Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  The BAFTA tribute cannily ended with the ‘Tip Top Tap’ number from Acorn Antiques: The Musical!. Victoria engineered another advertisement for the show by writing and presenting a 50-minute documentary on the making of the musical, which she sold to ITV. It was something of a luvvie fest with everyone singing each other’s praises but, significantly, it was co-produced by Phil McIntyre Television and Blue Door Adventures Ltd. The latter was Victoria’s new production company and its name was inspired by the Blue Door Theatre Company from The Swish of the Curtain – the book which had so influenced Victoria 45 years earlier.

  Victoria said the musical was a completely different idea, not just an extended episode of ‘Acorn Antiques’. Presumably, she was referring to Act 1 which saw the principals of the axed soap joining Sutton Coldfield Light Operatic Society in the Enoch Powell Arts Centre. Their pretentious and megalomaniacal director (Neil Morrissey) intends to turn the show into something ‘incredibly subversive’, a post-apocalyptic holocaust of a play.

  Victoria recycled some of her material – some a quarter-of-a-century old. Earnest, politically and socially aware theatre was satirized in both 1980’s Good Fun and the ‘To Be An Actress’ documentary insert in As Seen On TV. And the concept of a musical inspired by an unlikely source material had been done in ‘Whither The Arts?’ another As Seen On TV spoof documentary which looked at the making of Bessie!, the Bessie Bunter story.

  A conveniently timed windfall (echoes of dinnerladies) allows Bo Beaumont (the ‘actress’ playing Mrs Overall) to sack the director and take ‘Acorn Antiques’ in its original form into the West End.

  Act 2 of the musical was what an expectant public paid for – the set of the shop drew applause. It was the familiar and well-loved ‘Acorn Antiques’, complete with missed cues, fluffed lines, injury, haemorrhoids, ludicrous plots and the added bonus of musical pastiches (even though Mrs Overall’s hilarious song about the merits of macaroons and cups of tea over sex was strongly reminiscent of ‘Handicrafts’ from Good Fun). A more vampish Miss Babs was revealed, Duncan Preston as Mr Clifford was blatantly out of the closet and there was a new Miss Berta in the form of Sally Ann Triplett who, thanks to the shock revelation of a third sister, actually found herself playing a triplet.

  The cast acquitted themselves well but Julie Walters was the undoubted star of the show. Whether she was urging the audience to say it believed in ‘undemanding, middle-brow entertainment’ à la Tinkerbell, or ruining the pace of a showstopping dance number with her contorted gait.

  The idea of Acorn Antiques as a West End musical was amusingly surreal but once it got a hold, the surrealism snowballed. Royal photographer Lord Lichfield was soon photographing Mrs Overall for a Radio Times front cover and at the Laurence Olivier Awards 2006 the show received three nominations. It was nominated for Best New Musical, Julie Walters was nominated for Best Actress in a Musical and Celia Imrie was nominated – and won – for Best Supporting Performance in a Musical.

  The show was a success with the public and while it garnered some hugely positive reviews, some critics were less enthused.

  ‘Wood is as sprightly a lyricist as she is a dramatist, composer and everything else,’ wrote Benedict Nightingale in The Times. ‘The result is mischievous, good-natured, charming. But a comic masterpiece? Not really.’

  Victoria’s motives were questioned by Chris Bartlett in the Stage who wondered whether she was embracing the genre or simply attacking it. He described the show as: ‘a two-hour skit based on a series of five-minute ones’ but praised ‘some wonderful set pieces’.

  The BBC’s Mark Shenton criticised the ‘desperately overextended’ show for being ‘Filled out with weak pastiches of musicals from Les Mis and Company to A Chorus Line’.

  ‘In trying to be a backstage cross between Crossroads and The Producers,’ he wrote, ‘it unfortunately doesn’t become about the making of bad theatre but a piece of bad theatre itself.’

  The harshest critic was the Guardian’s Michael Billington who described the show as: ‘a load of slack, self-indulgent rubbish scandalously overpriced’ and ‘a pitiful waste’ of Victoria’s talents. ‘Sending up the second-rate,’ he wrote, ‘always smacks of smug condescension and camp.’

  Director Nunn did not escape censure: ‘He has failed to ruthlessly cut and edit a sprawling, inchoate piece that doesn’t know when to stop.’

  Billington highlighted the unoriginality of the idea, pointing out that shows and plays such as Noises Off, A Life In Theatre, Forbidden Broadway and even The Pirates of Penzance had already mined all of the jokes. And done them better.

  Despite the mixed critical reaction, the public loved the show and mindful of the financial opportunities, Victoria decided to take the musical on a seven-month nationwide tour taking in 24 cities and scheduled to begin in Salford, Greater Manchester, in December 2006. Confident of her abilities, she decided to extend the challenge and replaced Sir Trevor Nunn as director.

  18

  VICTORIA SAID HER 2002 stage show would be her last. ‘I’ve got things in me that can’t necessarily be encapsulated in a stand-up show,’ she explained. Her documentaries and the musical were examples of this, but Victoria yearned to produce something that married creativity with depth. She had always gravitated towards writing about ‘the little people’ who led quietly unspectacular lives, so the real-life war diary of a Cumbrian housewife was ideal material for her next project.

  The story of a depressed, middle-aged wife and mother who finds herself physically and emotionally isolated, frustrated, and unable to communicate what she truly feels, could have, at one time, read like a description of Victoria’s own mother. Perhaps this was something that Victoria recognised when she read Nella Last’s War, a book of the wartime diaries of Nella Last, who wrote them as part of a Mass-Observation project. In 2006, when ITV producer Piers Wenger invited Victoria to collaborate on a project, she suggested turning the diaries into a drama.

  ‘I read the book over and over and began to find things beneath the surface that I was interested in,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t just about rationing and dried egg and people painting their legs brown to look like stockings. There was a story underneath of a woman in crisis.’

  She added: ‘Nella was a woman who married at 19 and now does nothing outside the marriage. She has no independence. Back then, people didn’t talk about their emotions as much as they do now. They just stayed silent because they had no emotional vocabulary.

  ‘Nella’s therapy was writing her diary, and she started to learn about herself and to recognise her emotions. She changed. From writing her diary, then joining the WVS, she realised that she could live a life beyond her claustrophobic relationship with her husband.’

  Before writing the script, Victoria spoke with Nella’s family and friends to build up an accurate picture of her. She even visited Nella’s former home to help gain more of an idea of the woman she would be playing.

  Aware of the public’s expectations of her, Victoria was keen to stress how the film was a move in a new direction. ‘I hope people don’t think this is just a jolly Northern comedy set in a kitchen,’ she said. ‘People expect me to write that, but this is something quite different.’

  Both the script and Victoria’s performance had huge emotional depth. She had shown she could create poignancy with Pat and Margaret, but Housewife, 49 (the film’s title referred to Nella’s age when she began her diary) was on a whole new level. From the outset, it was impossible not to invest totally in Nella’s moving story.

  Patronised, undermined and blamed by her scathing, controlling husband, Will (David Threlfall); ridiculed by her insensitive sister-in-law, Dot (Lorraine Ashbourne); crushed by her youngest son, Cliff (Christopher Harper) and used and abused by the smiling ladies of the WVS, viewers could not fail to root for Nella.

  It was a masterclass in subtlety with no neat contrivances. Emotionally battered and bruised, Nella gradually gained confidence to stand up for herself and become a happier
woman, but there was still some ambiguity about how permanent this would be. There was no tidy resolution and this further added to the quality of the film. Even the secondary characters were fully delineated so that they, too, had dimension and believability.

  It was a serious story but there was still room for Victoria to smoothly inject some light relief. The character of WVS leader Mrs Waite (Stephanie Cole), for instance, could have come straight out of Joyce Grenfell’s repertoire, and Mass-Observation employee, Jill (Daisy Haggard), was a comedy nugget. Victoria also dipped into her trope of brand names and slipped in references to Dentifrice toothpaste and Yardley’s Lily of the Valley.

  The director was Gavin Millar, who had impressed Victoria with his work on Pat and Margaret. Michele Buck was the executive producer and Victoria must have been highly amused to learn that she had produced her beloved Crossroads in the 1980s.

  Housewife, 49 was a huge hit with both the public and the critics and attracted an audience of 8.2 million when it was broadcast on 11 December. Victoria reminded the public once again of the significance of seemingly mundane lives and of how the most emotionally involving, moving and important narratives are often to be found in the most ‘ordinary’ of people and in everyday life. This could be why two million more people watched Housewife, 49 than the final episode of natural history epic Planet Earth over on BBC1.

  Many were surprised at just how good a serious actress Victoria was. There had been earlier indications in Pat and Margaret, and her portrayal of Nella earned her more recognition, nationally and internationally. The role won her the BAFTA Best Actress Award, and the film was named as Best Single Drama by both BAFTA and the Royal Television Society. Significantly, Victoria was also nominated for the International Emmy Award for Best Performance by an Actress. The ‘hopeless’ drama student from Birmingham University attended the Emmy ceremony at New York’s Hilton Hotel and no doubt allowed herself a smile at how she had once been rejected by so many drama schools.

  Victoria never regarded herself as being particularly prolific, but in 2006 alone she had written and starred in Housewife, 49; been the subject of a second South Bank Show documentary; adapted Acorn Antiques: The Musical! (as well as auditioning, rehearsing and directing a cast for the touring production); and traversed the globe for a three-hour documentary. And this was not atypical of her output.

  The documentary was Victoria’s Empire, which was made for BBC1 and screened in three parts during April and May of 2007. Initially, the idea had been for Victoria to travel to places around the world which, like her, had been named after Queen Victoria. But, as she realised: ‘That’s not actually a television documentary, that’s just some very expensive holiday slides.’ More discussions followed and it was decided that rather than just visiting the locations, Victoria would use them to explore the subject of the British Empire.

  In the book which accompanied the series, Victoria admitted that she only had the vaguest idea about what the Empire was, and most of that had been gleaned from Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace novels. Her schooling on the topic had left her with the impression that Britain just owned all these other places which the British could go to whenever they wanted, ‘a bit like having a static caravan at Filey.’

  Back in 1995 when Victoria was invited to make a Great Railway Journeys documentary, she turned down the offer to travel to exotic locations in favour of a round journey to Crewe because she did not want to be away from Grace and Henry for too long. It was the same reason why she imposed conditions on filming for Victoria’s Empire. Her travels would take in Calcutta, Darjeeling, Hong Kong, Borneo, Ghana, Jamaica, Newfoundland, New Zealand, Tasmania, Australia and Zambia, but Victoria only agreed to do it if each block of filming was completed within fourteen days.

  The series was fresh, interesting and insightful. Victoria engaged well with those she interviewed and, unlike many celebrity presenters, she never lost sight of the fact that it was about the Empire, the people and the places she visited, not her.

  However, the Spectator’s James Delingpole dismissed the documentary as ‘just another pretty, Sunday-night celebrity-goes-travelling series dressed up as something more significant,’ and was annoyed by ‘the way it keeps apologising for being white, middle class, middle-brow, post-Imperial and British.’

  The Guardian’s Zoe Williams was even more critical, writing: ‘The whole dozy idea for the show has been retrospectively underpinned by a nice, chatty apologia for colonialism … I do not understand what purpose was meant to be served by this programme.’

  It was true that some aspects of Britain’s colonial past did leave Victoria deeply ashamed, but there was no blanket condemnation. As she said: ‘It’s not for me to say whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that the British should take over these places … but I think you have to admire the courage and tenacity of the people who first arrived here … so I think you have to say that they were very brave.’

  Later in the year Victoria enthusiastically agreed to play the role of Nana in a television film of Noel Streatfeild’s 1936 children’s classic Ballet Shoes.

  Set in thirties London, it followed the adventures of orphans Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil, who are adopted by an eccentric explorer, Gum (Richard Griffiths), and raised as sisters by his selfless niece. With its story of the girls’ struggle to fulfil their dreams (Pauline longs to be an actress), it was understandable why it ranked alongside The Swish of the Curtain as one of the young Victoria’s favourite books.

  A Granada production for BBC1, it was adapted from the original novel by Heidi Thomas who had written the screenplay for Cranford, which Victoria would go on to parody in a later television show. Producer Piers Wenger and executive producer Michele Buck were familiar faces to Victoria from their involvement in Housewife, 49. It was perfect festive family viewing and the BBC broadcast it in a prime-time slot on Boxing Day. Victoria gave a deeply sympathetic performance which was well received, as was the film itself.

  The public had been starved of Victoria’s stand-up ever since she finished her At it Again tour in 2002. Not surprisingly then, there was a buzz of excitement when she agreed to give a one-off performance at a celebration to mark BAFTA’s 60th anniversary in October 2007. The televised event was held at the New London Theatre, Drury Lane, and although dozens of stars appeared, it was Victoria who shone the brightest. Introduced by Lord Attenborough as ‘The Queen of stand-up comedy’, she delivered a superb seven minute routine. Relaxed, assured and obviously enjoying the moment, Victoria was at the peak of her powers.

  She took a drily humorous look at what she had identified as the seven signs of aging. One of them was an aversion to eating or drinking on the pavement. ‘You can put chairs and tables outside as many cafes as you like in the United Kingdom,’ she said, ‘it won’t be Tuscany.’ In a meander about the vogue for shaping pubic hair, she remarked: ‘You can’t do what I do, which is just chop the odd chunk off with the nail scissors.’ For the seventh sign of aging, Victoria returned to a favourite: how good and noble intentions are compromised by reality. The roars of recognition from the audience proved her observational skills were as razor-sharp as ever.

  ‘I’m not one to revive things. I’m not too fond of looking back on my work – when I’ve done something, I tend to forget about it,’ said Victoria. But she changed her mind when a proposal was made to restage Talent.

  It was more than 30 years since the premiere of the show that launched her career and, naturally, Victoria had a soft spot for it. Designer Roger Glossop and his producer wife, Charlotte, first met Victoria during the original run of the play in Sheffield. They went on to found their own theatre – the Old Laundry in Bowness-on-Windermere – and wanted to produce a piece of home-grown work.

  Victoria was happy for the revival to go ahead but she did not want to be personally involved. However, because she vetoed all the suggested directors, she ended up directing the play. She had already demonstrated her directorial skills with the touring
production of Acorn Antiques: The Musical! and having written Talent, appeared in the original production, made the television version, and seen numerous productions in the intervening decades, she was confident that she was up to the new challenge. And she needed to be confident because this was not just some low-key provincial run done as a favour for friends; it was a co-production with London’s highly esteemed Menier Chocolate Factory.

  The play would run at the Old Laundry from 27 August to 12 September before moving into the Menier for 21 days from 17 September. There was a lot riding on it because productions at the Menier often moved into the West End.

  For the new version of the show Victoria wrote extra songs and developed some of the male characters as well as introducing a new character – the club’s catering manageress (played by Mark Hadfield in drag). The prologue, which extended the running time of the show to 95 minutes, involved a fantasy sequence and the character of Julie returning to Manchester and claiming that she was now a superstar.

  Being directed by Victoria could have been intimidating for the cast, which included Hi-de-Hi!’s Jeffrey Holland and former Blue Peter presenter Mark Curry, but Victoria was careful to create a happy company. ‘It [the original production] was such a long time ago that I never thought, “Oh, well we used to do it like this”’, she said. ‘So I hope I never put them under the pressure of trying to copy what we did back then.’

  Cast members had nothing but praise for Victoria. ‘She understands us,’ said Holland. ‘She knows what she wants and she knows how to get it without getting cross. She’s very exact.’

  Leanne Rowe, who played Julie, added: ‘She’s very patient with us. When we’re in rehearsals and we aren’t doing something right, she doesn’t snap at us, she just shows us how to remedy it.’