New for Lucky Bag was a surrealistic strain (knitting an orgasm and escaping from a mental hospital by knotting sheets together to make a moped). For the character monologue, a mainstay of the music hall tradition, Victoria created Paula Duval, a Northern club comedienne and ‘vocaliste’ who wows a hen party before playing the ukulele and singing the philosophical song ‘Nasty Things’. ‘She’s a blue comedienne … She’s the type of comedienne I can’t bear,’ said Victoria, even though she was happy to get laughs from Paula’s material.
‘I can’t bear the fact that they’re reversing the role of the male comic. I don’t think it rings true. There are a few women blue comics on the club circuit. But I don’t particularly go along with what they do – it seems pointless to alienate the whole of the other sex just because a few women complain that male comics tell mother-in-law and headache jokes.’
Lucky Bag also saw Victoria creating non-professional characters who found themselves having to ‘perform’. This was a device which would serve her well in her career, both for other characters and as ‘Victoria Wood’. The comedy was mined from the idiosyncrasies the character would inadvertently betray when called upon to speak in a formal situation. Lucky Bag’s schoolgirl debater has been discussed previously, but the show also featured the Haworth Parsonage Guide and the auditioning actress. The former is no respecter of twee, National Trust preciousness; she leaves her poncho on the Reverend Brontë’s chair, parks her moped in the parsonage and makes inappropriate jokes. It was a brilliantly written and performed monologue but it did reveal Victoria’s snobbishness. The crass commercialism of the souvenirs (Brontë pedestal mats and novelty tea-strainers) was a fair target, but the tourists – the Yorkshire Heritage coach party – are painted as gawping philistines who sandwich the Brontës between three dark Satanic mills, Emmerdale Farm and Nora Batty’s front room.
The third character monologue was the actress whose career résumé includes children’s theatre – playing Winifred Wibbly-Wobbly and a less creatively satisfying raspberry – followed by a spell with a troupe called Lorryload. This was an in-joke as Julie Walters had toured the working men’s clubs of Liverpool in the early 1970s with her then boyfriend, Peter Postlethwaite, in a theatre company called Vanload. ‘You don’t know how near the knuckle I can go’ Victoria warned in the song ‘Put It Out Of Your Mind’ and she certainly demonstrated this in Lucky Bag with jokes about cancer, Auschwitz and how anorexia is a middle-class accessory.
Sex continued to be shown as a largely unsatisfactory experience (Victoria’s Dutch cap was too small and made her ears itch; her dyslexic boyfriend bought a sex manual and spent half the night looking for her vinegar). A joke about the bed bolster with broken glass in it was recycled from Nearly A Happy Ending and she also adapted Happy Since I Met You’s sexual climax-puncturing request for bin-liners for the show.
But despite such boldness there were still hints of insecurity. The fact that she felt obliged to signpost the phonetic humour (‘I was thinking what a funny word Twyfords is’) suggested a lack of confidence. In this respect she had not advanced from Talent where Julie, after mentioning a Mivvi ice lolly, adds: ‘Funny word isn’t it’. Later in her career Victoria would trust an audience to respond to an amusing-sounding word without her prompting.
The self-deprecation remained in Lucky Bag. She voiced the audience’s disappointments (‘It’s the other one I like, the thin one’). ‘I hope you like it’ she says of a song, ‘nobody else does’. Depressed, she phones the Samaritans and is cheered up, only to realise she has phoned C&A Outsize Department by mistake. She runs into The Body Shop and asks for ‘this’ in a size 8. ‘I’m trained,’ she says, in between an impressive piece of piano-playing during ‘Put it Out Of Your Mind’, ‘I’m trained to handle alsatians.’ But Victoria was also beginning to turn her barbs outwards, devoting one song to ‘fat people who go into a boutique and find the only thing that fits them is the cubicle curtain’.
For Lucky Bag, Victoria only added four new songs to her repertoire. ‘Bastards’ recycled a tune Victoria had used for an education programme. The song continued the messages of ‘Good Fun’ and ‘Don’t Do It’ and seemed to articulate Victoria’s own frustrations at her shyness and inability to speak up for herself in her early career. Make trouble with your gob, urged Victoria. Don’t be a social liar, smiling, saying what others want to hear and never complaining. The conflict between being taken advantage of and taking advantage was a subject that Victoria would return to.
‘Funny How Things Turn Out’ was a cleverly crafted song based on the progress of three fictitious school friends. All three (the thin actress, the bohemian, the sports star) would have been real-life rivals to Victoria and with a certain relish she showed them failing to match their early potential. The actress fails her RADA audition, advertises cat food and ends up singing Lerner and Lowe to the mentally ill; the bohemian ends up marrying a man from ICI; the sports star ends up having a sex-change.
Her songs showed how Victoria was more at ease communicating on stage than she was in real life. The fact that she preferred to regard an audience as an indistinguishable mass suggested the comfort was derived from being in total control of a situation rather than any close bond with the public. Offstage she had a problem with shyness and found it difficult to voice her opinions, but in her songs she could be loud and outspoken, belting out the messages: ‘It’s one life and one chance’; ‘Please enjoy what you are, ask me how? Live for now’; ‘You just tell them what the hell you like’.
Although she was still described as a ‘bulky blonde’, ‘rotund’, ‘reassuringly stocky’ and ‘roly-poly’ the critics were taking the quality of her comedy and performance seriously. ‘Miss Wood’s new prowess as a stand-up comic is the great feature of the show,’ wrote Robert Cushman in the Observer. ‘She mocks a plastic world, but she does not rage at it; she even recognises that it is, in certain lights, fun. She is the poet of Tesco’s, Crossroads, and the launderette down the street with one functioning tumble-dryer.’
In the Financial Times Martin Hoyle described her as ‘The Betjeman of a slightly chipped enamel meritocracy in an increasingly plastic age.’ The Times’s Anthony Masters said: ‘I think Ms Wood’s most winning quality … is that so much of her harshest satire is not so much a clever sneer as an indignant cry for life and fun.’
Successful though the show had been, Victoria still suffered a gnawing discontent that manifested itself in some erratic and sweeping decisions. She decided to switch back to television, throw herself into ‘normal’ life in Silverdale and become fully vegetarian. ‘I was just really up for doing some more television … I had loads of ideas and I had loads of energy,’ she explained. The BBC, regarded as the natural home of light entertainment, commissioned a series from her and in the January of 1984 she began writing. Victoria was careful to learn from the mistakes of Wood & Walters. Quality control was paramount and she wrote double the amount of material needed. Judging by some of the sketches that did not make it on to the show but were included in the subsequent sketch book, it was evident that what Victoria rejected, other shows would have gladly snapped up. In effect, Victoria was competing against herself and therefore crafting a show of extremely high standards. Each sketch was a rival for another and only the best would make it to the studio.
Despite having ‘bionic ears’ (her own description) Victoria was not usually one of those writers who carefully eavesdropped for inspiration. On the odd occasion when she did jot down overheard nuggets they remained unused because she found it impossible to graft them on to her own words. Some of these were based on real life, but had to pass through what Victoria referred to as her ‘barmy filter’, which extracted the essence and added ridiculousness.
The writing process, once a great kick, became a hateful chore. She worked on the script from 9.30 a.m. until 7 p.m. every day, sitting at her desk, gazing out at the sheep and cows and ‘just writing what comes into my head and hoping it’s funny’. Organ
ised as ever, she planned each individual show by arranging index cards on the carpet with brief details of each sketch. She admitted that being consistently funny was unnatural, it took hard work and time to create amusing lines. ‘I would much prefer to be performing all the time. Writing is exhausting and can be lonely.’
She avoided using ‘very rude’ words, not because of any personal scruples but because her audience awareness told her they would leap out of the television into the sitting room and distract from the comedy. Apart from a throwaway dig at the then Social Services Secretary, Norman Fowler, politics were out too. Rightly, she considered political humour a fad. Like obscenities, it was something that jarred. This belief also applied to her stand-up work. ‘I think it’s patronising to try and change people when they’ve paid £6.50 to come and see you. You don’t have the right.’
In light of her fondness for brand names it was highly appropriate that she should name the series after a phrase that signified the ultimate recommendation for products. Victoria Wood As Seen On TV was also a title that recognised the effect the medium had on her work. The shows were crammed with parodies of televisual genres: the advert; the documentary; the afternoon show for housewives; the children’s programme; the soap opera; the period drama; the continuity announcer; the po-faced and humourless television play; the Sunday morning television schedule; public access; and the late night Pause For Thought.
Work on the series was temporarily interrupted when Lucky Bag opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in February. Victoria was hailed as ‘one of the best songwriters around’, a ‘nifty social satirist’ and ‘one of the funniest women in England’. The offending adjectives were still in the reviews – ‘plump and homely’, ‘bulky’ and ‘chunky’ – but, stood on the stage against a backcloth of seagulls over Morecambe Bay, Victoria was connecting more effectively than ever before. She had the knack of articulating the everyday absurdities of life and highlighting the gulf between image and reality. By turns sardonic, innocent, self-deprecating, precise, disarming, crushing, sly, warm and witty, she had total control of her audiences. Whether it was the throwaway literary criticisms – she flicked to the back of a Margaret Drabble just to see what didn’t happen in the end – or the minute attention to detail, she made a tremendous impression during the 12-night run. Even the programme was given due attention, with Victoria writing a hilarious introduction in the guise of The Woman Across The Road.
But there were some dissenting voices, most notably John Barber in the Daily Telegraph, who described Lucky Bag as ‘a sub-standard music hall act which relies mainly on her old songs’. The use of brand names, once so quirky and amusing, was beginning to seem like an irritating tic. The reliance on old songs was also detected by the Sunday Telegraph’s Francis King, who said they ‘begin to seem a little narrow in range and monotonous in idiom as the evening progresses – particularly if one has heard them before.’
It was a mark of Victoria’s growing celebrity at the time that she was roped into that showbusiness institution, the charity record. Victoria read the story of Eric the Earwig on a fundraising album for the Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital, Brighton. Other contributors included The Great Soprendo, Roy Kinnear, Melvyn Hayes and Ruth Madoc.
At this time Victoria’s relationship with Walters entered its most tricky period. Contrary to popular belief, the two were never ‘best friends’ and the friendship was tested when Julie began to reap the rewards of the film Educating Rita. It earned her a BAFTA and Variety Club Award for Best Film Actress, a Hollywood Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. Eric the Earwig seemed slight by comparison. At that time Walters was being ferried around in Burt Reynolds’ helicopter and being fêted by Hollywood.
‘When she turned into a film star, I did become jealous,’ admitted Victoria years later. ‘It’s not that I wanted to be a film star, really, and I was pleased for her. But I was very insecure at the time and I did have a pang about it, because although I was doing what I wanted to do, trying to build up a career as a stand-up, I felt I was being compared with her and being found wanting … I could never explain to people that I was not an actress and my career didn’t lie in that direction.’
Walters, who furthered her stage career in 1984 by performing in Fool For Love at the National Theatre, was completely unaware of Victoria’s jealousy. Attending the Oscars had been all very exciting but she remained grounded and agreed to be in Victoria’s new series, as well as a film she had written about a seaside summer season. It was not a case of reluctantly obliging an old friend, working with Victoria was a very real pleasure. ‘People can’t understand why Julie bothers to be in a tacky little TV programme when she could be making a huge tacky film, but it’s the acting equivalent of putting your feet up and having a fag and a good gossip,’ said Victoria. ‘It’s great to be able to make yourself look awful in a show like mine – it’s such a relief from all the Hollywood stuff.’
The film Victoria scripted never materialised, but Walters’ show of loyalty, along with her relaxed attitude to stardom, enabled the friendship to endure.
‘When she came back from Hollywood I was a bit scared of her, not because she’d changed but because the circumstances around her had changed. It made me nervous of bothering her, but we just carried on as we had, and she’s worn it all very lightly,’ said Victoria. Giving a rare insight into her own personality, she admitted: ‘I think she is quite remarkable because if all her success and acclaim happened to me, I would be unbearable.’
Later Victoria became so comfortable with Walters’ stardom that she was able to jokingly compare their two careers – where Julie was nominated for an Oscar, she disappointed a contestant on the Saturday tea-time game show The Pyramid Game by losing them a chance to win a toaster. At the time though, Victoria did feel overshadowed and this may explain why she decided to try and integrate herself with her neighbours in Silverdale.
‘I decided I would try to do really ordinary things. I used to visit their [her friends’] children at their playschool. Help them with their crayons, work at the jumble sales,’ said Victoria. But the experiment failed, prompting Victoria to react: ‘I hated it. I hated sitting in somebody else’s house getting marmalade on my bottom. I suppose I had felt guilty because I had more money than they did.’
Around this time Victoria became a strict vegetarian. Characteristically she embraced the right-on attitude while simultaneously rejecting it: ‘I’m all for killing animals and turning them into shoes and handbags, I just don’t want to have to eat them.’
For Victoria Wood As Seen On TV Victoria needed a producer and director whom she could trust and Geoff Posner – the other Geoffrey in her life – filled both roles, as well as being a substitute for Peter Eckersley. Although relatively new to directing BBC entertainment programmes – his directorial career only began in 1982 – he already had a wealth of television experience, having directed Top Of The Pops, Not The Nine O’Clock News, The Young Ones and the pilot of Blackadder. In 1983 he won his first BAFTA for producing and directing Carrott’s Lib. He would go on to work with Lenny Henry, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Steve Coogan, Harry Enfield, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and John Sessions.
Posner shared Victoria’s drive and ambition, and had planned to be a director since the age of 12. Just as importantly, he too worked within the same framework as Victoria and, like her, had slogged his way up, in his case from floor assistant.
Assessing Victoria’s gifts he said: ‘She manages to examine people talking and capture speech-patterns and subjects that are everyday, but hysterical at the same time … Victoria lifts up the stone and examines what’s underneath … She always manages to be extraordinarily ordinary … The audience nods the whole time. It’s quite unique to hold a mirror up to ordinary life and make it so special.’
Walters’ place in the series was guaranteed but Victoria still had to find other actors who could be relied upon to deliver her words in the way she intended. In a sense, she set about creating
her own version of the Blue Door Theatre Company, forming a ‘repertory’ of key players. The recruits would have to understand her highly disciplined way of working. It was a comedy show but fluffed lines, unauthorised alterations to the script, in fact any hint of unprofessionalism would be frowned upon.
Since first becoming friends with Victoria in the early 1970s Celia Imrie had repeatedly told Victoria that she was a terrible actress, and Victoria took her at her word. She had worked in theatre and done bit-parts in various television programmes. Recognition of sorts had come from playing John Nettles’ romantic interest, Marianne Bellshade, in Bergerac, but it was not until New Year’s Eve 1981 that Victoria saw clearly the full range of Imrie’s talents. Sitting in bed watching a show by BBC Scotland called Eighty-one Take Two, Victoria was highly impressed by Imrie’s performance, which was how she ended up being recruited for As Seen On TV.
Imrie had a great deal in common with Victoria. She too came from a middle-class background and had been shaped by her siblings. ‘I prefer to make my way by myself,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it is to do with being the fourth of five children. I have always wanted the approval of my brother, who was second-born, but feel that I’ve never got it, so there’s an element of, “Right, I’ll show him”.’ Imrie had also faced blunt rejection – being told she was the wrong shape for ballet school – and her personal anxieties had also manifested themselves in her attitude to food. But whereas Victoria comfort ate, Celia starved herself, and suffered so badly from anorexia as a teenager that she was hospitalised.
Susie Blake had been spotted by Victoria in a musical at the King’s Head Theatre. The LAMDA-trained actress was awarded the part of the acerbic community announcer. Blake, like Imrie, had missed out on a ballet career for being the wrong shape.
Completing the core of the company was Duncan Preston, who turned down Shakespeare for Victoria. He had been offered the role of Hotspur in Henry IV, Part One, touring round the world for a year but, partly through the prospect of regular parts in As Seen On TV, and partly because he had just bought a house in Beaconsfield with his girlfriend, he turned it down. ‘I was at a crossroads and I had the choice of going straight or going off at a tangent with Victoria,’ said Preston. ‘I chose the latter and she changed my life.’
Victoria Wood Page 16
