Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  The series received another good response, but Victoria’s self-doubts remained. However, even her uncertainties could not fail to be temporarily lifted when an invite for the Royal Variety Performance arrived. Although no longer regarded as the ultimate accolade for an entertainer, an appearance on the bill was still prestigious. For Victoria, however, her appearance at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, represented a personal milestone. On the same bill was Peter Ustinov, the man from whom she had sought advice as a youngster.

  Victoria began 1987 by attempting to write yet another play as a sort of insurance policy. Ever cautious when it came to personal popularity, she assumed that she had reached her peak as far as stand-up and sketch shows were concerned and feared the future could only bring decline. ‘I’m probably at the peak of my popularity now, but the public will tire of me one day,’ she predicted. ‘I’m glad I’m doing work people like, and I’m lucky to have a chance to do it. But I don’t want to start taking it too seriously because I’m not expecting it to last.’

  It seemed the more plaudits she received the more she feared success would disappear. At the same time she was having to try to reconcile her status with her image. ‘I lead the same sort of life that most people lead,’ she said. ‘When it’s – quote – big stars, it’s just a bit “them” and “us”, isn’t it? And I don’t see myself as one of “them”, that’s all.’ But the truth of the matter was that she was a big star.

  When Victoria was Michael Parkinson’s castaway on Desert Island Discs, she was careful to stress the downside of fame.

  It’s not how you envisage it because it’s a nuisance … when you want to go and buy your knickers and things it’s just a bit of an irritation. People come up and poke you and things like that … mainly they want to know if you are who they think you are – which covers a large range of people from the woman who does the lip-reading on Sunday morning to Angela Rippon … What I mean is it’s not what you imagine. It’s not sort of swanning around in a fur coat. It’s people saying ‘My wife’s seen all your programmes and she hasn’t liked any of them yet.’

  Victoria’s desert island luxury was a Wurlitzer organ and her musical choices consisted of numbers by Prokofiev, Fats Waller, Gershwin, Ian Dury and Noël Coward singing a version of ‘Let’s Do It’ live in Las Vegas. ‘He’s obviously gone in to make a killing and make a few bob for his old age and he’s playing the most unlikely audience,’ said Victoria, who at the time was considering making a few low-key appearances in New York clubs. She said of the venture: ‘That’s a bit frightening, it’s always easier to do the things that you know and stay here, but I feel I should try it.’

  A further accolade came in March when the second series of As Seen On TV picked up the Best Light Entertainment Programme BAFTA, and both Victoria and Walters were nominated for the Best Light Entertainment Performance.

  On the domestic front Victoria’s massive success was in danger of becoming something of an embarrassment and she grew more defensive of Geoffrey, especially when interviewers assumed he was a kept man. ‘There’s no question of him being Mr Wood or anything,’ she stressed. ‘He’s earning a packet – he’s working so much he couldn’t work more if he wanted to, and he’s very happy about my success. Anyone in the business knows that he’s at least as successful as I am, probably more so.’

  There was a suggestion, however, that all was not well within the marriage during this period, prompting Victoria to be uncharacteristically open in interviews.

  ‘I could survive if our marriage broke up,’ she stated. ‘I don’t say I’d be thrilled at the prospect, but I would certainly survive. The quality of enjoyment of life is what’s important, isn’t it? And life would still be there for me if Geoff wasn’t, in the same way that it would still be there for him if I wasn’t. I don’t think our relationship would be healthy otherwise.’

  Her brother was also in the public eye in 1987, standing as the Liberal candidate for North West Durham in the General Election. Mindful of Victoria’s displeasure when he had spoken to the press in the past, he made it clear that he did not expect any support from his youngest sister and was at pains to trot out the Wood party line: ‘She does not help anybody’s campaign,’ he told journalists. ‘She prefers to take a private stance as far as politics are concerned. Her attitude is that she appears in public to perform and the rest of her life is private.’

  Victoria did appear in public in 1987. Whenever life appeared to be treating her well she seemed to feel the need to test herself, which could explain why she decided to make another foray into what she considered the toughest arena – live theatre.

  I can do something on television and it might be really quite mediocre but because it’s really well lit and it comes as part of something else you can get away with it. But if I come on stage and do something not very good then I instantly know and you really have to do your best because people have paid money to see you and it’s their night out. And that’s where you’re really tested I think.

  Stand-up also enabled her to get dissatisfactions off her chest: ‘There’s no such thing as a comedy of approval where you write about things that strike you as right. You have got to see something wrong.’

  The tour commenced in Ireland in October and would be her biggest yet. She drove herself from theatre to theatre and regarded her car as the most stability she had. Accommodation was either friends’ flats or hotels (in Manchester she refused to stay at the Britannia because she thought it looked like a brothel).

  For her, the joy of live performance was ‘the feeling of communicating with all those people’. Elaborating on the point, she added: ‘It’s the only time I ever feel people are understanding what I’m saying.’ In her opinion an expertly delivered routine to a warm audience was like flying – ‘like’ being the operative word, because however spontaneous and casual she wanted to appear to audiences, she was still tethered by her methodic approach.

  ‘While one side of your head is performing the other half is thinking “Oh, that didn’t go so well, I’m going to miss out the next bit” or “I’d better speed up, some quick laughs are needed!”’ explained Victoria. ‘You check what the audience is doing, what they’re up to, deciding how you can get a better grip on proceedings.’

  Earlier in the year she had criticised London for having the coldest audiences, even so, her residency at the London Palladium sold out. This was the venue where the New Faces Gala Final had been held, an event that she had missed out on. Now she would make it her own.

  ‘Without brand-name funnies Victoria Wood’s stand-up act would be fairly thin,’ wrote the Evening Standard’s Nick Barker. ‘In the first hour enough downmarket products were mentioned to clothe, furnish and feed a family of four for a fortnight.’ Victoria rebutted the accusation, saying: ‘It’s not all brand names, you know. Not by any stretch of the imagination.’

  Victoria still showed signs of nervousness in her onstage body language (hands in pockets; pushing up her sleeves; batting her hair forward), but she also began to use physicality to add to the comedy of her performance, such as in an impression of a punctured inflatable doll, and the comic stance of a market researcher and make-up demonstrator.

  The self-deprecation was diluted – Victoria described herself as a compulsive eater and made out she had to vacuum the theatre beforehand – but the show marked more of a shift from getting laughs from her own inadequacies to getting them from other people.

  There were no groundbreaking new takes on life or edgy comedy in the show. Instead Victoria contented herself with musings on motorway life; the misery of family Christmases (first visited in Happy Since I Met You); the horrors of a stay in hospital; a holiday to Spain; the direness of English farce; and a case of mistaken identity which enabled her to take an extended stroll along the contemporary British high street.

  It was nothing radical, which was how Victoria liked it. As she remarked at the time: ‘These bloody barriers. What are they? Why do we have to push them
back?’

  She was at pains to align herself with her audience. For instance, she gets a chartered flight to the accessible Spain in the holiday routine, and in the part of the act which deals with her stay in hospital the grim conditions make it clear she is an NHS patient. Yet at the same time there was a certain degree of snobbishness. Her fellow holidaymakers are portrayed as sex-crazed sluts and the artistic tastes of the lower classes are mocked (the ‘lovely’ painting of white horses running in the surf in the moonlight). Bizarrely, it seemed the very people she was attacking for what she deemed as poor taste were the same people sitting in the theatre having hysterics. She embraced her audience, while at the same time holding them at a distance.

  Victoria also expanded the scope of her targets, incorporating into her act a mocking affection for the British aversion to anything that might trigger a pulse. She wondered if couples who drive to beauty spots and sit in the car looking out would be unable to fully appreciate the sight of the Taj Mahal unless there was a tax disc and windscreen wiper in vision. And she compared the Indian practice of suttee (where the widow throws herself on her husband’s funeral pyre) to its English counterpart: an English widow and her friend at a wake deciding who is to slice the baps and who is to spread the butter. She zeroed in on the sudden suburban upfront attitude about safe sex (crowds of shoppers calling out their Durex orders in loud jolly voices), and touched upon NHS underfunding (her doctor has to double-up as a cab driver).

  There were only two new songs for the show: ‘It Would Never Have Worked’ and ‘Litter Bin’. The former was another song about incompatible lovers and dissatisfaction with a relationship, but its lighthearted approach allied it more to ‘Thinking Of You’ than ‘Don’t Do It’. The song’s denouement – ‘his’ homosexuality – had also occurred in one of Victoria’s earlier songs, ‘Song of the Lonely Girl’. ‘Litter Bin’, which gave full vent to Victoria’s sometimes bleak outlook, created confusion and embarrassment for an audience not used to straight sentiment from her. It is a lament on the bleakness of modern life, where babies are abandoned and innocent lives are blown away or crushed beneath the tyre of a drunken driver. ‘If something sounds cruel and pointless / Chances are it’s true’ sang Victoria. The song, which closed the first half of the show, ends with a glimmer of hope in the chorus, ‘We have to light tiny bonfires / That can pierce the dark’ but by that time most audience members were tittering uncomfortably or waiting for a punchline. As far as Victoria was concerned, the song had its place in the show no matter what the reaction was.

  It always felt like a challenge to shut them up … to halt the gigglers. I quite enjoyed seeing how soon I could shut them all up … it shows another side I suppose. It’s mainly for theatrical effect. And it gets you off in a black-out. Throw them a shocking last line, and then out goes the spotlight! By the time they realise what’s happened, zap, you’ve disappeared. Gone in a blaze of glory; nowhere to be seen. They’re still there, feeling disturbed, and you’re in the dressing room with the kettle on.

  The character monologue had become an expected component of Victoria’s act by this time and we were introduced to three new ladies. Deirdre was the nervous, tongue-tied market researcher attempting to way-lay passers-by with a hidden agenda. It was a creation worthy of Joyce Grenfell. Madeline was equally superb. An in-store representative for Cacharel, it was her job to encourage customers to try out the new autumn range of cosmetics and skincare preparations. As with Deirdre, it was yet another example of the non-professional public speaker. Over the tannoy Madeline launches into a sales routine littered with nasal tones, malapropisms, strangulated vowels, rising and falling intonation and elongated words. The jargon she uses is very similar to Good Fun’s Betty and the overall effect is one of a failed attempt at sophistication. As she grows increasingly exasperated by the lack of response, Madeline begins to drop the pretension along with the aitches. Her Northernness comes through and her language grows less flowery as her desperation mounts. The mask is dropped and she reveals her true self.

  The third character, and one who enjoyed an extended life, was the nameless ‘Kimberley’s Friend’. Another gormless Northerner, she was never seen without a brightly coloured beret (a covert reference to her creator’s home town?) and worked in a supermarket. It was the wide-eyed innocence Victoria invested in the creation that made her so appealing. Kimberley’s extreme drunken exploits were relayed without censure and the character was totally without malice. Although she shared some characteristics with two of Victoria’s earlier creations, Gail and Kelly Marie Tunstall, she stood out as the most endearing, largely due to the underlying pathos of the character. She was the ultimate in the line of non-professional public ‘performers’, wandering on stage in the belief that she was in a Wimpy. She was also a vessel for Victoria’s only attempt at employing a catchphrase: ‘I’m lookin’ for my fwend’ – a line that drew applause from audiences.

  The critics were united in their praise for Victoria, noticing not only her increased confidence, but also a vein of viciousness and cruelty in her material, suggesting some repressed English desire for rebellion and violence bubbling under the surface. True, there was an almost audible sigh of relief at her weight loss, but she was no longer being described as some cosy, cuddly and harmless light entertainer. However, Victoria’s stance remained elusive, and she was described variously as middle class, appealing to the common man, Northern, typically British, the most completely English performer around, guileless, and snobbish. It was impossible to compartmentalise her and, consequently, it was impossible to limit her.

  10

  THE END OF the tour in late November segued nicely into the publication of Barmy, another collection of sketches, culled this time from the second series of As Seen On TV. Victoria was also given a 40-minute As Seen On TV Christmas special, which aired on 18 December.

  Wisely, she decided it was to be her last sketch show. ‘I love television, and if it was possible for me to work in it more, then I would; but because of the position I’ve put myself in of being the only writer on the show, I can’t physically work in it that often,’ she explained. ‘I’ve just had it with sketch shows for a bit – people have liked it, and I want to stop while they still like it.’

  Dour as ever, she defined the ‘special’ as ‘ten minutes longer than usual and I’ve splashed out on a new bra’. Gardeners’ World had not wanted the extra 10 minutes created by someone turning the oven up too high on a cookery programme, she explained in her opening monologue, so BBC2 had dumped them on her.

  Julie Walters, Celia Imrie, et al. were obviously included in the cast and Victoria once again allotted other parts to Kay Adshead, Georgia Allen, Nicholas Barnes, Jim Broadbent, Deborah Grant, Meg Johnson, Sam Kelly, Maggie Steed, Sue Wallace and Sandra Voe, all of whom she had worked with previously.

  Her fascination with television was more apparent than ever with a Doctor Who parody, a mickey take of Sunday television, the money-saving advice show ‘McOnomy’ (with Celia Imrie and Molly Weir playing a Scottish version of Margery and Joan), a badly dubbed foreign advert for men’s bras, a Right To Reply slot, a Coronation Street parody, a documentary, and a sketch in which Walters and Imrie conversed solely in advertising speak, reeling off a string of credible products and slogans. Television programmes in general and soaps in particular formed the main topic of discussion in Victoria’s opening monologue.

  ‘Self Service’ saw Walters and Victoria as Enid and Wyn queuing for a snack and creating a vivid world of suburban madness with the most casual of gossip. The only other non-television-based sketch saw Walters and Victoria as unhelpful hotel receptionists, inspired by Victoria’s experiences during her tours.

  Song-wise there was ‘High Risk Area’, which, because it was a special, was shown in wide-screen film rather than cheaper video. It was another number about the dangers of relationships and the preference for insularity. In it Victoria sang how she had a degree and O-level Maths. This jokey habit of just
ifying oneself through academic qualifications had previously been used in Good Fun and As Seen On TV and was, perhaps, a hangover from the Bury Grammar ethos of being defined by academic achievement.

  The special also included an ensemble song, ‘The Chippy’, which applied West Side Story staging to a gaudy celebration of working-class pleasure.

  The affection of her Coronation Street ‘tribute’ earned praise from none other than Doris Speed (the soap’s Annie Walker), who ended her days in a Bury care home. Victoria expertly captured the early years of the soap with her, Lill Roughley and Walters playing Ena Sharples, Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst in the snug of the Rovers’ Return. Shot in black and white, it was a brilliant recreation of the show’s glory years with knowing predictions and a brilliant send-up of style. There was even a jokey allusion to the demise of Anne Reid’s Valerie Barlow.

  One sketch had Victoria as a humourless feminist with lesbian tendencies. Plonked on a chair staring austerely at the camera, in spectacles identical to Helen Wood’s, she condemned the previous sketch. Any militants who saw Victoria as a figurehead may have found themselves revising their opinion.

  There was also a brilliant documentary about the making of ‘Acorn Antiques’, inspired by the BBC’s recent Just Another Day documentary on EastEnders. Maggie Steed played the much-feared executive producer Marion Clune, an obvious imitation of EastEnders’ intimidating creator Julia Smith. The complete lack of chemistry between the actors, the arrogance, the egos, the bitching and the cliques all helped to make it highly entertaining.