries – Talent even won some fringe awards when it was shown in Los Angeles. For Victoria, though, the important thing was to advance her career. She was mindful of how deceptive sudden success could be, thanks to her initial winning appearance on New Faces, and was impatient to consolidate the triumph of Talent. ‘I just want to get home and get on with writing songs as well as plays,’ she told the Evening Standard.

  The theatrical acclaim she received swelled Victoria’s belief in herself; she was being recognised for her own abilities. Consequently, when the BBC producer John Lloyd offered her a starring role in a new comedy series entitled Not The Nine O’Clock News, he was given very short shrift. Victoria was not remotely interested in diluting her new-found appeal by becoming identified as part of a group, and the place eventually went to Pamela Stephenson. Victoria was aiming higher and she already had a commission for another play, from the leading impresario and producer, Michael Codron. He identified something special in Victoria and approached her after seeing Talent. He had a wealth of experience, having staged productions since 1957, and his client list read like a directory of British theatre, from Alan Bennett to Tom Stoppard via David Hare and Harold Pinter. Being commissioned by the man who introduced Joe Orton to the West End must have been particularly pleasing for Victoria.

  She set about writing the play with a vengeance, determined to make up for those four wasted years of unemployment and idleness. Driven, she also managed to keep her hand in with the stand-up and fitted in an early-evening performance of Tickling My Ivories at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre on 9 March, as well as a couple of performances at Leicester’s Phoenix and Haymarket theatres. In later life she gave a revealing insight into these early shows. ‘I used to feel that the real me was on the stage and the rest of me was fumbling to catch up,’ she explained. ‘That when I was on stage it was talking honestly and communicating with people, that I had difficulty doing the rest of the time.’

  By the spring of 1979 Victoria had completed her second play, Pals, but this tale of bedsit life failed to impress Codron and the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield where it was to be staged. Victoria had confidently mailed it off, but grew increasingly concerned by their failure to respond. She was tempted to phone to check if they had received it, but gradually realised the silence indicated disapproval, so in the bin it went.

  Meanwhile, preparations began for Granada’s version of Talent. It was not Victoria’s first encounter with the company. She had the odd slots in Pandora’s Box and This England and a few years previously had applied for a job on one of its local programmes. On that occasion, by coincidence, Julie Walters had unknowingly crossed her path for the first time since 1971. Victoria was one of only two finalists shortlisted for the job and when she turned on the television to see who had beaten her, Julie appeared on the screen.

  Other commitments had prevented Walters from appearing in the role created especially for her in the stage version of Talent, which was why the part went to Hazel Clyne. But now she was free, the two women would appear on television together for the first time.

  6

  EVEN BEFORE TALENT was broadcast, Granada commissioned another play from Victoria involving the central characters of Julie and Maureen. This added to her already busy schedule and meant that as well as juggling the demands of rehearsals at Granada with writing a stage play that Michael Codron found acceptable, she now had to think up a televisual sequel for Talent. An additional pressure came in the days leading up to Talent being broadcast when Victoria became the focus of mass media attention. The press screening had left her a bundle of nerves and in the round of newspaper interviews which followed, it became clear that journalists had already decided how to present her. Here was the perfect Cinderella story: a fat, plain-looking and seemingly working-class Lancashire lass emerging as an unlikely star. The fact that she was also a female stand-up comedian living with an even fatter magician in a Morecambe side street, and was one of the few New Faces success stories, provided additional interest for reporters.

  Flimsy comparisons were drawn between Talent and The Liver Birds and the newspapers even elicited Victoria’s weight, prompting Patrick O’Neill to remark in the Daily Mail that she was ‘more than plump at 13st and too clever by half’. She and Walters were also portrayed as a double act following in the fat and thin tradition of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello and, most damningly, Little and Large. The fact that they were female gave them additional novelty value.

  Victoria had assumed it was her work that would be judged and was taken aback by some of the attention. ‘I was always very upset if they ever said I was fat. Even though I was. I felt they shouldn’t mention it, I felt it wasn’t relevant, but of course it’s a British obsession,’ she reflected. ‘I was patronised either for being fat, for being a woman or for being Northern … I just felt I was living in a world of mad Southern people.’

  Being presented as a fat, overnight success and having to share billing, even with a good friend, must not have been easy for Victoria who hated losing control. To speak out was to risk being branded a prima donna so instead of defending herself, she defended Talent, declaring loftily in the Daily Mail: ‘This isn’t sit com. This is the real thing.’

  Talent was broadcast at 9.30 p.m. on Sunday, 5 August 1979, with Peter Eckersley producing and Baz Taylor directing. It was the second play in Granada’s Screenplay series and besides Victoria, only Peter Ellis remained from the original Sheffield production. Bill Waddington, who later played Percy Sugden in Coronation Street, took the role of George and Sue Glover played Cathy Christmas, a character only ever referred to in the stage version. Forty minutes had to be cut for television and Victoria was allowed to have her bust squeezed only once by the Compère. Fans who only discovered Victoria in her later years might be surprised by the raw vocabulary of Talent but mention of a ‘twat’ and two ‘cock’ references survived the television censors. However, a ‘fuck’ was removed, diluting Julie’s celebrated line to ‘I thought Coq au Vin was love in a lorry’.

  Victoria wisely extracted some of the overly lo
ng magic scenes for the television version and certain lines were rearranged or sharpened, but fundamentally the play remained the same.

  The television critics were unanimous in their praise. Talent was a rarity in being a television play with songs that actually worked. Only Dennis Potter had employed song so effectively before. The stage and television writer Alan Plater wrote Victoria a letter expressing his delight at seeing a new Northern writer, and John Le Mesurier wrote a letter full of praise, but the play was not to everyone’s taste. Radio Blackburn’s phone-in audience had a field day complaining about the bad language. One indignant woman even wrote to Victoria personally, informing her that Lancashire people never spoke as fast as June (sic) Walters and that the play’s producer should be shot. Mischievously, Victoria responded with a letter informing the woman that June Walters was in fact from Manchester.

  The wave of media attention that began with Talent’s press launch continued after the broadcast, engulfing Victoria and leaving her momentarily off guard. Her workload too may have meant she was not as in control as she would have liked. She viewed the press interest as a ‘by-product’, but seemed to realise the futility of fighting the media image that was being created of her, and gave in to it. Years later she complained that she was regarded as ‘Northern Funny Girl’ by the media, but back in 1979 if getting her photograph in the Daily Mail or TV Times meant squatting on Morecambe Beach, gazing from the pier, posing in an amusement arcade or having her palm read in Gypsy Smith’s booth, then so be it.

  She obliged those journalists who tracked her down to the Oxford Street flat by swigging milk from the bottle and eating biscuits. She volunteered information about how she and Geoffrey only had a black-and-white portable television to watch the play on, and she revealed that she was down to her last 40 pence so could not afford to buy all the newspapers to read the reviews. The Granada money, she said, would come in handy as she had been hard up since university. She had already bought a Fiat with it – a colour television would follow – and was waiting for more money to last her the rest of the week.