Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  ‘Playing Sadie wasn’t really my idea,’ said Victoria, who took on the role. ‘That wasn’t my motivation at all. I just wanted to get this remarkable story to the public.’

  It was Bowker who suggested involving Eric’s parents in the film, and it was quickly realised that Sadie was the driving force of the whole story. Victoria’s name didn’t appear first in the credits because of her star status, it got top billing because Sadie was the central character of the film.

  ‘I discovered that Morecambe and Wise would not even have existed if it hadn’t been for Sadie Bartholomew’s fierce ambition – for her son, and the boy she came to see as a second son,’ he explained. ‘In many ways, the story at the heart of Eric & Ernie is that of a mother’s love and ambition – and the poignancy of having to let go.’ Both he and Victoria were in agreement that Sadie was not a clichéd pushy showbusiness mother.

  ‘She was a very intelligent person who realised Eric would never be happy in an ordinary job,’ said Victoria. ‘She saw there was something in him that would only be fulfilled by going on the stage.’ To help with her research into Sadie, Victoria visited Eric’s widow, Joan, her son, Gary, and Ernie’s widow, Doreen Wise, before filming began in the summer of 2010.

  ‘Victoria’s a very quiet soul in lots of ways,’ commented Joan Morecambe afterwards, ‘but she’s a lady who knows what she wants.’

  Just as Morecambe and Wise were once a Christmas institution, Victoria too was a mainstay of the seasonal television schedules and the film was broadcast on New Year’s Day. It was sandwiched between the Morecambe and Wise 1976 Christmas special and a one-hour documentary about them, Eric & Ernie: Behind the Scenes, which Victoria presented and narrated. The film was a hit, pulling in an audience of 6.083 million viewers – more than three times BBC2’s average for the time slot.

  Self-deprecating as ever, Victoria dismissed her performance by saying: ‘I tried to show the passing of the years by smiling a lot when Sadie was young and then wearing a different coat when she became middle-aged.’ The critics thought differently and used adjectives like ‘stunning’ and ‘marvellous’ in their praise of her.

  It was a fantastic performance and one that showed Victoria was without vanity – she seemed to physically morph into Thora Hird in the scene where Sadie interrogated Eric’s fiancée. In another scene, filmed at the East Lancashire Railway Station in Victoria’s home town of Bury, she was particularly moving. Having made successful inroads in their career, Eric and Ernie decided the time was right to dispense with Sadie as their unofficial manager. As the train pulled away, Sadie’s forced jollity dissolved into tears.

  A BAFTA magnet herself, Victoria had the satisfaction of seeing Peter Bowker win the BAFTA writing award for the film, and Daniel Rigby was named Best Leading Actor. The film was nominated for Best Single Drama but lost out to The Road To Coronation Street, something that Victoria, a long-time fan of the show, could live with.

  Victoria was one of the film’s executive producers and, after her falling-out with the BBC over how it had treated her and her previous Christmas offering, she was keen to show she was back to having a harmonious relationship with the corporation.

  ‘I’m working with a completely different set of people. On this I couldn’t have been treated better,’ she said. ‘The script was treated with huge respect, the crew is fantastic and I’m working with [producer] Piers Wenger who produced Housewife, 49, and is the most creative, supportive person.’

  19

  ‘IT ABSOLUTELY IS a love letter to the north,’ was how Victoria described her next major creation. It would also be a valediction.

  With its theme of youthful optimism crushed by life’s realities, and the message that it is never too late to engineer a hopeful resolution, That Day We Sang encapsulated so many of Victoria’s core sensibilities.

  She was commissioned to write a play for the Manchester International Festival and decided to use an idea that had been at the back of her mind for almost four decades. When she was unemployed and living in a Birmingham bedsit in 1975, Victoria happened to see a documentary about the Manchester Children’s Choir.

  In June 1929, 250 children from 52 local schools made a recording of Henry Purcell’s Nymphs and Shepherds with the Hallé Orchestra under the direction of Sir Hamilton Harty in the city’s Free Trade Hall. It went on to sell one million copies. The recording was often heard in the Wood household as Victoria was growing up and she introduced her own children to it.

  The This Week documentary Victoria saw featured a reunion of the former choir members in later life, reminiscing about that day they sang. Among them was Joe, a lathe operator who had been forced to reject the offer of a place at grammar school in order to start earning a wage. When asked if he was happy, he replied: ‘Who is happy?’ But when the interviewer asked him about what singing had meant to him, his face lit up and he rhapsodised: ‘It’s been an expression of joy … you can convey a lot of emotions in singing, can’t you? It’s a really wonderful thing to be able to sing.’

  It was Joe’s words that struck a chord with Victoria and became the inspiration for the musical.

  ‘The idea popped into my head about people having a big, golden memory of something that had happened to them as a child and how perhaps their intervening lives did not yield that same level of joy,’ she explained.

  ‘I liked the idea of the children’s choir going to the Free Trade Hall to make a record, and how exciting that must have been for them. But the idea that really interested me was that of someone hearing themselves singing on the record 45 years later, and being reconnected with the emotion that they had in their lives when they were 10.’

  As part of her research, Victoria spoke to two women in their nineties who had sung in the choir, and a copy of the original documentary was obtained for her. ‘It was nothing like I remembered it,’ she said. ‘I’d invented the whole documentary in my head.’

  The play switched between 1929 and 1969 and had two strands; one followed schoolboy Jimmy’s audition for the choir, and the other focused on Jimmy (known as Tubby in adulthood) and fellow former choir member Enid Sutcliffe who meet at a 1969 reunion that is filmed by Granada TV.

  Tubby, a shy, overweight insurance man (Stanley Wood’s profession), and Enid, a browbeaten secretary who has allowed herself to be taken advantage of by her boss, both share a sense that life has passed them by and that nothing since has ever lived up to that joyous day of the recording. At the reunion, Tubby hears the recording for the first time since he sang on it, and he cries.

  ‘That’s the start of his emotional journey triggered by hearing the music,’ explained Victoria. ‘He’s very jolly and jokey but everything has been locked down. He has lived with his mother who doesn’t like music. She has only just died; now he is able to listen to music and it is able to propel him on to the next stage of his life. And the next stage of his life is a relationship with Enid. The play asks what as a child do you aspire to be? As a man, what do you feel you owe that child?’

  Elaborating further, she added, ‘I have stayed true to that first idea that people can have a day in their lives that is very important and if they can reconnect with that day, reconnect with the people they were then, they can suddenly revive their emotions. That’s what it’s about – the power of music to revive your love of life.’

  Originally, Victoria wanted Michael Ball to play Tubby but he was unavailable. Instead, the relatively unknown Vincent Franklin took the part, and Jenna Russell played his love interest, Enid. Budgetary constraints meant the production could only run to a cast of 12, which involved some tactical writing by Victoria to allow them to get offstage, change costume and reappear as a different character. But a small budget did not mean there was insufficient preparation. Soprano and choir trainer Anna Flannagan spent eight months training two choirs of children recruited from four north Manchester primary schools.

  The script had Victoria’s regular hallmarks of brand names and eclectic name-d
ropping. To help capture the period, she drew on her own teenage memories, including faddy diets. One song was a celebration of the Berni Inn, which was a symbol of glamour to the young Victoria – it was the only place where the Woods dined on those rare occasions when they ventured out as a family.

  The play was a world of burnt chip pans, bus stops, dustbins and clothes lines and this juxtaposed nicely with the lavish fantasy sequences. It ran for 10 days from 6 July at Manchester’s Opera House and the lure of a huge new Victoria Wood production was enough to attract reviewers from national newspapers.

  ‘Wood mines the humour she finds in the northern class system so well that, for a time, the laughs get in the way of the story,’ wrote Ian Herbert in the Independent.

  ‘The show has a host of good things going for it,’ wrote Charles Spencer in the Telegraph. But he felt the construction was sometimes ‘clunking’. He added: ‘I also think Wood is taking on too much by directing the piece as well as writing it. An outsider might have delivered a crisper production … but there is no mistaking the show’s humour or its heart and there are some splendid performances.’

  The Guardian’s Alfred Hickling wrote: ‘At times, the hand of the author is so distinct there’s a danger the best lines belong to Wood, not the characters. Nor is it easy to make a whole lot, dramatically, out of decency … overall, the show’s straightforward good nature and lack of pretension becomes hard to resist.’

  But perhaps it was the opinion of Mrs Nancy Parker-Brown that Victoria was most interested in. The 96-year-old was an original member of the choir and she said: ‘The show was very enjoyable, the children here were excellent and she merged the stories very well.’

  That Day We Sang was the undoubted hit of the Festival. Victoria directed the production and, dashing up and down the aisles in her trainers and overseeing proceedings from her seat in the centre stalls, it was obvious that she was in her element. It was the Blue Door Theatre Company come true.

  With such a huge oeuvre of quality work behind her, it was not surprising that later that year Victoria received the Writers’ Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. What was surprising was that it was the first time a woman had been honoured. ‘I couldn’t believe I was the first woman to receive this award because I regard writing as a gender-free zone but it was still an honour,’ Victoria said.

  She was presented with the award by Peter Bowker who had himself won the Television Drama Award for Eric & Ernie. Another winner was director Danny Boyle, who could have shared with Victoria his experiences of growing up in 1960s Bury.

  There was cause for celebration on the personal front for Victoria when Henry moved back into the Highgate home. After leaving Leeds University during his first year, when he was offered a job in music, he was back at home writing songs. Adding to Victoria’s joy was Grace, who was also back in London. Having graduated from Cambridge with a first-class honours degree, and after spending a year in Verona, she was training as a mezzo-soprano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

  During the summer of That Day We Sang, Victoria had somehow managed to fit in five weeks of filming for a 90-minute television film of The Borrowers. She played the grumpy but loving Granny Driver and joining her was a cast that included Stephen Fry as Professor Mildeye, and Christopher Eccleston and Sharon Horgan as Pod and Homily Clock.

  Those expecting a cosy retelling of Mary Norton’s classic tale of little people living under the floorboards were in for a surprise as this was a high-octane contemporary take on the stories. The adaptation, which plucked aspects from Norton’s five books and added some new ideas, was packed with modern references and thrilling adventure and was given the coveted 7.30 p.m. Boxing Day slot

  Making the bed one Saturday morning in 2006, Victoria was half-listening to Radio 3 when she noticed a growing indignation and outrage in the voices. News had broken of a fraud that had scandalised the world of classical music. Surprisingly, the culprits were an elderly suburban couple living in a Hertfordshire cul-de-sac.

  Concert pianist Joyce Hatto first met William Barrington-Coupe (known as ‘Barrie’) in 1953. For the highly nervous Joyce, the hugely confident Barrie and his vows to make her a star were a huge attraction and they quickly fell in love and married.

  For a time Barrie gave the anxiety-prone Joyce the support and encouragement that she so badly needed. But, in the seventies, she finally lost her nerve halfway through a recital at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. She walked off the stage, never performed in public again and was largely forgotten.

  The couple pottered along in suburban obscurity but when Joyce was diagnosed with cancer in the early 2000s, Barrie decided to reignite her career. It was possibly an attempt to help her gain the recognition he felt she had been denied. Barrie began splicing other pianists’ recordings into Joyce’s work, digitally manipulating more than 100 recordings that were then released as CDs and attributed to Joyce. It helped that Barrie owned the record label that distributed her work.

  The scam worked and music critics lauded Joyce. When she died in 2006 she was so famous that the news made the national newspapers and the world of classical music mourned the loss of ‘one of the greatest pianists that Britain has ever produced.’

  But in the months following her death, suspicions grew about her prolific output and the fraud was finally exposed by Gramophone magazine, which in turn led to the scandal being more extensively covered by The New Yorker. Although the British Phonographic Industry described the affair as the most extraordinary case of music piracy it had seen, Barrie got off relatively lightly and was not even pursued for financial damages by the record companies.

  The story had an irresistible appeal for Victoria – classical music; suburban shenanigans; the extraordinary coming from the ordinary; the duping of authority figures. So when Left Bank Pictures asked her to write a script she happily agreed.

  ‘Partly it was the oddness of the story of this elderly couple, but also that they were practising their deceit on the whole world via the internet from their suburban house,’ she said. ‘It was the conjunction of those two people and modern technology that caught my interest.’

  The somewhat rarefied world of classical music was not an area which Victoria’s fans usually associated her with. And it was initially an odd choice for a film that the BBC was touting as a Christmas highlight. But, as with so much of her work, the real-life ‘story’ was merely the vehicle by which Victoria could explore more complex and universal themes; in this case the lengths love can drive people, the gradual dilution of integrity and the question of talent versus fame.

  ‘This is about a couple starting off with very high hopes and they get bashed about by life,’ Victoria explained. She could have been talking about That Day We Sang’s Tubby and Enid.

  Victoria recalled how she went into journalist mode spending three years hunting down details of the couple’s lives. She managed to trace some of their former colleagues, but her detective work did not stop there.

  ‘My proudest moment was when I saw in a tiny clipping a woman’s name and we actually tracked her down. She was an old mate of Joyce and I went to visit her. Every little bit of information – Joyce never answered the doorbell or the phone, for example, and loved watching Monkey World on TV – all sunk in and eventually rose to the surface in my story.’

  Victoria’s research into Barrie, who was then in his eighties, was just as thorough. She found out where he was living and drove there to check out the house. ‘I wanted to see what it was like,’ she explained. Victoria spied him on the pavement outside but chose not to introduce herself. ‘I didn’t want to meet him,’ she said. ‘It would have cramped my style.’

  She did not consult with Barrie while writing the script – ‘Why would I want to? Joyce and Barrie are my invention’ – but she was adamant the film would be made with or without his approval.

  ‘I don’t really know what he feels,’ she said, when work on the film was complete, ‘and I can’t worry about it too
much cos I’ve done it now and he’ll just have to take it on the chin.’

  The degree of Victoria’s investigation was forensic in its scrutiny. ‘Barrington-Coupe admitted he had made tiny edits in Joyce’s recordings because she was too ill to play without making what he called “cries of pain” due to her cancer,’ explained Victoria. ‘He said he had taken just a few bars from other people’s recordings, patched up her performance and that she knew nothing about it. But if you go by the waveforms of the CDs, there appear to be whole movements that are identical to other recordings, so that doesn’t bear out his account of just taking the odd notes here and there.’

  Barrie always maintained that Joyce knew nothing of the fraud, so as a dramatist, Victoria had to make a decision about whether this was the line she took. In the end, she decided that Joyce was complicit in the scam.

  ‘I don’t see how she could not have known. And I hope she did because I like to think of them doing it together and getting some fun out of it,’ said Victoria, who emphasised her script was an ‘imagining’ of what happened, based on the magazine article. She was not interested in condemning the pair, ‘I certainly don’t stand in judgment on what they did … nobody’s blameless. We’ve all done things we regret. We’ve all made mistakes.’ Instead, she sought to find an explanation for their behaviour.

  ‘My reading of their story is that Joyce hadn’t been treated well in the early years – a professor at the Royal Academy of Music apparently told her that, as a woman, she’d be better off making roast dinners – and they were disappointed how things had turned out. Either it was good fun to create this career for her, or they felt that she was owed some sort of legacy.’

  She added: ‘They were the cause of each other’s downfall. If they’d never met, perhaps Barrie would have been more successful in the music industry, and Joyce would have been perfectly content as a music teacher.’