Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  Victoria’s take on the show’s dimmest and only Asian character was more succinct: ‘They can’t all be brain surgeons can they?’

  Completing the dinnerladies cast was Andrew Dunn. Apart from Duncan Preston as the pedantic Stan, he was the only other male performer in the show of any significance. A member of the Hull Truck Theatre Company, Andrew had previously worked with John Godber and had come to acting late after originally training to be a teacher.

  ‘I auditioned with Victoria in Manchester and read the entire six scripts. A few weeks later I was recalled down to London and read the part of Tony in front of all the regular cast. It was nerve-wracking! All of these famous people I’d just seen on television. They told me the same day I’d got the part, I was driving on the motorway and my agent rang me. I had to stop for a cup of tea as a celebration, it was fantastic.

  ‘Tony is in his early forties, his wife has left him, the job is probably the only part of his life that is going right,’ he explained. ‘Working with the ladies he has a laugh with them and good rapport. He’s a flirt but if anybody came on to him he’d probably run a mile. He is completely harmless, however. He and Bren like each other but they haven’t got it together yet.’

  Victoria based the sexually suggestive manager on a few people from her university days who talked about sex non-stop. ‘He’s not seedy,’ she said. ‘I did want to do realistic people.’

  Through the situation comedy, Victoria decided to take another pop at her pet hate: political correctness. In the character of Tony, she was able to create an unreconstructed man who was overtly sexual without being sexist, offensive or threatening. ‘Abuse and harassment are disgusting but when people go to work they do talk about sex – it’s part of life. They say these things when they’re intimate,’ explained Victoria.

  In the same way that Anita and Twinkle were partly created to appeal to a teenage audience, it seemed that part of Tony’s role was to attract an adult male audience. Generally speaking this group had never made up a huge contingent of Victoria’s audience, deterred by the idea that her act was dominated by gynaecology. As in most of her work, gynaecological matters did crop up in dinnerladies, with mention made of water retention, yeast infection, thrush, cystitis and PMT. But rather than demystify the mysterious world of women’s issues for her male audience Victoria reinforced the sense of bewilderment. ‘Lost in the land of No-Speakee-Ladytalk,’ remarks Tony when the women are discussing bras. In this capacity he is acting as a navigator for men watching the show and if they do not understand the women’s jokes, they can still laugh in recognition at Tony’s reaction.

  Tony’s likeability meant he could articulate the frustration and confusion of men everywhere without becoming a sexist bigot. ‘I’m not a dinosaur,’ he explains. ‘I quite like women in a sad, baffled sort of way, but can we please get a grip? Out of a workforce of five, at any given moment, one’ll have premenstrual tension, one’s panicking cos she’s not, someone’s having a hot flush, and someone else is having a nervous breakdown cos their HRT patch has fallen in the minestrone.’

  For all his breezy sexuality (‘Anyone for a gang bang?’), which was refreshing in an era of political correctness, Tony could be sensitive to women, which was no great surprise as he spent every working day surrounded by them. One tiny exchange with the veg man showed his awareness of traditional gender expectations while at the same time revealing that this Northern canteen manager was, in his own quiet way, a New Man. The veg man prattles on about the intricacies of a football match in much the same way as Brenda and Jean might discuss a vaginal prolapse. Tony falls in with the veg man, making the right noises and expressing the expected opinion on the match and then tells Brenda he had no idea what the exchange was about.

  Victoria played Brenda Furlong – her unusual surname inspired by that of an old schoolmate. ‘The character I wrote first of all was very bland and ordinary, she just had lines to help the story along. Then I thought I’d make her a bit more vulnerable, so her main interest in life is work, it’s centred within that kitchen. A lot of her information comes from the television so she’s articulate, but not in a clever way,’ said Victoria. She said she identified with Brenda because she shared her enthusiasm and had experienced her lack of confidence.

  There is genuine pathos in Brenda’s low self-esteem, limited expectations and resignation to disappointment. ‘I know I look stupid,’ she says when reluctantly revealing her Christmas party dress. She is perfectly happy to catch the night bus home, where her idea of excitement is removing the labels off food tins so she can surprise herself with what’s for tea. The understated romance that develops between Brenda and Tony across the series is touching. He flirts while she responds with diffidence. When he offers to take her to the Christmas party and when it finally looks like they are about to get it together, it is inevitable that Brenda will end up disappointed but put a brave face on it.

  ‘It just removes it from Sitcomland and roots it in a world I know,’ said Victoria about the importance of tragi-comedy. ‘Most interesting things – whether they’re drama or comedy – contain both elements. The best drama has always got funny bits in it, and the best sitcoms have a truth and, if not pathos, then something underneath that isn’t just happy and jolly. Otherwise, it’s meaningless.’

  To help ensure Brenda was a sympathetic character, Victoria made her something of a martyr who radiated niceness. When Stan comes on to her she lets him down with the utmost kindness (‘Blimey, Stan, I think I’m going a bit deaf or something. I didn’t hear what you said then, and I won’t embarrass you – telling you what it sounded like’). It is Bren who agrees to break the news to Twinkle’s mother that her daughter might be pregnant; it is Bren who is prepared to sacrifice the others’ good opinion of her by preventing the docu-soap in order to protect Tony; and it is Bren who makes Stan’s day by ensuring Prince James pretends to remember him.

  There was also a more technical reason for the existence of Brenda. ‘There’s got to be a sane centre in an ensemble piece and Bren is it,’ said Victoria. ‘You’ve got the two girls and the two older women and she’s in the middle holding it all together. But within that there’s leeway for her to do various different things. Her mother is completely mad, and that’s Bren’s story, what will happen with the mother? Every time she comes in, she upsets the equilibrium and spoils Bren’s little world.’ In fact the relationship between Petula and Bren seemed to be yet another commentary on Victoria’s own relationship with Helen Wood. She certainly seemed to share Bren’s enforced stoicism towards a neglectful mother. ‘I’ve had post-natal disinterest for thirty years,’ says Petula who put Bren in an orphanage as a child and then forgot the address.

  Victoria wanted her characters to sound realistic and Northern. ‘I don’t know if it’s an attitude or a form of speech that makes things sound funny. It’s a very deflating, dismissive way of talking,’ she once said. Consequently sentences were punctuated with ‘like’, ‘me’ was used instead of ‘my’ and abbreviations were omitted in favour of ‘would you not’, ‘is it not’, ‘are they not’ and ‘did you not’.

  It may have been situation comedy but Victoria applied her playwright’s grasp of dialogue to the scripts. Conversations rattled with speculation, confusion, non-sequiturs (‘I didn’t realise every topic had to link up,’ complains Jean. ‘I didn’t realise I was on Blockbusters’), surrealism, prattle, innuendo and banalities. Because there were many scenes where the characters, naturalistically, spoke at cross purposes, it required precision timing from the actors. ‘Her choice of words is very funny and the order in which they’re written. And they’re not if you make a mistake,’ said Celia Imrie.

  ‘You have to be very sharp, you have to stay alert, because Victoria likes you to be very quick,’ added Anne Reid.

  The humour in some of the lines took some getting used to and Gulati in particular found it difficult. ‘My instinct was to impart the funny bit at the end of the line, rather like the punc
hline of a joke, until Victoria said “Look, the humour is in the line itself. Just speak it.” Of course she was right and once the penny had dropped, we were up and running.’

  Rehearsals took place at the BBC rehearsal rooms in North Acton. ‘It would be ridiculous to claim that we all felt comfortable at the beginning,’ admitted Gulati. But Victoria’s quest for authenticity helped relax the cast. A woman was brought in to teach them how to chop vegetables properly, but she took her task rather too seriously. ‘That pretty much broke the ice because we were all put down to the same level and most of us just fell about laughing,’ said Victoria. ‘I was aware that Maxine and Shobna, in particular, might be a bit wary of me, but I was in a daze most of the time. I was writing through the night as well as working in the day, so I was forever locking myself out of my dressing room and forgetting my wallet and having to borrow fivers off everyone. I was less of an awesome person and more of a ridiculous specimen.’ Victoria also helped lighten the atmosphere by being humorously blunt and verbally sparring with Imrie, the only Southerner in the main cast.

  ‘It was an interesting cast because, although we are all very different, everyone really wanted it to work,’ said Thelma Barlow. ‘The young ones were anxious because it was their first big show; it was Victoria’s first television sitcom and I was nervous because it was the first thing I’d done since Coronation Street.’

  For Victoria the opportunity to work with other people again after extensive touring was a joy. ‘It was just brilliant. I’ve never worked so hard and laughed so much in my life.’

  Rehearsals took up most of the summer and were followed by the filming at Television Centre. It was a measure of the corporation’s respect for Victoria that she and every member of the cast had a fresh bouquet of flowers in their dressing room every day.

  Victoria gladly embraced a shooting technique for dinnerladies that was revolutionary for British television. Normally rehearsals take place from Mondays to Thursdays with one recording on a Friday evening. For dinnerladies a version of each episode was recorded on Friday night, but the following day Victoria and Geoff Posner analysed the show, deciding what needed to be cut for length and what needed to be removed because it had not worked. Re-rehearsals took place on the Saturday afternoon and the whole show was recorded again that night.

  ‘It meant things like all your prop changes and camera moves were all done much slicker, so you tighten the whole thing up,’ said a delighted Victoria. ‘It’s like doing it in a theatre: you do it on a Monday night but by the Tuesday night it’s always much better, everybody’s relaxed. You never get that in television, it’s always “Ah! We’ve done it. Oh God! I wish we could do it again!”.’

  The only drawback of the new method came from some of the editing decisions. ‘You did have this rather painful process of saying to people, “You know that big line you’ve got? You haven’t got it”,’ said Victoria.

  Strongly disciplined, she expected the utmost professionalism from her colleagues and was very strict on set. Corpsing and mistakes were frowned upon and paraphrasing was the ultimate taboo. If anyone did make a mistake, Victoria was usually the first person they apologised to.

  After her unhappiness with the 1989 BBC series of plays, Victoria was determined to make sure the mistakes would not be repeated with dinnerladies. She wanted control and achieved this by following the independent route: dinnerladies was co-produced by her own production company, Good Fun, and Pozzitive, Geoff Posner’s company. For the first time she was credited as co-producer, as well as star and writer: her childhood fantasy of living The Swish of the Curtain had finally been achieved.

  ‘I just wanted to make sure with this I had official recognition of what I was doing because always with my work I had an input, but if you call yourself a producer you’ve got an official input and people have to come and say “What do you think of this?” and you can then say “Actually, that’s not what I want”,’ said Victoria. ‘It was more relaxing to have that recognition because you knew things couldn’t slip by you by accident. I wanted to be in on my own programme and have a good say.’ The power this gave to Victoria (she insisted on a lower case title and even chose the colour of the costumes) made her regard the series as the first piece of work that truly belonged to her.

  dinnerladies abounded with that staple of traditional situation comedy: the double entendre. The lines (‘I could do with an unusual knob’; ‘Where’s my Clint?’; ‘He’s adjusting his nuts’) would not have been out of place in any 1970s’ situation comedy.

  Victoria also gave a nod to the traditional situation comedy with attempts at catchphrases, although it is hard to imagine playgrounds and offices up and down the country echoing with ‘Let’s feed the faces of folk’ and ‘Shutter’s going up’.

  Parts of dinnerladies also shared the lack of realism that traditional situation comedies had. However sexually charged Tony was feeling, would he really have sex with Petula? Would Philippa really have an affair with the aged boss, Mr Michael? Would problems really be solved so neatly and conveniently? Standard situation comedy plots were used but only after they had passed through Victoria’s barmy filter.

  Central to each episode was the effect that different interlopers had on the core cast members and their working day. In episode one (‘Monday’) Jean is panicking about her daughter’s wedding arrangements while Philippa impacts as the new Human Resources officer; in episode two (‘Scandal’) Petula shacks up in the factory with sixteen-year-old Clint. The interlopers are his angry mother, a docu-soap crew and a local television news reporter; in ‘Royals’, the canteen is visited by Prince James and his wife; in episode four (‘Moods’) the canteen is invaded by the mothers of the main characters; in episode five (‘Party’) the Christmas party saw Jean and Dolly’s husbands and the comically misnamed Babs, Petula’s strange friend, who was not the bubbly vivacious being her moniker implied, enter into events. The final episode (‘Nightshift’) saw the team pulling together to save the factory and at odds with the battle-axe of a temporary canteen supervisor.

  Conventional though much of dinnerladies was as a situation comedy, it did contain elements of realism that helped elevate it. The characters talk about what is on the television and one has a period in the canteen toilet. They utter lines whose purpose is to promote naturalism rather than induce laughter. ‘I can’t remember what I was going to say’, states Petula mid-utterance, and Brenda’s thought process (‘What are them things like cucumbers? Suffragettes!’) shows an internal life rare in situation comedy characters. Even Tony’s throwaway line that it takes two fives to dial out on the canteen phone serves to make the canteen seem like a real place.

  Perhaps the most unusual way in which Victoria added realism was to have one of the central characters suffering from cancer. Tony’s illness was totally unexpected in a situation comedy and thanks to Victoria’s skilful handling, it seemed neither crass nor cynical. There was no shock announcement, melodramatic wait or neat conclusion at the end of an episode, instead the cancer hovered in the background throughout the entire series with occasional references made to his treatment, his checks and his condition. One might have expected the series to end on an optimistic note but Tony was absent for most of episode six because of his treatment, and when he did appear he was pale and in a fragile state.

  The subject of television itself was interwoven into the episodes, with Victoria comically defining the necessary components of costume dramas and examining the phenomenon of the docu-soap. She also commented on the predictability of television movies, the rise of the Jerry Springer-style show, and once again mocked regional news programmes (‘She only normally gets to interview people who make furniture out of conkers’).

  She reflected on the nature of contemporary celebrity, where a person becomes famous after tripping up on television, and used television to differentiate the generations: Twinkle and Anita are baffled by references to Rag, Tag and Bobtail and Tony describes Petula as ‘a woman old enough
to remember Maigret’.

  Weight was clearly no longer a personal problem for Victoria but the series included a familiar contempt for the diet industry. The double act of Dolly and Jean was used to show where Victoria’s loyalties lay. The diet-obsessed Dolly was spiky and unsympathetic and her bitchy put-downs of Jean concentrated on her ample figure. To Dolly, 12 stone 2 is ‘clinically obese’ and while her constant weighing of herself, use of a mini-stepper, dietary requirements and facial exercises created laughter, they also implied a neurosis of character. Jean on the other hand is not hung up about her figure (‘It’s all a load of codswash dieting. All that misery for what?’) and is portrayed as a much more honest, generous and likeable person.

  Either out of mischief or as a further attempt to escape her safe and cosy image, Victoria used some near-the-knuckle gags. Romanian orphans were employed for comic effect; cancer sufferer Tony compared a salad bowl full of pulverised lettuce to a hospice; there is a crack about war atrocities; after Tony tells Enid his cancer’s looking good she remarks cynically ‘that’s what they told you’; Babs is made a figure of fun because of her mental illness.

  Victoria always refused to name Halstead’s as the inspiration for the series, because ‘they might not like it’. But the clues were there; the factory in dinnerladies was called HWD Components (Halstead’s Whitefield?) and Enid tells Dolly: ‘You must have had the biggest bottom in Whitefield.’

  In the weeks prior to dinnerladies being broadcast it became apparent that the BBC was touting it as the revival of the Great British Situation Comedy. It was not a view shared by Victoria. ‘I don’t feel anything is riding on it except I want people to like it,’ she said. ‘I want it to be half an hour of television that people like, that’s all.’