Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  That series would also feature weekly ‘documentaries’, a device which was first used in Wood & Walters’ ‘Girls Talking’. Parodying the stark documentary style and grim subjects of the early 1980s, this has Victoria and Walters playing the bored schoolgirls Marie and Jeanette. No strangers to shoplifting (the crime which Victoria often used for amusement), both come from broken homes and live in Liverpool. They don’t like school because they don’t learn important things like how to inject themselves. Bored by child prostitution, they spend their time sniffing burning lino. They would like to get married because it is supposedly easier to get Valium.

  At this stage in her career Victoria was getting used to being accosted by the public who tended to bluntly criticise her and her work, or mistook her for anyone from Pam Ayres to Virginia Wade. This may have inspired the sketch ‘Groupies’ in which Victoria and Walters played Bella and Enid who stage-door a star (Alan Lake). They tell him they liked his show, but qualify this by saying they are easily pleased. The two typists do not want a signed photograph of him and they don’t know anyone who would; most people in the office think he’s really dated.

  The piano had inspired one of Victoria’s contributions to the school magazine and it also inspired the sketch ‘The Practice Room’. Walters played the crass, chain-smoking cleaner with fond memories of Dream of Olwen which was on in Women’s Surgical the night she had her cervix cauterised. Victoria played the stuffy piano student irritated by the cleaner’s interruptions. The sketch came close to snobbery but Victoria redeemed it by having the working-class cleaner, a supposed philistine, reveal an in-depth knowledge of piano technique.

  ‘Some bits of it were good; some were deadly,’ was Victoria’s bald verdict of the series. In spite of the mixed reception Granada, keen to keep the double act together, offered Victoria a second series. In Victoria’s mind that would have only prolonged the failure; anything that was not totally successful was abhorrent to her and she declined. Eager to elevate herself from the series she began talking about her ‘dark side’ and the importance of developing her craftsmanship. Even Walters was distancing herself from the show, telling the reporters: ‘I want now to do something more serious than Wood & Walters. Comedy can get you down awfully after a while, and I have done so much that it becomes depressing.’

  The most sensible thing for Victoria to have done at this time would have been to move to London. She was already making thrice-monthly visits but a permanent base there would have made it easier for her to raise her profile and take advantage of the comedy venues that were springing up all over the capital. Her middle sister, Rosalind, had already relocated and lived near Islington with her son, Madza, named after a figure from Sumerian mythology. She had her own market stall selling 1950s clothes. Penny, meanwhile, was based in Oxford and sang with rock bands.

  ‘All four of us have made our own way in life,’ said Chris Foote-Wood. ‘No one’s followed in any of the others’ footsteps. Penny and Rosalind are more at the cutting edge. They’re very individualistic at what they do. They are not concerned about populism. If people like it, fine. If not, hard luck. Penny is the artist. She’s painted, sculpted, all sorts of things … She’s very avant-garde.’

  Victoria and Geoffrey, however, retreated further and bought their first home together in the village of Silverdale, 25 minutes from Morecambe. Number 22 Stankelt Road was a semi-detached stone cottage with a sea view from the toilet window. Silverdale was a rural idyll of dry stone walls, hedgerows, winding tree-lined country roads and meadows. Explaining the move, Victoria later admitted: ‘I suppose I wanted to be odd in a way. I wanted to cut myself off. I wanted to be separate. I didn’t have the nerve to go to London. I didn’t want to compete.’

  This distancing also applied to the villagers of Silverdale. ‘She was a stuck-up bitch. She was her person and we were just riff-raff,’ said Chris Taylor. He was one of the first villagers to encounter the local celebrities as number 22 was his grandmother’s former home and he had to turn on the power for Victoria and Geoffrey. ‘It was basically “Thank you. Goodbye”. There was no concern, no “How do you do”. You didn’t see much of her at all. She’d walk around occasionally, if it was a sunny evening, but she wouldn’t speak to you. She never involved herself. She wasn’t interested.’

  Wood & Walters had failed to meet Victoria’s exacting standards, and with the disaster of Good Fun still galling her, she decided to concentrate on what she did best and take her stand-up act on the road again. However, she was aware that Geoffrey’s career was struggling so they decided to reactivate Funny Turns in the hope that it would enable them to achieve something like steady earnings. It was the perfect solution to the enforced separations of work that were beginning to get the couple down. It was also to be their most ambitious outing yet.

  A short eight-date tour was arranged prior to a four-week trial run at the King’s Head, beginning in March 1982. The theatre pub’s Dan Crawford had heard good reports about their act and asked them to fill in when another performer had let him down. Then, through Michael Codron, they would take the act, which Victoria described as ‘Him – Interval – Me’, into the West End for the first time. On the surface Victoria was confident and optimistic, still planning to write a film as well as a new play for Walters. She was not averse to elevating herself above any possible rivals either, telling the TV Times: ‘A lot of women [comedians] aren’t very good – that’s the trouble.’ But deep down her insecurities remained. By the time she was preparing for the nerve-wracking prospect of entering the arena of the West End, she had given up reading all reviews of her work because they caused depression. One, in which she was described as dominating the stage like a witty tank, particularly affected her.

  ‘I don’t read the reviews because I get so depressed. If they’re very good, I don’t believe them and if they’re very bad, I do! Geoffrey sifts through them and says, “You’ve got quite a good one here … not such a good one in this paper.” If they say “Victoria Wood is weak in this area”, I get paranoid,’ she said. An additional worry was how audiences would respond to Geoffrey as he tended to attract hecklers.

  Exiling herself from Morecambe left Victoria with no qualms about savaging the town she had once praised. It was, she said in Funny Turns, so boring there that the tide only bothered to come in once a week. Evening classes were the only release but the choice was confined to Handling Your Pension, Coping With Cystitis, Good Grooming For the Over 90s and Keep Fit Beginners.

  Victoria’s act covered the traditional music hall subject matters of class, regional snobbery and sex, but her experience as a playwright gave her the edge. Very few comedians in those days had such a literary advantage. She was less reliant than others on punchlines and the humour tended to stem from exquisitely observed descriptions: the Hush Puppy slit for the bunion; the keep fit slippers that curl up as if they are about to devour your foot when you take them off; Victoria in a red leotard and tights looking like an eager salami.

  Her musical instincts allowed her to employ phonetic comedy, savouring such words as ‘culottes’ and ‘trews’. And once again she juxtaposed garments with textiles – a tweed body-stocking – for comic effect.

  ‘Maaarjorie’, one of Morecambe’s more sophisticated hostesses, wears such a low-cut dress it looks like she is standing in a carrier bag and her black hair is so heavily lacquered it looks like a 78 with a parting. Like the hostess in Happy Since I Met You, whose jarring attempt at sophistication is demonstrated by her serving up a plate of liver at a dinner party, Maaarjorie also gets it wrong by serving sprouts on cocktail sticks.

  It was noticeable that Victoria’s earlier awkward innocence had been replaced by a slick, calculated, sly professionalism. She was out of kilter with the trendy, right-on inhabitants of Islington, but instead of being intimidated as she may have been in the past, she went on the attack using a stage persona of down-to-earth Northern common sense as her weapon. ‘Don’t worry about being mugged when leaving t
he theatre,’ she told the audiences, ‘you’re more likely to be subsidised’. The world of stripped pine and wholemeal bread was also swiftly demolished in her stand-up act, and the political climate of the day was also mocked by Victoria chirpily threatening to sing a ‘jolly chorus song’ entitled ‘I’m Not Worried About Unemployment Because There’s Going To Be A Nuclear War’.

  Geoffrey might not have told Victoria about Milton Shulman’s review in the Evening Standard (‘Miss Wood is a big girl with few pretensions to glamour’), but the Sunday Telegraph’s review by Rosemary Say may have reached her ears (‘She is sharp, observant and outrageous, but with it all she invites us to join without malice in the sheer hilarity of other people’s behaviour’).

  A friend had once remarked to Victoria and Geoffrey that their act was so good because he was not totally masculine and she was not totally feminine; the Guardian’s Tom Sutcliffe put it more plainly when he wrote that Geoffrey had a higher voice and was less butch. This androgynous quality had been identified by Victoria in Max Miller, one of her favourite comedians, and she happily embraced it. This extended to her stage costumes and the jacket/blazer, trousers and tie became something of a trademark look for her. Just as wearing a tie had been an act of rebellion at Bury Grammar, so it was for Victoria as an adult female performer. So closely did she become associated with a tie that in October 1982 she became the first woman to be nominated for Tie Man of the Year (she lost to Trevor McDonald). Offstage too, she never wore a skirt and did not possess a handbag. Combined with the camp aspects of her act, the Northern caricatures, the exquisite detail and the mockery of the heterosexual male, it was hardly surprising that Victoria attracted a large gay following. Indeed, in later years she became a patron of the London Lighthouse Aids charity and was a public supporter of the campaign to lower the age of sexual consent for gay men.

  ‘I used to get a lot of lesbians dressing like me actually,’ she said. ‘I had very short hair and a tie and I suppose it was a very masculine look … and I did used to get these enormous women coming back with cropped heads and ties. It was a bit scary … I think I was probably giving off androgynous signals because it wasn’t a sexy look, it wasn’t saying “I am a sexy woman”, or “I am a butch woman”. I think what it was saying was that whatever I am just take it and don’t analyse it and just listen to the comedy.’ The non-sexy look did have advantages. ‘If you’re not being glamorous or particularly feminine, people aren’t feeling uncomfortable because you’re twice as good looking as they are.’

  Her stage presence too was getting more masculine. In the early days of stand-up she remained seated behind the piano. In Wood & Walters she had graduated to standing in the crook of the piano. But now she strode purposefully on stage and only had a stand mike between her and the audience.

  After a short break for rewrites and adaptations Funny Turns opened at the Duchess Theatre on 12 May with Russell Harty giving an onstage introduction. The show still featured the old songs ‘Fourteen Again’, ‘Music and Movement’, ‘I’ve Had It Up To Here’, ‘Don’t Do It’ and ‘Northerners’, but for the Duchess shows Victoria composed two new numbers. In ‘Dear God’ she succinctly summed up the utter misery of her impressions of student life.

  ‘Thinking Of You’, one of Victoria’s ‘anti-man’ songs, was also new for the West End show. In it Victoria addresses an ex-lover and lists examples of how he reminds her of all her idiosyncratic pet hates (dripping-wet towels, Dick Van Dyke’s attempt at a Cockney accent) and veiled references to his impotence (a jellied eel, a pink blancmange that won’t set).

  The Financial Times’s Michael Coveney said her ‘fast, brilliantly worked out and devastatingly funny’ lyrics were the best available on the London stage with the exception of Guys and Dolls and created real poetry of the streets. Robert Cushman in the Observer went even further and said she was the best British lyricist since Noël Coward.

  For the show, Geoffrey gave The Great Soprendo an additional catchphrase (‘Olé Placido Domingo’) and continued to delight critics with his malapropisms and mispronunciations (‘I want you all to be as quiet as pins. I want to hear a mouse dropping’, ‘You are sitting there with one card; I am standing here with piles’). He was still prone to hecklers, which enraged Victoria. Sharing the bill with him meant the weight-watching critics moved their focus from Victoria’s figure. So while Geoffrey was described as ‘elephantine’, Victoria was now being called ‘attractive’ and ‘sexy’.

  Funny Turns had a successful run until the end of June, repeats of Wood & Walters on Channel 4 no doubt helping raise Victoria’s profile, and while not quite conquering Theatreland, Victoria had proved to herself that she need not fear a London audience. By delicious irony Bob Mason, the old boyfriend who so callously dumped her and who had gone on to gain a degree of fame as Terry Bradshaw in Coronation Street, had begun work on a biographical play about George Formby, arguably one of the most famous Northern comedians. It dealt with a pivotal moment in Formby’s career, when he attempted to find success in London. Unlike Victoria, he failed.

  8

  A PANIC ATTACK seized Victoria the night before her 30th birthday. In a Maida Vale hotel room she came to the conclusion that the best of her life was over. Her childhood dream of being famous had been realised, she was an award-winning playwright, television star, stage actress, stand-up comedian, singer-songwriter and was living in an idyllic place with the husband she loved, but still the inner demons lingered. She discovered what many celebrities find out; fame does not eradicate fundamental psychological problems. There was still the sense of unworthiness, the impatience, the low self-esteem and the feeling that time was running out. Victoria needed to make a decision about where her career, which in those days was essentially her life, was heading.

  It was not surprising that she chose the path that led to instant gratification and decided to concentrate on her stand-up work. ‘When I go out there and make them laugh I’m saying “this is my personality and I hope you like it”,’ she said, demonstrating the almost masochistic extent she was prepared to go to to gain assurance. But in order to truly test herself it had to be a solo venture, praise or criticism would be diluted if she continued performing with Geoffrey and so the end of Funny Turns marked the end of their professional stage partnership. Publicly, she blamed unsympathetic audiences for the break-up and claimed she was worn down by her worries that they would not like him: ‘I overheard someone in the audience say “I don’t like magic, but I suppose we’ll have to sit through it until she comes on.” It didn’t bother him, but it was too much for me.’ The claustrophobia of their relationship did not help either. ‘I think our problem was that we worked together, lived together and did everything together. We never did anything separately.’

  Performing alone was nothing new to Victoria, but previous outings had tended to be one-offs at universities, festivals and clubs in Northern England. For her new show, Lucky Bag, she was booked into the King’s Head, Islington in October for a five-week run. It would be the last time she performed at that theatre, but she did not sever her involvement. She performed charity galas for the theatre and in the 1990s was made its life president.

  Lucky Bag was a ninety-minute show based around Victoria’s CV, school, life in Morecambe and a trip to London. These were filled in with the sort of finely observed comic detail that was as much her hallmark as brand names.

  ‘You have to distance yourself, be detached,’ was Victoria’s answer when asked what made a successful stand-up comedian. She had distanced herself from her family, from Geoffrey, from Walters, and from the town and the city. This isolationism became apparent in her material for Lucky Bag. But the more she distanced herself, the more her audiences grew.

  As with Funny Turns the trendies and middle classes were targeted. She mocked the friend who lives in a converted mill chimney (‘the rooms are very small but they have nice high ceilings’); time-share apartments in disused collieries; health food restaurants (‘where
you queue for 50 minutes for something that would do you a lot of good if you could get it out of your back fillings’); the Arts Council (‘like the town council except the decisions they make don’t affect anybody’); the alternative cabaret featuring a juggler who juggles three copies of the Guardian and a wok. A play is described as so boring it should win a Fringe award.

  Victoria swept up and dispensed with such a world using down-to-earth common sense. But that did not mean she was automatically aligning herself with a no-nonsense, working-class, unsophisticated and welcoming North. ‘See Naples and die – see Morecambe and feel as if you already have,’ she said. Her savaging of the town was now total with descriptions of the waxworks (‘four shop dummies in de-mob suits labelled Bucks Fizz’), the pier (‘a council house on a stick’), and the fair which consisted of a big wheel with antimacassars on the back of each seat and a liniment stall. The place is the domain of the pensioner. Old ladies wearing ‘Kiss Me Quick, But Wait While I Get My Teeth In’ hats grab men, take them into a dark corner, and show them photos of their son-in-law in Australia. In the ‘Gifte Shoppe’ hangs the sign: ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here, just old, deaf and incredibly irritating’.

  Victoria’s look and choice of career prevented her from being compartmentalised as feminine stereotype, but that did not mean she was about to embrace militantism. An unresponsive audience was assumed to be a deputation of Feminists Against Laughing and Victoria jokily introduced one song as: ‘Don’t Bother Buying Us A Port And Lemon As Freda And I Are Lesbians’.

  Schooldays were increasingly influencing her work – she admitted to being obsessed with them – but she even managed to distance herself retrospectively. In one routine she describes half of her schoolmates as being common and the other half as being posh and in the process removes herself from the equation.