Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  Such compulsive behaviour might have represented a distancing from and rejection of her physically and emotionally messy past. That could not be tidied up, but her present could. As she said of cleaning: ‘I see [it] as a way of imposing control on your surroundings.’

  The November publication of Up To You Porky, a collection of sketches and monologues from Lucky Bag, Wood & Walters and As Seen On TV (dedicated to Peter Eckersley), demonstrated how Victoria was careful to make the most of the financial opportunities available from past work. She capitalised on the fact that lines from her sketches lent themselves to being performed. There was something immensely quotable about such nuggets as ‘My God, if her bum were a bungalow she’d never get a mortgage on it.’

  Despite her industry a sense of gloom prevailed. After months of working on her new play Victoria decided it was mediocre and threw it away. To add to her woes she also felt it had been a mistake to do As Seen On TV; ‘I’ve been seeking to branch out but it hasn’t happened,’ she said. ‘I wanted to do something different before I went back to TV.’

  With a heavy heart and a bottle of Jif she followed Geoffrey down to Bristol for Christmas. While he was in pantomime she scrubbed the bath in their rented flat and began work on a film script. The script was abandoned in the new year for being ‘too Alan Ayckbourn influenced’, and instead she began working on the second series of As Seen On TV. With Bix Beiderbecke records and The Archers as her only company, Victoria aimed to complete 18 minutes’ worth of script a week. Fridays were left for rewriting, but this could also extend to Saturdays. It was a process she found hellish.

  ‘It’s a lonely existence – just me, my pen and the dreaded blank sheets of paper,’ explained Victoria. ‘I can’t honestly believe anybody actually enjoys writing. It’s an absolute agony … You pour everything you’ve got into one [sketch] and you don’t ever want to write another – only you realise there are 59 more to go before you’ve enough for a series. It’s torment. There’s not a morning goes by when I’m writing that I don’t panic and think there’s not another idea left and my career is finished.’

  This time round it was even more lonely as Geoffrey was touring extensively with The Krankies and away filming in Kenya. ‘There are pressures, there’s no denying that. You’ve just got to work that bit harder at it,’ said Victoria. This involved writing and telephoning each other every day and arranging brief rendezvous whenever they could. She regretted the separations, but after years of unemployment they were reluctant to turn down work and she was philosophical: ‘If you want to work then I suppose something has to go.’ They were too busy to think about having children but were determined their partnership did not suffer. ‘Our relationship comes first,’ she stressed. ‘We would never do anything that would endanger what we have.’

  In all it took six months to write the series and the only ‘break’ Victoria had was for a tour, but before that came a triumphant interlude: she won the BAFTA award for Best Light Entertainment Performance. Victoria was genuinely shocked to beat Ronnie Barker, David Jason and Gordon Kaye, but the success did not end there and the show also earned the award for Best Light Entertainment Programme. The series went on to win the British Press Guild Broadcasting Award for Best Light Entertainment Programme.

  Typically, the BAFTA euphoria was short-lived. ‘I was very pleased to win but it really put pressure on me. I was already writing the new series and every time I looked at the award I kept thinking that people would be expecting so much more now and I just wouldn’t be able to live up to it. In the end, I just had to put the thing away.’

  For the tour which, with 22 dates in England and Scotland, was her biggest yet, Victoria debuted her tomboyish pudding basin haircut and what became her most popular song, the mammoth, fifteen-versed ‘Ballad of Barry and Freda’ better known as ‘Let’s Do It’. The saga of suburban lust had audiences roaring with laughter and remained Victoria’s encore number for the following decade. What was refreshing about it was the way she took the clichéd comedy of a husband wanting sex and the wife refusing, and completely reversed it. So while Freda wants to wear nothing but stilettos and an oven glove, and roll in gay abandon on the tufted Wilton, Barry wants to lag the pipes and read a catalogue on vinyl flooring. As Freda’s demands are given full vent (‘Bend me over backwards on my hostess trolley’, ‘Smear an avocado on my lower portions’, ‘Beat me on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly’), Barry’s excuses become more lame (‘You know I pulled a muscle when I did that grouting’, ‘It’s too chilly to go without a thermal vest’). Only Victoria could portray sado-masochism and kinky sex in such a funny, wholesome and inoffensive way.

  The tour, which commenced on 20 March also included songs from As Seen On TV, a mix of old and new stand-up routines and a new character monologue in the form of an usherette (another Margaret).

  Because Victoria travelled light with few overheads, it was her most lucrative tour so far and saw her playing larger venues. Particular satisfaction was derived from appearing at Manchester’s Palace Theatre, a childhood favourite. Her profile was also rising – at least people were mistaking her for Dawn French rather than Pam Ayres now – and with it her confidence, ‘I know people like me or else they wouldn’t pay to come and see me.’ No longer did she allow herself to be manipulated into giving interviews on Morecambe pier or Trust House Forte hotels; now it was the Ritz and the Waldorf.

  Despite moving into a higher league of celebrity, she was still at pains to keep herself rooted. ‘You actually decide for yourself what level of normality you operate at. If you want to prance about being famous you can – but people will no longer identify with you because you have no normal life. But I still lead a very normal life. And I only get recognised 50 per cent of the time.’ She was also wary of becoming a Much Loved British Institution. ‘That’s too much pressure,’ she believed. ‘Look what happened to Hancock. There’s a line between doing what you want to do and being completely taken over.’

  But like Hancock she was beginning to analyse comedy. She likened her role on stage to that of a shepherd, ‘It’s like rounding sheep up, you have to keep them all in the same place and attack them all at the same time.’ For her, the joy of live performance was the sense of something special happening at that particular moment in time, and the secret of getting a laugh lay in the rhythm and timing. ‘The content is very low down on the list. It’s not as important as the way you say something and the syllables you choose and the consonants you choose to say it with. It’s almost like if you could hear it, if you didn’t speak English, you would still find it funny because that rhythm would just carry you along.’ She also connected the comedian’s skills with the musician’s, ‘It’s very musical. It’s all to do with rhythm and punctuation, and building up an expected pattern and then breaking it and catching people on the off-beat.’

  Helping her in her analysis was Geoffrey. He would loiter at the back of the theatre and in the bar at intervals, eavesdropping on audience opinion and working out why certain parts of the act were better received than others. This information would then be relayed to Victoria who would adapt the act where she thought fit.

  Somehow she managed to fit in a series of Asda adverts with Walters during this period. It was particularly apt that she agreed to promote a supermarket as so much of her act was concerned with branded goods and the housewives’ lot. The commercials necessitated a mini-tour of Europe, filming on location in the Austrian Alps, France and Spain. Victoria and Walters pushed their shopping trolleys oblivious to their surroundings and more concerned with discussing such weighty matters as whether Nana Mouskouri could be classed as country and western. Whereas Walters went on to be the voice of Bisto, Typhoo and Sainsbury’s, it took another 13 years before Victoria made any more adverts. She could hardly mock dozens of products in her work and then appear on television endorsing them.

  The day after completing the Asda ads she was in the BBC’s rehearsal studios preparing for As Seen On TV 2. Addit
ional commitments included the press interviews for the series, the release of Up To You Porky in paperback, and talks about a promotional tour of Australia where the first series of As Seen On TV was to be shown. By November Victoria and Geoffrey had spent only a hundred out of the last three hundred days together, and she had not been home for months.

  The filming of As Seen On TV 2 meant Victoria had to spend the summer in London, a place she described to her local Lancashire paper as ‘very boring’. She stayed at David Leland’s Highgate flat (she would later buy her own) and Leland himself worked with Geoffrey that year on the critical and commercial hit film, Wish You Were Here. Leland wrote and directed the film based on the early life of notorious madame Cynthia Payne. Geoffrey played Harry Figgis, who gets Lynda (Emily Lloyd) a job at a bus company, and then fires her for titillating staff on the canteen table.

  Filming of As Seen On TV 2 was not completed until the end of October, by which time Victoria had resolved to put an end to the show. ‘It’s not that I feel burnt out, but I believe in giving my best, and I think – so far as TV sketches go – I’ve given all I’ve got for a while. Now I need some fresh challenges,’ she explained. She had grown frustrated by the hard work and limited format of sketch shows and wanted to move on in a similar direction to John Cleese after Fawlty Towers.

  ‘I’ve done what I wanted to do and it’s time to go while people still want more. I don’t want to make the public sick of me,’ she sensibly reasoned. But Victoria was careful to show her loyalty to the BBC, and did not rule out making Christmas specials and one-off shows for them.

  For years she had kept her depressive side hidden from public view, but the burden of work began to make Victoria less cautious in some interviews. ‘I take life much too seriously,’ she admitted. ‘People always thought Julie Walters was the intense one, but it’s me all the time.’

  Despite the plaudits, her self-confidence had dropped: ‘Sometimes I really do believe I have forgotten how to do it … There are days when I am sure I am not going to be able to deliver. I think I am a talentless little git and I should go off and be a waitress or load up the shelves in Woolworth’s or something.’

  There seemed to be something hollow about her quirkiness in other interviews of the time – raving about her excitement at spotting the cast of Howards’ Way in the BBC canteen – almost as if she was on autopilot. Other interviews seemed to turn into self-therapy sessions:

  One thing I do take seriously is miserable people. I see it happening. Very few people are living a rich life. People seem to live on a very shallow level, not because they want to. I feel lucky. I go to work. I have a lot of fun with people I like. Lots of different things happen and then I come home and weed the garden. I can do a million different things in the course of a day and they will all be good. And then I think, well, suppose I was in a house I didn’t like with noise coming through the walls or I had a job where I couldn’t talk to people and nothing happened. There would be all these strands missing out of the day.

  The second series of As Seen On TV was first broadcast on 10 November 1986, and it was a measure of the BBC’s optimism that it was shown on Mondays. The first series had been screened in the less-popular Friday slot. It was indicative of her growing stature that Victoria ditched the baggy blazers and lost the loose ties for more stylish jackets and brooches.

  The first episode was watched by 7.15 million viewers, making it BBC2’s third most popular programme. The second week it moved up to the number two placing with 8.3 million viewers. And by the third week, when repeats of Fawlty Towers ended, Victoria moved in to take the top spot with an audience of 8.55 million.

  The old gang was reassembled, even Walters whose career was making more demands on her time (1986 saw her starring in When I Was a Girl I Used To Scream and Shout at the Whitehall Theatre and appearing in the film Car Trouble). And as well as the inner core there were once again parts for those Victoria had worked with before and trusted, including Eric Richards and Kathryn Apanowicz.

  ‘Acorn Antiques’ returned and Victoria continued to base a lot of the sketches on parodies of television and cinema genres such as the British war film, the Hollywood musical, local news programmes and 1970s’ British thrillers.

  New material began creeping into her opening monologues and one entire set was devoted to adolescence and schooldays. It showed how the adult Victoria could revisit her unhappiness and, using a comic’s eye, turn the misery into mirth. In another monologue she demonstrated the growing sophistication of her comedy. It was a reworking of the train trip tale, first used in Lucky Bag. Again there was the woman eating an individual fruit pie by sucking out the filling through the hole in the centre. Originally the ‘joke’ was her picking her nose and saving her bogey to eat later. This easy laugh remained, but was now eclipsed by an additional gag which saw Victoria adroitly commenting on the psychology of the English: a couple make love on the train but nothing is said until they light a post-coital cigarette, making one woman shrilly point out that it is a non-smoking compartment.

  In another sketch Victoria provided a wry social comment on the times by having Imrie play a self-sufficient successful businesswoman who does not know what a pregnancy is.

  The sketches ‘Spaghetti’ and ‘No Gossip’ best represented Victoria’s unique style. In both she placed two lower-middle-class women – played by her and Walters – in an unremarkable environment (a restaurant and a tea room) and showed how the banalities of chat make for remarkable listening. The humour came from the juxtaposition of naturalistic intonation and delivery with content that took off at bizarre and sometimes surreal tangents.

  This mismatched element was also used in ‘Partly Political Broadcast’, in which two housewives, Jean and Barbara, promote their newly formed party by prattling on about supermarkets.

  But Victoria’s favourite sketch of the series was a marked departure from her usual style, even though she did play yet another dim Northerner. ‘The Trolley’ could have been written by Spike Milligan. It is stripped of all Victoria’s usual references and relies on the madness of her waitress for its humour. Her repeated question, ‘Is it on the trolley?’ and complete lack of comprehension is wedded to the physical humour of her whizzing on and off with a trolley while two totally straight businessmen become more and more frustrated by her barmy behaviour.

  Those long afternoons staring out of the window at the sheep were doubtless the inspiration for one sketch in which Victoria played a woman driven insane by the boredom of country living (‘We’ve got a barrel in the lounge and I like to look at that’).

  This time the only documentary with autobiographical content was ‘A Very Funny Young Man Indeed’, a look at comedian Baz Bennett’s shot at fame. New Faces became ‘Star Search’, but the host for both was Derek Hobson. Perhaps Victoria got her revenge on her first manager by depicting him as the character who turned down Elvis. Through Baz’s mercenary dream (to land an advert for microwaves) Victoria criticised the light entertainment mafia. Her final comment on the New Faces experience was, tellingly, making a performing chimpanzee the winner.

  Anne Reid – Peter Eckersley’s widow – starred in the documentary ‘Mr Right’. The part marked her return to television after a 15-year absence. She had last been seen as Ken Barlow’s wife in Coronation Street. After leaving the show she devoted her time to bringing up her son. Victoria did not offer her a part in As Seen On TV 2 as a thank you to Peter – sentiment never got in the way of her professionalism – but because Anne was the perfect actress for Victoria’s material. The 47-year-old spinster, Pamela Twill, is one of the RADA-trained actress’s favourite roles, and she played the part of the rueful suburbanite on the blind date trail so well that Victoria would later write a television playlet for her and make her part of her repertory company.

  Margery and Joan were back, as was Kitty, and a new episodic character was introduced in the form of Kelly-Marie Tunstall. This over-the-top, Lancashire tart was played with relish
by Victoria. Mouthing off at a bus stop, this loud, common and uninhibited creature might have been familiar to Victoria from her childhood days waiting at Bury bus stops.

  Just as Victoria pastiched television genres, she sometimes did the same with songs. With more than a nod to her namesake, Marie Lloyd, Victoria wrote ‘Alice’, a send-up of a Good Old Days-style song, performed by Walters in a music hall setting. The series also contained the 1950s-style ‘Sitting On The Prom’, with Victoria playing one of a trio of Radcliffe pensioners singing about the delights of Blackpool.

  Elsewhere in the series there was ‘Barry And Freda’ and ‘Count Your Blessings’, which borrowed lyrically from the Ian Dury (one of the few lyricists Victoria admired) song ‘What A Waste’. The poignant ‘Crush’ was a beautiful evocation of the yearning, insecurity and confusion of an eleven-year-old girl’s first crush. The most interesting song, ‘I Don’t Care’, is musically very similar to Talent’s ‘I Don’t Know Why I’m Here’. In it Victoria praises selfishness and a lack of sympathy (‘people’s dreary lives are the biggest bore’). It shares the appeal for honest expression of ‘Don’t Do It’ and the message of self-liberation of ‘Bastards’, but is much more defiant, with Victoria suggesting suicide as an alternative to supporting an old schoolmate. The song is significant in that it expressed Victoria’s own real-life desire to be blunt while at the same time highlighting her isolationism and dislike of emotional expression (‘cry away, away from me’, ‘don’t come by anymore’, ‘keep my flat a tear-free zone’).