Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  The naturalism of speech and conversation in the series (‘What’s that word? Not unicorn – dilemma!’; the awkwardness in the immediate aftermath of a row) and the realism of Tony’s continued cancer worries was offset by plot contrivances and an overkill of pathos and jokes. Although there were surprises in the series – Bren’s secret husband, Anita’s pregnancy – and incidents that defied audience expectation – Victoria overdosing on drugs, a verbal gag hanging on the word ‘cunt’ – all Victoria’s usual trademarks were included, from date specification to high street/brand names.

  In the second series, lyrics were given to the theme tune. They were of the same lineage as the earlier songs ‘Go Away’, ‘Go With It’ and ‘Andrea’ in that they followed Victoria’s preoccupation with unfulfilled dreams and hopes crushed by everyday living.

  The general consensus among the critics was that the show had improved considerably. ‘A cracking script, brilliant ensemble acting and simple yet imaginative direction,’ wrote Christopher Matthew in the Daily Mail. In the Daily Express Simon Edge said: ‘The tired and bedraggled dinnerladies we used to know has re-emerged, transformed into a brilliant and sparkling piece of comic writing. The dialogue raced along at three times the pace of the first series.’ And the Daily Telegraph’s Matthew Bond wrote: ‘Its unashamedly antique feel has become part of its charm, its use of a single set … almost a gesture of defiance.’

  Sir Christopher Bland, the Chairman of the BBC, cited dinnerladies as a potential long-running hit. But Victoria, finally satisfied that she had got it right, determined that there would be no more, stating: ‘I’ve done what I wanted to do now.’

  Rather less satisfaction was derived from how dinnerladies fared against other comedies. The first series competed against The Royle Family at the 1999 BAFTA awards in the Best Comedy Programme category. Julie Walters was also up against Caroline Aherne for the Best Comedy Performance. However, any judgement between Victoria and Caroline was avoided when the awards went to Father Ted and its star Dermot Morgan, who had unexpectedly died shortly after completing the series. The priestly comedy set on the eccentrically peopled Craggy Island may have won irrespective of Morgan’s death, but there was always the suggestion of sentimentality which Victoria could use to defend dinnerladies’ failure.

  At the British Comedy Awards later that year Victoria may have been irked that The Royle Family beat dinnerladies as the Best British Sitcom and that Aherne was judged Best Comedy Actress while no one from dinnerladies was even nominated, but she could take solace that dinnerladies was named Best New Television Comedy. It was a category that was not applicable to The Royle Family and the distinction meant Victoria did not leave empty-handed.

  A showdown of sorts finally came at the BAFTA awards in May 2000 where The Royle Family beat dinnerladies as the Best Sitcom. There was no way of avoiding the fact that Victoria had been eclipsed on the night by a younger talent. To confirm this, Caroline Aherne took the Best Comedy Performance title (three of the four nominees were The Royle Family cast members, the other was Dawn French for The Vicar of Dibley. No one from dinnerladies was nominated).

  The Radio Times/Lew Grade Audience Award, voted for by Radio Times readers, Radio 2 listeners and GMTV viewers, gave Victoria a chance to show that she might no longer be a hit with the Academy, but she was still the viewers’ favourite. However, dinnerladies came third behind A Touch of Frost and the gardening programme, Ground Force. It was time to go away and think up something new.

  16

  VICTORIA BEGAN THE new millennium by satiating one ambition and very nearly achieving her ultimate career goal of making a film. As part of the millennium celebrations the BBC screened The Nearly Complete and Utter History of Everything, a two-part sketch show with a cast made up of the cream of British comedians. It presented the ideal opportunity for Victoria to at last write and perform in a two-handed sketch with Thora Hird. Set in her Northern home ground of Radcliffe, Victoria used a favourite location; a hairdressing salon. She played the talkative stylist, and Thora the optimistic customer.

  A little later in the year a much grander scheme of Victoria’s ended in failure, as had all her earlier cinematic ambitions. In 1998 eleven members of the Rylstone and District WI in North Yorkshire, aged between 45 and 65, came up with the idea of posing naked for a charity calendar after the husband of one of them, Angela Baker, died of leukaemia. When the calendar appeared it gripped the nation, not so much out of prurience – the women were photographed behind strategically placed copper kettles and apple presses – but because of its quirkiness. A total of 90,000 copies of the calendar were printed making £350,000.

  Their story contained elements that were so vital to Victoria’s work: poignancy, friendship, humour and Northernness. dinnerladies had left her exhausted, but Victoria was astute enough to recognise an opportunity when it presented itself. Successful though Pat and Margaret had been, it still narked Victoria that she had missed out on breaking into cinema. The Full Monty, which also saw a resourceful bunch of friends stripping, had been a global hit and the story of the WI calendar had the potential to be a similar cinematic success.

  Victoria entered into negotiations with the women to turn their story into a film, but she had not reckoned on a rival that even she could not compete with. Five of the eleven women wanted Victoria to do the film, but the remainder, including Angela Baker, signed up with Buena Vista, part of the Walt Disney Corporation.

  One of the pro-Victoria brigade, Moyra Livesey, explained that Victoria’s offer was financially far superior and would have resulted in a quintessentially English film. Expressing her disappointment at Disney’s triumph, she said: ‘People’s feelings about how they are going to be portrayed come into it. Also Disney is not as “altruistic”, shall we say, as Victoria Wood was going to be. Victoria was interested in the fact that all the money for the rights was going to charity. She had never come across that before. We had long talks with her and although there was no script we really liked what she was suggesting.’

  Defending the decision to opt for Disney, Tricia Stewart said: ‘The film is not so much about how much money we get upfront, but about how widely it is distributed, it has to be a success … and although we thought hard about Victoria Wood you have to go with your instincts.’ Victoria withdrew her offer.

  It was the missed opportunity to tackle such a quirky story and, perhaps, extend her fame internationally that disappointed her, not the lost financial rewards. Even without the film deal she earned £1.32 million in 2000, making her the eleventh highest earner in television. The money was made from dinnerladies, video sales, the £25,000 she charged for each 45-minute corporate performance (expenses and hotel fees were extra) and the commercial voice-over work she began accepting for such products as McVitie’s Chocolate Digestives and Dyson cleaners.

  In May 2000 Victoria presented Don’t Panic! The Dad’s Army Story, a 50-minute documentary about the situation comedy for the BBC to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the formation of the Home Guard. Thorough as ever, her research saw her watching 40 episodes in one week. She admired the craftsmanship of writers Jimmy Perry and David Croft and sobbed at the sentimental scenes.

  Later that year she enjoyed a double success at the British Comedy Awards. dinnerladies actually beat The Royle Family as the Best Comedy Programme, and although Victoria lost out to The Royle Family’s Sue Johnston in the Best Comedy Actress category, she did receive the Writer of the Year Award.

  Jocularly acknowledging her troubled past she announced: ‘I have been very lucky because when I was in my early twenties and I was very depressed and solitary and obsessive and overweight I met my husband who was exactly the same, so then there was two of us.’ And, as if to prove that she could not be hurt or scarred by her history, she said: ‘I’d like to thank my father cos he made sure I had the three things I needed as a child to become a writer: I was lonely, unpopular and bored.’

  She continued to demonstrate her writing talents
with a one-off sketch show which she co-produced. Victoria’s reliance on television for inspiration reached its zenith with her Christmas Day 50-minute show for the BBC, Victoria Wood With All The Trimmings. Every sketch was either a parody of a television programme or a send-up of an oft-televised classic film such as Brief Encounter and A Christmas Carol. To present this she played a version of herself arriving at the BBC rehearsal studios to make her Christmas special. From the outset she firmly established her credentials as being Everywoman by arriving on a bus in a duffel coat.

  Like her audience she is baffled by the bombardment of digital television programmes and adopted the persona of the down-to-earth, unspoiled, slightly bemused Northern woman surrounded by lunatics from an industry she seems to have accidentally stumbled into.

  No sooner has she arrived than she discovers the making of her show will be filmed for the new digital channel, ‘BBC Backstage’. She quickly learns of other new BBC digital channels (Upmarket, Downmarket, Newmarket, Makeover, Takeover, Good Old Days) and of the ‘Mini-dig Viewer’s Choice Micro Channels’ (Wartime, Daytime, Tea-Time, Braindead and Knitwear). Along with digs at the BBC management’s obsession for titles (fourteen years before the comedy W1A) and mockery of television focus groups, the cumulative effect was one of Victoria, the embodiment of Common Sense, decrying the decline in television standards. As she says to a CCTV camera in the toilet:

  ‘If I trip I’ll be on Auntie’s Bloomers, if I break a leg I’ll be on Hospital Watch. If I come in here for a wee I’ll be on Channel 4. If I don’t have a wee I’ll sneeze and wet myself and that will be part of BBC2’s Incontinence Night!’

  The entire show was a series of parodies exemplifying the fictitious digital channels mentioned by Victoria at the start. There was a puzzlingly dated parody of the 1996 film Brassed Off under the ‘BBC Upmarket’ banner, which satirised all things Northern and in which Victoria indulged herself by jemmying in a silver band to perform with.

  ‘BBC Wartime’ was represented by a Second World War morale-boosting newsreel in which Victoria and Julie Walters played indomitable Cockneys in The Blitz. It was followed by ‘BBC Knitwear’, which applied the sensibilities, style and syntax of ER to the Women’s Institute – perhaps a mildly sarcastic commentary by Victoria on the WI’s business saviness in light of the failed film project.

  ‘BBC Tea-Time’ was a parody of Brief Encounter with a lesbian resolution, and ‘BBC Braindead’ allowed for a blisteringly cruel and extremely funny attack on docu-soaps in general and The Cruise in particular. The channel also saw Hannah Gordon mocking her own Watercolour Challenge show.

  ‘BBC Good Old Days’ sent up the Billy Cotton Band Show with Victoria and Anne Reid playing pianists Hilary and Valerie Mallory. Speaking in posh Received Pronunciation for the cameras, they bicker in Northern accents when the audience cannot hear.

  Typifying ‘BBC Upmarket’ was a parody of a period costume drama. Plots and Proposals was tired, unoriginal and smacked of indulgence. The finale of the show was a would-be satirical song about Ann Widdecombe with Victoria playing the politician. It seemed the only humour Victoria could mine from it was to make fun of Widdecombe’s oversized figure.

  Acknowledging the ghosts of Christmas TV past, Victoria included a skit on 1970s right-wing comedians and a high-kicking Angela Rippon.

  For once there was no need for the usual high density celebrity name-dropping as the show was physically peopled by the famous.

  Disappointingly for Victoria, her show failed to make the Christmas top 10. With ratings of less than 9.72 million it was a sobering lesson for her, especially as Caroline Aherne’s 30-minute Christmas episode of The Royle Family, which immediately followed All The Trimmings, was the eighth most watched programme that Christmas.

  More bad news came three days after the show was broadcast, when an embittered Bob Mason returned to haunt Victoria by going public about their relationship for the first time. The Mirror was the chosen mouthpiece through which he criticised Victoria for talking about what a rat he had been in interviews and in her act.

  ‘The backlash seemed to start when she started to become very famous. It was like: “Right, now I’ve got the power – I can use it”,’ he said.

  ‘I feel sorry for her to have carried that pain for all these years. It’s been hard for me, too, because she’s never forgotten it and nobody likes to be reminded with so much vitriol of their mistakes.

  ‘I know I hurt her, but it must be hard to be nearly 50 years old and still not be able to forgive.’

  17

  FORGIVENESS WAS NOT something that mattered in Victoria’s relationship with her mother. Helen’s lack of interest in her was all Victoria had ever known; it was just the way things were. It was not the ideal mother–daughter relationship but Victoria had grown immune to the situation.

  Helen died in 2001. ‘She faded away quite peacefully,’ Victoria explained. ‘She suffered from osteoporosis and had a hip replacement, but her femur kept snapping. She was so worried about it she didn’t want to get out of bed. So she decided to stay there and gradually she stopped taking an interest in the outside world. She stopped reading. She just dropped off, really.’

  The death of a parent naturally leads to reflection and Victoria came to partly understand why Helen was the way she was. ‘I realised she was hugely clever and creative and she should not have been a housewife. If she’d only gone out to work, we would all have been a lot happier. Being in the house drove her mad. She hated housework … She was full of energy and batting against the walls with it. And this gave me a real sense that you had to have your own life.’

  Once again Victoria put this philosophy into practice and announced another huge stage tour. It was scheduled to begin in May 2001 but had to be postponed when she had an emergency hysterectomy necessitated by painful fibroid growths in her womb. ‘I wanted to delay the operation until after the tour, but they said if I did I’d spend most of my time back in casualty,’ she said. After seeing three different specialists to gauge her options Victoria had to concede defeat and the tour did not actually begin until July.

  The 62-date stage tour, which began in 2001 and continued with a further 23 shows in 2002, served to remind the nation of just how good a live performer Victoria was, though one suspects selling out venues no longer represented much of a challenge or held the same thrill for her.

  ‘I just thought I’d give it one more crack, thinking I might really enjoy it if I didn’t have to do it any more, instead of just getting through it,’ she said.

  At It Again – a title that hinted at the new smuttier onstage Victoria – was a wake-up call to those who had forgotten the saltiness of her early material. The bawdy jokes and routines were something of a surprise to her newer fans.

  ‘I think everything has moved on,’ explained Victoria of her decision. ‘If I did what I was doing five years ago it would seem quite mild. I’m just responding to the climate.’

  Gynaecology, which had been a staple part of Victoria’s act since the beginning, featured heavily. Almost the entire first half of the show was devoted to the saga of her hysterectomy. If anything, she went into too much detail, but it displayed a remarkably open approach to matters she would have once considered private and off-limits.

  ‘This [the show] is very based on what actually happened to me. I wasn’t scared to do it any more. I wasn’t trying to hide behind something. I’ve got nothing to prove and I wanted to grant myself the freedom to talk about what I wanted to talk about.’

  She was equally upfront about her eating disorder, which she once treated as a guilty secret. Even her ‘strange relationship’ with her mother, whom Victoria partly blamed for her problems, was referred to. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever revealed this much about myself on stage,’ she said. ‘But there’s a fine line between being honest about things that have happened to you and letting people into your personal life.’

  After the interval, when fans could buy such ‘Acorn Antiques�
�� merchandise as teapots and Mrs Overall rubber gloves, the second half opened with Victoria in the guise of Stacey Leanne Paige, the Jane McDonald parody she first introduced in her Christmas 2000 television special.

  Sluttish, shameless, untalented, egotistical and Northern (Stacey is from Radcliffe and proud of it), it was a viciously funny send-up. However, there was an uncomfortable feeling that as with her mockery of Debbie McGee, Victoria was setting her sights on easy and rather safe targets.

  Back in Victoria Wood mode, she went into a lengthy routine about physical decline and the frustrations of middle age. Amidst this densely structured and expertly delivered piece there was an amusing detour into her failed attempt to be a perfect mother (on a day trip to East Anglia she ends up taking her children to the Tungsten and Ball-bearing Experience).

  The show, which earned her the 2001 British Comedy Award Best Stand-up title, ended with a character monologue by the predictably named Pat. She was Victoria’s third incarnation as a keep fit instructor, following in the steps of Madge and Hayley Bailey. Like so many of Victoria’s creations, Pat was Northern, vulgar and an unprepared public performer.

  Perhaps the most significant feature of the show was the way Victoria jettisoned the security of songs. Musical numbers had always punctuated her live act and in the early days they formed the main body of it, but now there were just two musical numbers. Neither of these was performed in her ‘Victoria Wood’ persona; instead it was Stacey Leanne who belted out the torturous power ballad ‘Filling My Hole’ and the singalong ‘Shagarama’. It was a sign of Victoria’s total confidence that she abdicated from the piano stool for the first time in her career and handed over keyboard duties to Nicholas Skilbeck.