Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  A lengthier hairstyle added to her attractiveness and the overall effect seemed to have boosted her confidence, although she still hid behind a stand mike on stage. The critics certainly noticed this sexy assuredness.

  ‘It is hard to square the glowingly self-confident woman on stage with the diffident fattie who cut her comic teeth in the cramped surroundings of the King’s Head in the early Eighties,’ wrote Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph. In The Times Alan Coren said: ‘The Lancashire duckling is [now] this slim and pretty superswan’, and Colin Donald wrote: ‘The chubby, ultra-audience-friendly character with the Alan Bennett-like Northern cosiness has been superseded by a leaner, more confident voice.’

  Interestingly, it was only when she had slimmed down that Victoria became more caustic about the thin. When she had been larger she was as average as her audience and perhaps it was concern at losing this bond that made her go on the attack by negating the slim. Her ‘thin, neurotic, body-conscious friends’ are always on a diet, while her ‘massive jolly friends’ amuse themselves by watching aerobics videos over bottles of wine and criticising the leotards. The slimming industry is witheringly dispatched with Victoria’s description of Weight Watchers’ Quick Start programme (‘You run in, they shout “You’re too fat”. You run out again’). There was only one disparaging – and patently untrue – remark she made about her own figure; she didn’t have a waist, she said, more of an unmarked level crossing.

  It was typical of Victoria’s perfectionism that even the tour programme was carefully crafted. She wrote a parody of a Hello! interview (‘Ooh Hello!’). It was gloriously out of touch, full of ludicrous inaccuracies and condescension to Victoria’s Northern origins, with ‘oop’t ‘t’ North’ and ‘Ee by goom’ inserted indiscriminately.

  As well as the obligatory mentions of nuns, Tupperware, shoplifting and unsatisfactory sex, the routine covered her week, hotel life, the Bury Grammar School reunion and her efforts to conceive. For a wife-swapping routine she created a verbal mini farce in which she played the two couples (including the ubiquitous Pam) applying surburban sensibilities to a swingers’ party.

  She was particularly good on the English character (‘We don’t like to be happy’), giving brilliantly perceptive insights into the personality of the country. ‘If we had the Ceauşescus here,’ she said, ‘we wouldn’t have executed them, we would have written funny letters about them to Points of View.’

  More and more physical comedy was creeping into the act, from an exaggerated impression of Coronation Street’s Deirdre to a mime of the insertion of a tampon. The innuendo was more unsubtle than usual too, and Victoria went for some easy laughs with jokes about hanging a sign on a knob and a man sitting on an enormous organ.

  The antipathy the villagers of Silverdale felt towards Victoria after the remarks she made about them in her last tour seemed to provoke rather than restrain her. Now she joked that they made Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man seem outgoing and vivacious, and she said that, because they did not have any money, their idea of celebrating was to book a window table at Kentucky Fried Chicken. The song, ‘Saturday Night’, also displayed a cold superiority to the North with Victoria depicting the exploits of two gormless Northern tarts, Tracey Clegg and Nicola Battersby.

  Politics appeared in the act, but as usual Victoria dealt with it in workaday terms. She attributed the mortar attack on Downing Street to an attempt by Margaret Thatcher to get her curtains back, and Douglas Hurd was said to look like ‘someone very high up in the carpet department at Selfridges’.

  In the character monologue slots, ‘Kimberley’s Friend’ made a return and was celebrating the fact that she had caught the right bus. There was also Susan, Victoria’s 16-stone roadie (‘Like Desperate Dan only not quite so effeminate’). One new song in the show concerned another unhappy relationship, but whereas in the past Victoria had tended to have the downtrodden and abused female accepting her treatment and, later, progressed to having her accept the relationship was over, here ‘she’ is proactive, and electrocutes the offending man by dropping a heater in the bath.

  In Lucky Bag Victoria had sung about her relief at not being a celebrity in the song ‘Dear God’. In 1990’s ‘Reincarnation’, however, she wished she could sample the life of what she believed was an ordinary person. Both songs suggested she was in an isolated position, and ‘Reincarnation’, although seemingly affectionate on the surface, contained an element of snobbery. Victoria’s concept of ‘ordinary’ people included a suburban housewife obsessed by the paraphernalia of domesticity, a yuppie mobile phone salesman, the spinisterish invoice clerk, the vulgar good-time woman, and the suffocating mother. Victoria expressed a desire to be all of them but the reality may have been rather different.

  The explicit tampon mime, in which Victoria demonstrated the insertion instructions, suggested that she was trying to break out of her ‘cosy’ straightjacket, but it was at the end of the show that she really allowed her more subversive and mischievous side to show. Announcing how she didn’t normally do this sort of thing, she explained how she’d got a nice letter backstage before the show from a lady whose name she forgot (but who is sitting in the circle) saying that her husband was supposed to be there but he was in Stoke Mandeville Hospital. She has asked Victoria, on her behalf, to thank the nurses who’ve helped her husband learn to drive, get dressed and cook. Demonstrating a superb acting ability Victoria was totally sincere and believable. Just when the audience grew cowed and respectful Victoria took a beat and said: ‘He’s not paralysed, he’s just a pillock.’

  A short family holiday in Ireland allowed Victoria to rest before she began a 10-week run of the show at the Strand Theatre in September. By this time she was being hailed as a national institution and a survey by market researchers Mintel found that most working women would like to be seen more like her than Margaret Thatcher, Anita Roddick, Claire Rayner, Marilyn Monroe, Kylie Minogue or Raisa Gorbachev.

  For the London run the show was titled Victoria Wood Up West, a title which suggested a night out and a night off from ordinary suburbia; a temporary escape into a nicer world. It also neatly encapsulated Victoria’s duality; she was both the audience and the attraction; the struggling victim who had to negotiate the pitfalls of everyday life and the star of the show who had triumphed over suburban gaucheness.

  Rather than ignore the fact that the down-to-earth, ‘ordinary’ Victoria Wood was appearing on the West End stage, Victoria incorporated the incongruity into her act. Joan Collins was appearing in Private Lives at the nearby Aldwych Theatre, prompting Victoria to tell the audience: ‘Don’t clap, it does annoy Joan.’ There were gales of laughter when Victoria confided she had spotted the star popping out for a packet of cigarettes. Victoria made out that she, like her audience, was the sort of person who read Hello! and shopped at Argos, but in actual fact she was the real star; Up West had sold out, but Private Lives had not.

  In Talent Julie Walters, as the desperate Julie, struggled to remember the lyrics to ‘Cabaret’, but in 1991 she found herself starring alongside cinema’s Sally Bowles in the film of Richard Harris’s stage play, Stepping Out. But even with the presence of Liza Minnelli, the film failed to attract vast audiences. The poor performance of the film was the least of her concerns, because it was during the filming that her two-year-old daughter was diagnosed with leukaemia, a battle that would take three years to win.

  On learning of the terrible news Victoria wrote Walters a supportive letter and sympathised on the phone.

  ‘Of course, there’s nothing anyone else can do and often it’s intrusive to be too sympathetic or make too many inquiries, because that can drain what energy they have got that they need for dealing with the situation,’ she reasoned. ‘So I did back off while the worst was going on. Sometimes it’s better to keep away, and that’s how I felt, rightly or wrongly,’ she explained.

  Even if Walters had wanted her company, it would have been difficult because Victoria, flushed with the success of her
1990 show, took it on the road for a six-week sell-out tour in the March of 1991. It coincided with her, technically at least, having a number one hit in the record charts. As a guest on a Saturday morning children’s television programme, filmed for some bizarre reason on a cross-Channel ferry, Victoria expressed a desire to do a Comic Relief song with the Pet Shop Boys. The Northern duo shared her sly humour and drollness, and a collaboration may have yielded a song more sophisticated and intelligent than the standard charity single. The Pet Shop Boys failed to take up Victoria’s hint and so in early 1991 she went ahead and wrote ‘The Smile Song’ for herself. The song, the flip side to the Hale and Pace song ‘The Stomp’, which received the air play, allowed Victoria to display her rarely seen talent for mimicry. She turned in highly credible vocal and physical impersonations of Kylie Minogue, Janet Jackson, a rapper and Jessie Matthews. Straddling a throbbing motorcycle in thigh-length leather boots helped effect her transformation into the lead singer of the female rock group, Heart, and there was even a send-up of the Pet Shop Boys.

  The song itself was another of her lists of life’s nasties. As a song for Comic Relief it might have been expected that famine or flood would have featured among life’s negatives, but Victoria remained true to her pet hates, so there was a plea for the abolition of Kylie and Jason, stopcocks, instant mashed potato, pink acrylic knitting, rainhoods, tartan shopping trollies, ranch-style new houses, sex scenes with Ken Barlow and see-through tie-neck blouses. Perhaps mindful of her public image, she put Hampstead on the abolition list and, mischievously, ‘dreadful charity singles’.

  The money Victoria made from her latest tour was supplemented by the £22,000 she received for a 30-minute show in Nassau that May. The idea of her performing her brand of comedy at the luxurious Bahamian Merv Griffin Paradise Island complex at first seemed incongruous, but the booking was made by the Derby-based boiler installation firm Gloworm, which was much more Victoria’s territory. As a struggling stand-up she was prepared to travel the length of the country for an engagement, so flying across the Atlantic for a 48-hour stay was a small price to pay for such a huge fee. She was booked to round off the company’s annual five-day conference and the fee included her then basic £15,000 charge, two £2,500 club class BA tickets for her and a friend, two nights’ accommodation at the complex, food, drink and other expenses. Gloworm spokesman Roger Wilson said: ‘She was worth every penny … We wanted something special to thank the employees and we got it.’

  Victoria’s bank balance was further increased by sales of Mens Sana in Thingummy Doodah – a book of the Victoria Wood scripts – and the release of Victoria Wood – Sold Out, an hour-long version of her most recent tour filmed at Southampton’s Mayflower Theatre. A Good Fun product, it was produced and directed by Marcus Mortimer with Geoffrey as executive producer. It generated even more profit when ITV paid to broadcast it the following year.

  ‘I’m very puritanical about spending money. I have a real problem spending it on myself,’ Victoria told the Daily Mail. Such an attitude created something of a dilemma.

  ‘The quality of life is much better where we are. If we moved any nearer to London it would only be to somewhere like Sheffield and that would be close enough,’ Geoffrey said in 1990. So averse was he to the capital that he refused to read the Sunday papers, feeling they were too London orientated. But after lengthy discussions in 1991, Victoria and Geoffrey decided to uproot themselves, invest in a large home in London and make it their permanent base.

  At the time Victoria attributed the move to purely practical reasons. Living in Silverdale meant work and business meetings involved a 200-mile journey, leaving home in the early hours and returning in the middle of the night. Victoria also expressed concern for Grace’s well-being, anticipating problems for her daughter if she grew up in a quiet village as the only child of a celebrity. Grace was nearing nursery age so if they were to move, then was the time. But fundamentally, the real reason was not so much practical as mental. ‘I could feel on some very very basic level that I should not live in that isolated way,’ Victoria confessed several years later, ‘at the bottom line I wanted to join the human race and that’s what I did.’

  In their first year down South they lived in two flats before investing in a mansion on Highgate West Hill. That Victoria, seen by many as the epitome of Northernness, chose such a celebrity enclave as her new home surprised some. It should not have. Her personal wealth and cultured tastes meant she blended in perfectly with Highgate life. And Grace would be socialising with the children of neighbours like Annie Lennox and Jonathan Pryce, meaning she would not be regarded as an oddity.

  Victoria missed the space and the countryside around Silverdale – on the day she moved she made a poignant walk across Morecambe Bay – but she found Highgate liberating. By extracting herself from a Northern village of ‘ordinary’ people she obtained a comparative anonymity, camouflaged by her fellow celebrities. ‘What I like is the acceptance,’ she said. ‘People are caught up in their own concerns. It feels very open, that anything is permitted.’ This new-found enthusiasm for life even extended to her family and her niece, Rebecca, one of Chris Foote-Wood’s three children from his first marriage, was invited to move in with them and stayed for three years.

  Victoria entered into London life with gusto, attending book launches, gallery and exhibition openings, first nights and concerts. She acquired a secretary and there would be occasional trips to the Groucho Club and thrice-weekly visits to plush gyms. ‘I can’t be put in a box’ was her response to those who questioned the ease at which she embraced such a lifestyle.

  Victoria’s fifth attempt at a screenplay coincided with a period of reassessment. Uprooting herself from the North was the catalyst. Her need for order and neatness meant she could not simply extract herself from the scene of so much personal mess and unhappiness and start afresh. It had to be dealt with and her new lifestyle forced her to confront the journey she had made. The way her career had accelerated so rapidly had left no real opportunity to take stock or properly orientate herself. Counselling sessions were imminent, but her new project may have been a form of therapy in itself.

  Not surprisingly, the inspiration for it came from television. ‘I must have seen something like Surprise, Surprise. I remember wondering what happened at the end … I was interested in the idea of people being divorced from their pasts. Even if you invent a persona for yourself, in the end you have to face what’s inside,’ she explained.

  The vehicle she used for her idea was the reunion of two sisters; one living in the working-class North, one a famous Hollywood actress. Victoria was interested in exploring the nature of fame and celebrity and the clash when someone who believed their own publicity was forced to confront their past and their family. She acknowledged that it came at a time in her life when she had begun to re-examine her own youth and the changes she had undergone.

  She found it easier to identify with the anonymous working-class sister of the piece. ‘I was interested to write about people who have no control over their own destiny. Most people don’t have access to influence or power or money and are virtually stuck where they were born and have to make the best of it,’ she explained.

  It was as if it was always there waiting to be said. I was looking back to my own childhood and my relationships with the people I knew. I mean, what would have happened to me if I hadn’t gone into showbusiness? I could have just been a nice person, with no possessions and no security and unable to move from the position I was in. If I have a different lifestyle, does that make yours any less worth living? I don’t think so. That’s the story.

  Victoria conceived the idea at around the same time that she became pregnant again. She had hoped for another girl and was initially rather disappointed when she found out it was to be a boy. As with her first pregnancy, she did not reduce her workload. Besides writing the film script she helped prepare the revised and expanded Lucky Bag Songbook (six of the fourteen songs were from the original
, and the introduction was lifted from her 1990 tour programme), and was the main contributor to the LWT Special, Julie Walters and Friends.

  The show, broadcast on 29 December 1991, was nominated for a BAFTA, and won the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Light Entertainment Script. Six of the nine sketches and the one song were written by Victoria, proving that she could more than hold her own in the company of England’s greatest contemporary playwrights (Alan Bleasdale, Willy Russell and Alan Bennett also contributed material). Television sketches were her medium so she had the advantage. Such experience worked in her favour and her material was the most original. Bennett basically wrote an extension of the Lesley character Julie had played in Talking Heads, Bleasdale penned a mini sequel for the character Mrs Murray which she played in GBH, and Russell wrote a piece in which the arts were mocked in rhyme.

  Victoria appeared in four of the sketches with Walters. In the first delightfully observed and performed one they played two young Northern girls in the 1960s. They aged up to become Southern pensioners for a sketch set at a funeral reception which saw Walters changing sex to become a blazer-wearing, incontinent, name-dropping, culinary, xenophobic chauvinist. Walters got all the best lines, but it was the grey, permed Victoria who got most of the laughs with her ‘dancing’.

  Another sketch revolved around the seating arrangements for a gathering of family and friends. It gave Victoria free rein to cram in references to such suburban necessities as breakfast bars, foldaways, tumptys, tip-ups and such textiles as velour and one-way plush. Bizarre afflictions also featured heavily.

  In another sketch Walters played the forthright Rhona receiving a manicure from Victoria’s Jewish lesbian. Rhona loves the sound of her own voice and has gloriously off-kilter opinions on apartheid, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Israel. Like so many of Victoria’s characters the humour came through her use of extraneous detail, unique phraseology and the admittance of having had ‘female surgery’.