Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  Wisely, Victoria treated Talent as a period piece. She could hardly have done otherwise as it was crammed with so many references to 1970s pop culture (Black Jacks and Fruit Salad chews were even on sale). It certainly had curiosity value as an insight into the world of talent shows before the advent of shows like The X Factor.

  The Cumbrian audiences enjoyed Talent, but when the reviews came in for the London production all hopes of a West End transfer were quashed.

  ‘More a series of routines … never moves beyond cliché. Nothing is properly developed,’ was the verdict by Paul Taylor of the Independent. The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner said it was ‘nicely acted … but it’s so scrappy and inconsequential that it outstays its welcome.’ Charles Spencer, writing for the Telegraph, was a little kinder, writing: ‘Structurally it’s a bit of a mess. But for all its faults … the piece is blessed with both heart and humour.’

  Victoria was philosophical and found a positive when she and Julie Walters went to watch it after working on her upcoming Christmas television show. ‘To be filming with her [Julie] that day, and to be sitting watching that play with her, with two girls playing our parts … it felt really special,’ she reflected. ‘I felt really fortunate that we had worked all that time … and it was just a lucky thing that we were friends all that time.’

  Along with reading, watching television was one of Victoria’s favourite pastimes. She decried the absence of arts coverage (‘I think it’s sad we have not got a big arts show on BBC One … I think they underestimate people’s intelligence in this country’), but she was not immune to the lure of low-brow programmes. Like everyone, she had her guilty pleasures.

  ‘My absolute favourite is Snapped: Women Who Kill, a true-life U.S. series shown here on the Crime & Investigation channel,’ she said. ‘I’m fascinated by all these people who suddenly pick up a gun and shoot somebody just because they’re a bit cross with them. I’m transfixed by the awfulness of their actions.

  ‘You and I might fling a plate of dinner at someone but, this being America, they’ll pick up a rifle and blow somebody’s head off. And they never seem to appreciate the consequences. There’s often footage from their police interviews and trials, and it’s really interesting.’

  Despite appearing on a television talent show herself, Victoria had no time for The X Factor, hating the humiliation of some of its contestants. And although it would have been interesting to witness her living side by side other celebrities, reality shows were a no-go area.

  Even while relaxing in front of the television, what she watched was feeding inspiration for her next big project. ‘I’d been having all these ideas for sketches, and it seemed like the best format for them was a special,’ she said.

  Victoria Wood’s Mid Life Christmas was her first sketch show for nine years and, like her previous Christmas sketch shows, she mined television itself to get the laughs. Harking back to As Seen On TV, there were a couple of joke adverts; slippedonachip.com for compensation claims and Let’s Talk Rubbish language learning which poked fun at the banality of teen-speak. The ‘Mid Life Olympics’ featured such events as Hedge Trimming and the Married Couple Self-Assembly Flatpack competition. The physical comedy was rather laboured and the real humour came from the comments of sports anchor Sally Hewitt (Victoria) back in the studio. As a fan of The Apprentice (which she had once appeared on), Victoria couldn’t resist dressing up as Margaret Mountford for a dance routine.

  ‘Lark Pies to Cranchesterford’ was a parody of period dramas of the day but the joke would have been better served if it had been confined to just one visit. Victoria fared much better when she appeared in Jennifer Saunders’ own period drama spoof, Uptown Downstairs Abbey, for Comic Relief. She played Mrs Crawler, who committed the ultimate faux pas of referring to the drawing room as ‘a lovely lounge’.

  The main attraction of Mid Life Christmas was ‘Beyond The Marigolds’, a documentary which followed a week in the life of Bo Beaumont (Julie Walters), the grand actress who played Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques. We saw her ‘embracing the challenges of a modern media career’, which essentially meant trying to get work on every reality show going (she didn’t get very far with Who Do You Think You Are? after refusing to disclose her date of birth and real name). Her manner and jaunty outfits, so typical of actresses of a certain age, combined with Victoria’s devastatingly funny lines, made it the highlight of the entire show.

  ‘Bo is Julie’s favourite character to play, I thought it would be lovely to take Bo out of Acorn Antiques and put her in the modern world,’ said Victoria when promoting the show. ‘We placed her in shows such as Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing on Ice. How would an old-style actress deal with the idiots who work in modern TV?’

  Walters was the only one of Victoria’s old gang of friends to appear in the show. There were no parts for Celia Imrie, Duncan Preston, Anne Reid or Susie Blake. Victoria liked the ‘shorthand’ that came from working with familiar faces but was aware that there was a danger of getting stuck in a ‘cosy rut’.

  ‘I think that’s not good, creatively,’ she said, ‘which is why the last few things I’ve done I’ve ducked and dived a bit with the people I’ve worked with.’

  Among these ‘new people’ were Lorraine Ashbourne, Sylvestra Le Touzel and Dorothy Atkinson. They had all appeared in Housewife, 49, cropped up in Mid Life Christmas and would go on to appear in future programmes made by Victoria. Henry Durham, Victoria’s son, also made a fleeting appearance in Mid Life Christmas, playing a teenage television viewer.

  For the Mid Life Christmas finale there was a spectacular performance of the ‘Ballad of Barry and Freda’ complete with Busby Berkeley staging, CGI effects, and dozens of Barry and Fredas dancing about in their underwear.

  The show was generally well received but the standard of some of the sketches was below what viewers had come to expect from Victoria. A sketch about how bad women drivers are at parking was hardly fresh, and a character saying she had a bee in her bonnet only to find that she did indeed have an actual bee in her bonnet was not exactly up there with Victoria’s previous work. Elsewhere Reece Shearsmith popped up as a gay priest in a sketch whose main punchline seemed to be that old people are a little out of touch. And an overlong sequence of Julie Walters on ice skates was an unwelcome reminder of her and Victoria on roller skates in one of Wood & Walters’ more dire moments.

  The BBC heralded Victoria Wood’s Mid Life Christmas as ‘one of the most treasured gifts BBC1 is giving viewers this year’ but for Victoria it was a present that made her livid.

  Over the years she had become as much a Christmas Day television tradition as Morecambe and Wise had once been. While certainly not complacent, she was very aware of her high ranking status. ‘It’s a very strange feeling,’ she said, ‘but it’s got to be someone, hasn’t it?’

  Having given Victoria a 90-minute career retrospective documentary (Victoria Wood: Seen On TV), a one-hour sketch show and a 44-minute documentary about the making of the show (What Larks!), it could be argued that the BBC had not neglected her over the Christmas of 2009. But when she learned Mid Life Christmas was to be broadcast at 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve she was outraged.

  A source claimed Victoria was ‘furious’ that an alleged promise to give the show a prime-time slot on Christmas Day had been broken. Victoria’s last Christmas special, in 2000, had been trumpeted by the BBC as the centrepiece of its Christmas Day schedule. But now the honour went instead to a special Christmas edition of Caroline Aherne’s sitcom The Royle Family.

  Defending the scheduling, a spokesman for the BBC said: ‘We are committed to offering a broad and varied range of quality content throughout the year, with Christmas being no exception. The Christmas period spans from the week before through to the New Year and we work hard to ensure we have content throughout this period that caters to all our audiences’ needs.’

  There were reports that Victoria was also offended by changes which had been made to the show after she believed
the content had been agreed and finalised, and that no one had the decency to either consult her or inform her of the changes.

  ‘I’ve been in showbusiness an awfully long time and I just think if you’re asking somebody to make a programme, let them make a programme,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell them how to make it.’ But the BBC spokesman said: ‘Any final edits made to programmes are done so in agreement with the production teams and done so to ensure we deliver the highest quality shows to our audiences. A face-to-face conversation was had between Victoria and the most senior executive on the production of the programme and subsequently with her producer.’

  There was a time, early in her career, when Victoria regarded the nascent French and Saunders alone as a threat. But in the intervening decades she came to celebrate the emergence of a plethora of female comics on to the comedy scene. So when she was asked to host an awareness-raising concert featuring Britain’s female comic talent, she immediately agreed.

  The cause was the British Heart Foundation’s drive to raise awareness of the dangers of heart disease in women. Victoria had already fronted a documentary about a Moonwalk charity event for breast cancer but it was not widely known that heart disease actually causes three times more deaths in women.

  The Angina Monologues was performed at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 5 December 2010 and a recording of the show, directed by Victoria’s old friend and colleague, Geoff Posner, formed the centrepiece of Sky 1’s Christmas schedule. The cause gained additional exposure when the film was shown at selected Vue cinemas across the country.

  Among those on the bill – the majority being of a younger generation – were Jo Brand, Katy Brand, Roisin Conaty, Julia Davis, Jessica Hynes, Ria Jones (as Mrs Overall performing a tune from Acorn Antiques: The Musical!), Andi Osho, Joanna Scanlan, Vicki Pepperdine and Isy Suttie.

  ‘Two decades ago a female-only night like this would have just been me plus Jo Brand and Danny La Rue,’ Victoria jokily observed. It was the first time so many female comics had come together for such an event and one can only imagine how different it would have been if it had been an all-male gathering. Victoria had commented how male comics tended to compete and spar with each other so that the clash of egos resulted in a ‘misogynistic bear-pit’.

  She acted as a host and melded together pertinent messages about heart disease with stand-up (‘I’ve been single for many years, to me the other side of the bed is where you put your toast’). The show was a mixture of sketches, songs and solo spots, and climaxed with a performance of the ‘Ballad of Barry and Freda’ which retained the adored lines (‘Beat me on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly’) but included some updates (‘Don’t bully / I can’t fully / Guarantee to cope / Without a rope and pulley’).

  Victoria’s contribution was enough to earn her the British Comedy Award for Best Female TV Comic, beating, among others, Miranda Hart, a relative newcomer who had made a huge impact in the comedy world.

  As much as the other comics were there to support a very worthwhile campaign, sharing the bill with their comedy heroine was another major motivating factor. And Victoria might have reflected how she had not only inspired and influenced them, but had helped to make their careers possible by breaking down so many barriers.

  After the previous year’s falling-out with the BBC, Victoria turned to Sky 1 for her 2010 Christmas offering. The Giddy Kipper, which Victoria wrote and directed, was under the ‘Little Crackers’ banner – 15-minute films with a Christmas theme made by celebrities.

  ‘It is – in a lot of ways – my childhood,’ said Victoria of the 1961-set film. The story was about eight-year-old Eunice, who was facing Christmas with just her dad after her mother had died. Festive spirit was thin on the ground until Eunice delivered eggs to Mrs Whitefield and was invited into her wonderfully Christmassy home. Captivated by what she sees on the television, and briefly reunited with her mother, Eunice returned home with the realisation that cherished memories are indelible.

  Like Eunice, Victoria was aged eight in 1961, and she too used to marvel at how other people’s homes – tidy, clean and welcoming – were so different from her own. Although Helen Wood hadn’t died, the Wood family dynamics meant Victoria was just as solitary as Eunice. On Christmas Day itself, Helen and Stanley would always go off for a drive leaving the children to their own devices, which usually meant them retreating to their individual rooms.

  Victoria was determined that her own children would have a childhood they could treasure. Snuggling down together to watch Christmas television, taking it in turns with one of her sisters to host Christmas dinner, Victoria ensured Grace and Henry’s Christmases were more enjoyable than her own had been. She even took Grace to the opera at the New York Met one year, as a post-Christmas treat.

  Victoria’s glorious career trajectory and the national adulation she received meant a huge amount to her, but it was her children who gave her undiluted joy and fulfilment. With Grace and Henry she created a tight and loving family unit that she had been denied during her own childhood. She regarded her relationship with them as her greatest achievement.

  Grace was 14 and Henry 10 when Victoria and Geoffrey parted, particularly difficult ages at which to cope with the end of their parents’ marriage. It helped that Geoffrey moved into a property close to the Highgate mansion.

  With no new partner, Victoria’s relationship with her children grew even stronger so she experienced a huge sense of loss when first Grace, and then Henry, left home for university. Grace went to Clare College, Cambridge, as a choral scholar where she read French and Italian. When Henry left to study Music, Composition, and Music Technology at Leeds in the autumn of 2010, Victoria doubled her workload to help her cope with the terrible loneliness.

  Work, she said, was what defined her. Writing was a solitary business but it left little room for negative introspection. To make it a more enjoyable experience she had a writing ‘hut’ installed in her garden; a special mechanism allowed it to revolve so that it let the sunshine in whatever time of the day. When she did feel down she would play her favourite ‘happy music’, the Doobie Brothers’ ‘What a Fool Believes’.

  Victoria said she enjoyed the writing process much more than in her earlier days and even chose a black pen and a book to write in as her luxury on her second appearance on Desert Island Discs. The only aspect of being a lone castaway that slightly troubled her was that she would be ‘too fine’ at handling the isolation.

  Producing and directing allowed her to make new friends. ‘I’m in a business where people make friends really quickly,’ she said. ‘Instant connections. Loads to talk about. You have to get on with people straight away if you’re rehearsing a play.’ But quite often, these new friendships only lasted as long as the current project. ‘They serve their purpose. You have a working relationship. You can’t keep up with everybody. Your life would be a nightmare.’

  She did, of course, have a more permanent circle of friends with whom she could socialise, although with Julie Walters living in Sussex, that particular friendship tended to be conducted via email or by encounters at award ceremonies.

  ‘People think you’re missing out if you’re single, I’m sure they do,’ remarked Victoria, who did not seem to be troubled by her status. ‘I’ve got my friends and my kids and I’m all right. I don’t have a boyfriend. I’d love to talk about a boyfriend if I had one. But I don’t have … I’m simplified.’

  She was open to the possibility of a new relationship, but did not see it happening. ‘I think there’s not much of a chance for me finding somebody of my age. Gentlemen of my age are dropping down 30 years to find girlfriends.’

  Unusually for a writer and performer of such standing, Victoria had no ego when it came to handing over lines and characters to those she considered the best person for the job. For her next project she went even further by relinquishing the writing duties altogether and, instead, hiring Peter Bowker to create a script from her idea.

  A film about the early l
ives of Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise had been germinating for ten years. Victoria wanted to explore the period before they were famous, from their first meeting in 1939 up to their burgeoning television career in the 1950s.

  ‘Nobody’s ever told that story of Eric and Ernie as 13-year-old boys meeting, she said. ‘They didn’t just emerge as middle-aged men … you’re not born a national treasure.’

  The historical perspective it gave on ‘the workings of comedy’ was an added attraction of the project. ‘I’m interested in old variety, that world,’ Victoria said. ‘Being a comedian you feel that you are linked with other people who’ve gone before.’

  She had the wisdom to realise that she lacked the necessary insight required to write the script. ‘I felt it was very much a man’s story, one of friendship between boys and then men. So it seemed better in the hands of a male writer,’ she explained. ‘I don’t understand men at all – they’re a complete mystery to me.’

  Having proved his credentials with the musical drama Blackpool, and as a Morecambe and Wise expert and fan (he even named one of his children ‘Eric’), Bowker was a natural choice. But he was surprised Victoria did not write the script herself and welcomed her input.

  ‘I would send the draft and then we’d meet and I’d see she’d made the neatest notes I had ever seen. Just very like her humour, really precise and forensic,’ Bowker recalled. Victoria also offered advice on the staging of the duo’s comedy routines.

  As well as helping to choose filming locations, Victoria was heavily involved in the casting, which involved auditioning more than 100 boys in Manchester and Leeds for the parts of Morecambe and Wise at different points in their career. The process lasted two months. ‘We wanted raw diamonds,’ Victoria said. ‘We got lots of nice little Ernies [but] it was harder to get the Eric quality.’

  Actor and stand-up comedian Daniel Rigby was chosen to play Eric, and Bryan Dick was only cast as Ernie three weeks before filming began. Ten actors were considered for the part of Eric’s father, George, before Victoria decided that Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) was the most interesting and believable. That left the question of who would play Eric’s ambitious mother.