Victoria wrote solo sketches for Walters which saw her as a loopy Barbara Cartland figure and the 53-year-old Mary Brazzle, a serene woman filming an advertisement for her relaxation routine who becomes increasingly stressed after every retake.
The song Victoria wrote for Walters charted a relationship from the excitement and nervous preparations for a first date to the disenchantment with marriage, combining elements of the earlier songs ‘Go Away’ and ‘Living Together’. Unusually it ended optimistically (‘He says let’s stick with this it has to come right … and the sun shines cos love can struggle up between the lines’).
Inserted into the programme were surprise tributes from the contributors. Whereas the other three leaned towards affectionate praise there was no sentimentality from Victoria, who had fun playing with her Northern image.
Shortly before Victoria’s 39th birthday Marcus Plantin, director of programmes for London Weekend Television, announced that her still-untitled screenplay would be made into a £6 million two-hour cinema film. Negotiations had already started to ensure it would be going into production in 1993.
Victoria was delighted. Breaking into cinema was a long-held ambition and she was convinced that having Walters on board would open up the American market to her. The gestation of the film, however, was much more troubled than that of Victoria and Geoffrey’s second child, who was born on 2 May. Like his sister, Henry William Durham was born at the Portland Hospital. It was one of those rare occasions when Victoria’s careful plans went awry and she panicked. For once the circumstances mirrored the sort of domestically farcical situations that Victoria spoke about on stage. Because they could not get a taxi, she insisted on going to the hospital by Tube. This meant a ten-minute walk to the station laden down with two enormous bags, and when they did get on the train it was rush hour and they had to stand all the way. This time round though, she got her wish and had natural childbirth.
‘Because I had a distant relationship with my mother … I’m closer to my children than she was to me,’ said Victoria with familiar understatement. The strength of the bond she had with her children was sometimes exclusive of Geoffrey. ‘I think I pushed him out for a while. They became the focus of my life,’ she later admitted. Victoria hoped to have four children, but Geoffrey, who had not been keen on having any children, put his foot down.
Even though she had staff, the demands of being a mother to two small children forced Victoria to make changes. ‘You’d think it would be easier with your second child but, if anything, it’s harder,’ she said. ‘You seem to have four times as many things to do. You think you’re prepared but you’re not. Your hormones are still whizzing round in your brain and you’re just as batty the second time round.’
Rather than a set working routine she now had to do as much as she could when she could, cutting out any time-wasting. Another baby also meant less time for internalising and negativity. ‘I used to be very negative, very apprehensive, a bit precious about it all. Now I just do the best I can,’ she said. ‘I used to be very shy but after a certain age it becomes a bit of an affectation … shy people are very self-obsessed.’
A nanny helped, but even she could not breastfeed the baby every 90 minutes. It was through her maternal obligations that Victoria got the idea for her next television show. Staying at home with Henry meant she was watching more television than usual and was able to examine daytime television in particular. ‘It doesn’t take long to realise that everything that comes on from breakfast time to teatime is actually the same thing – it’s all social conscience and ovaries, really,’ she said. The programme that most caught her attention was This Morning and it was this format she chose for her new show.
Victoria Wood’s All Day Breakfast was broadcast on Christmas Day in the spot once taken by Morecambe and Wise and The Two Ronnies. Directed and produced by Geoff Posner in association with Good Fun, it won the Royal Television Society’s Best Light Entertainment Programme Award and the Writers’ Guild Award.
It was unquestionably a parody of This Morning, from the Albert Docks backdrop to Victoria’s and Duncan Preston’s winning impression of Judy Finnigan and Richard Madeley, here called Sally Cumbernauld and Martin Crossthwaite. They interrupt and hurry their guests, switch subjects abruptly, are glib, insensitive and drop nuggets of their domestic life into conversation. Susie Blake popped up as Jolly Polly, the right-wing aerobics instructor giving unsolicited advice, and there was even a brief guest appearance by Alan Rickman playing himself. It was the first time he and Victoria had performed together since 1976 when he was Big Chief Blackmoon to her Wild Wilhelmina Fifty Fingers in Gunslinger at Leicester.
As always, other famous figures were named but not seen, from Hollywood stars, to opera divas, to old soap favourites. The daytime TV format was a perfect opportunity for Victoria to get gynaecological, with mention made of ‘faulty fallopians’ and ‘wonky wombs’. Brand names were remarkably thin on the ground but Victoria was able to show her obsession with them via three adverts in which she tried to sell Sonara – the slimline sanitary towel with last number redial – Acton Liquid Detergent and Romany Roast Fine Blend Coffee. The adverts themselves were sharp parodies of existing advertising techniques; the blue ink on the sanitary towel, the Green sell for the detergent packaging (‘Because we care about the environment we’d like it to be in a green box’) and the ludicrous sexual element deemed so necessary for coffee adverts.
Inserted into the daytime television format were unrelated sketches, the first of which followed the familiar formula. Set in a knitwear shop – which allowed Victoria to reference such favourites as a cerise batwing, sling backs, angora roll-neck and crinoline – it had Walters as shop owner Saundra and Victoria as the lumpen assistant, Petrina. Saundra was another of those opinionated outspoken middle-aged figures so beloved of Victoria, while Petrina was the familiar thick Northern girl. The dynamic of the relationship was very similar to the manicure sketch in Julie Walters and Friends in that the older character dominated a younger, more subservient character. Walters was the exponent of Victoria’s usual idiosyncratic figurative language (‘body odour that could strip pine’, ‘sitting round waiting for something to happen like an undescended testicle’) and was the vessel by which the weighty was trivialised (‘Chernobyl, I worried for weeks about that … the night that it occurred we’d had our garden furniture out’).
Victoria portrayed yet another limited Northerner (Alison Smedley) in a sketch with Susie Blake. She was a 38-year-old woman who, for some undisclosed reason, still attends ‘a very well-respected grammar school’. Blake is the disciplinarian teacher demanding an explanation for increasingly extreme schoolgirl misdemeanours.
In another sketch Walters played the cronish old mother trying her utmost to make her daughter (Lill Roughley) feel guilty and uncaring (‘When I go I don’t suppose anybody will find me for several days … can’t see much end for me but an eternal, black nothingness’). It was another negative portrayal of the mother–daughter relationship which frequently occurred in Victoria’s work. Victoria’s mothers were either suffocating, uncaring or manipulative.
The final sketch allowed Victoria to take a timely poke at political correctness. She played the tidy Nicola on a first date with Sean in the pub. Nicola collects pictures of Mrs Bridges from Upstairs, Downstairs and approves of the idea of men knocking women out with a club and dragging them back to their cave. As she says: ‘The man is lord and master … what he says goes.’ She manages to get an initially surprised Sean to agree before blowing her whistle and revealing that she is an undercover member of the politically correct police; a p.c. PC.
For fans who were still trying to come to terms with the demise of ‘Acorn Antiques’, there was a treat. Victoria created ‘The Mall’, a parody of the ill-fated BBC soap, Eldorado, of which she had been a fan and had even donated money to the Save Eldorado campaign fund. Although it was difficult to achieve, the production values were even poorer than on ‘Acorn Antiques
’. In the dramatic climax Mrs Overall, last seen choking to death on her own macaroon, made a surprise reappearance. She revealed Miss Babs, Miss Berta and the other principals had been killed in a mysterious food poisoning accident on the M42, leaving everything to her. She brings the curse of ‘Acorn Antiques’ to ‘The Mall’. As soon as she appears, the Mall’s fountain breaks, cameras zoom into view and lines are fluffed and forgotten. The soap ended with Mrs Overall unveiling a new Acorn Antiques.
Victoria concluded the programme with a short stand-up routine. The brevity meant she was sharper than usual – professional autograph hunters were dispatched with the withering description of them being like trainspotters but with more body odour. Her habit of date specification was still evident (‘I’d just blown my nose on my husband’s dinner jacket to pay him out for something that had happened in 1979’), as was her self-deprecation, only here the humour eclipsed the self-cruelty. Victoria explained how she used to have a self-help manual that advised stripping naked, looking at herself in the mirror, picking out her best feature and saying it out loud. ‘You have Latin O level’ Victoria told her reflection.
The show finished with a new song and David Firman was once again the musical director. ‘Real Life’ highlighted the discrepancy between the ideal and the reality. Life, Victoria proclaimed, is badly designed, under-rehearsed, not a nice address, a knee in the groin, a windowless room in the Hotel Belle Vue. We live in real life, blundering around the shops, squinting at lists and dropping our specs. We are not allowed to swap our lives for ones with more plot and sex. Life is a fan club and Victoria is not a fan.
12
THE CONCEPT OF the troubled clown was far too clichéd for Victoria to ever associate herself with. Similarly, she would not admit to the traditional mid-life crisis on the approach to a 40th birthday. But in 1993 Victoria, who was seen as a Northern beacon of common sense with no time for introspection, began therapy. The sessions would last on and off for the next two years and at one point – orderly as ever – she was seeing two therapists simultaneously about different things.
She threw out a whole shoal of red herrings about why she required therapy, including the fear of career failure, heavy workloads, her belief that it was better for things to be difficult, her shyness, her feeling that everyone else had a better grip on life than her, a puritanical streak which prevented her from treating herself, and a lack of assertiveness and confidence offstage. She even joked that it was ‘something to do of a Tuesday’.
‘It is just too personal a thing,’ she later admitted, when pushed to explain the real reason for therapy. There were some strong hints, however. ‘I did go through a lot of childhood stuff which was useful because it was an area I had never gone into before,’ Victoria explained. ‘Counselling helped me to clear up things that might have been bothering me from my past. And afterwards, I realised it is possible to make changes to your life … I wanted to get the problems from my past out in the open … When you do that, they lose their power over you – it’s very releasing.’
Victoria had been so troubled by her history that she actually tried to physically expunge the past by purging herself through colonic irrigation. ‘I was in the last throes of punishing myself. It was the same as scrubbing with bristle brushes to get the toxins out but you do it really because it hurts,’ she said.
All the evidence suggested that it was Victoria’s relationship with her mother that lay at the heart of her troubles. It was distant even when they lived in the same house and had not improved over the years. Helen had never encouraged Victoria and was reluctant to acknowledge her success. ‘She would come to see my shows and tell me what other people said, but never what she thought.’
Subconsciously Victoria may have been yearning for a show of love or pride from her mother, even an indication of approval would have done. But if anything, Helen seemed to harden, possibly through the pressure of coping with Stanley, who by that time had gone into decline with senile dementia and was having paranoid delusions about people surrounding Birtle Edge House. If Helen was not prepared to change then Victoria would have to learn to accept the reality that she would never have a ‘normal’ mother. The past could not be altered and without Helen softening in some way, it was highly unlikely mother and daughter would be able to develop a warm and loving bond in the future. Victoria needed to let go and acknowledge the situation was not salvageable and for this she needed expert help.
Talking uninhibitedly with a detached professional must have enabled Victoria to see the behavioural patterns that had permeated her life. She came out of therapy feeling more positive and more comfortable with herself, having realised what had been driving her all along: ‘I discovered that I was worrying about some things that really weren’t worth the bother, so I just let go.’ Apparently reconciled to the fact that the relationship with Helen was irrevocable, she was free to fully devote herself to her children, her husband and herself without feeling guilty any longer.
For Victoria therapy was a practical solution to her problems. ‘To me, it was like getting a car mended. I went to the expert and then when it was mended I left,’ she explained. ‘Therapy is a very sensible way of dealing with things. You pay for 50 minutes of someone’s time to listen to you and it’s very releasing. It’s not a personal relationship. When you leave that room, they forget you.’ Despite advocating therapy, Victoria was careful not to become dependent on it and stopped going once she had gone through everything she needed to, although she did not rule out future sessions.
Victoria did not need to embark on another tour in 1993 but the full benefits of therapy had yet to take effect and she insisted on pushing herself on. Unfortunately this meant Geoffrey had to turn down work offers in order to maintain the domestic stability.
Beginning in April, the 104-date tour would sprawl over six months with residencies at fourteen venues across the country. It would culminate with a record breaking fifteen nights at the Royal Albert Hall.
Likening it to working on an oil rig, Victoria did four shows a week. Much as she loved touring, her devotion to her children came first. She made a point of taking the summer off to be with them and travelled home each night from any venue within two-and-a-half hours’ drive of London so that she could be home when Grace and Henry awoke. When returning home was impractical she took Henry with her, even when he had chicken pox. Grace had accompanied her on her 1990 tour but this time she remained at home with Geoffrey and cousin Rebecca because she had started school.
The tour was the first time Victoria had faced a live audience since adopting the Highgate life and, while acknowledging the fact, she was at pains to stress that she did not belong there (‘I don’t fit in, I feel very out of it … It’s too posh for me’). She mocked the locale, joking that Kiri Te Kanawa was the lollipop lady, and that even the homeless slept on futons. At the bottle bank she was the odd one out among all the glamour; while others were depositing champagne and Perrier bottles she was dropping in Marmite and pickle jars.
Sometimes it was difficult to reconcile the onstage ‘Victoria Wood’ with the offstage Victoria Wood because her own real life mirrored those she mocked. Part of the act saw her ridiculing a neighbour for instructing her nanny to provide her children with raw carrot puree and creative play. Yet the fully organic Victoria employed a nanny, Grace attended contemporary dance classes and Henry appeared in the pages of Tatler before his first birthday. As she said in an interview: ‘I don’t do anything in the stage show that’s akin to my life. You don’t know much more about me at the end of it.’
It was important for Victoria to project a persona that enabled audiences to continue to regard her as one of their own. Hence, a very funny routine where she highlighted the discrepencies between celebrity mums and ‘real mums’ like herself.
Surprisingly, in light of her own experiences, Victoria used the plight of fat and friendless teenaged girls to get laughs. On wedding photographs, she said, there are always three ‘normal�
� bridesmaids and a ‘great whopping one’ at the end in a kaftan. The use of the word ‘normal’ was telling as it indicated how the newly sleek Victoria now regarded overweight girls as abnormal and objects for derision.
The onstage mateyness with her audience did not always translate in personal meetings with her fans. ‘On the stage I’m happy to be their best friend,’ she said, but admitted, ‘once I’ve done the show I’ve got nothing else to give.’ Those women she met who had similar hairstyles to her own made her feel ‘uncomfortable’ and she deemed their enthusiasm ‘inappropriate’. She was far happier controlling them from the distance of the stage.
Explaining her act, Victoria said: ‘There’s hardly any situation in life that doesn’t have humour. Everything I do is based on truth, and truth is usually serious, but my job is to turn it on its head. I like annoying people. I don’t mind saying things you’re not supposed to.’ This was exemplified in her 1993 stage show when she incorporated another joke about the IRA. This time the gag concerned the bomb in the City which had killed a man. Victoria joked that it was not a bomb that had caused the explosion but the collective rage of twenty women with PMT when they discovered the chocolate machine was broken.
‘People say that I’m cosy and domestic but I’m not really, I’m quite subversive really. But I keep smiling,’ Victoria once said. ‘I’m very anti-authority. My material is as spiky as someone like Alexei Sayle but I just do it in a jollier way.’ This was evident in her treatment of royalty. Rather than a caustic attack on privilege Victoria made her point by cleverly deconstructing the royals’ claim that they were just doing a job, and imagined the unlikelihood of ladies-in-waiting telling ‘Liz’ her horoscope over a fag. Similarly, the idea that the Windsors were just the same as ‘us’ was ridiculed by the image of a Lancastrian Queen Mother preparing to put Charles up by taking her knitting machine out of the back bedroom and putting a Farrah Fawcett Majors poster over the damp patch.
Victoria Wood Page 23
