Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood

by Jasper Rees

  Above all, from 1988 onwards, motherhood became the galvanising pulse of each and every day. Put simply, if a child of hers were to swim the channel, Victoria would have been in the support vessel. Where that drive to be a good mother came from is, perhaps, the defining theme of this book. Her fans must reckon with a bleak equation: that without the neglect of parents who left her to be brought up by the television set in her den, there would be no Victoria Wood as we know her. Her genius – and genius it was – came at a cost.

  I had one precious experience of watching Victoria at close quarters as she worked an audience. A season of her work was being shown at the BFI Southbank in 2008, and I was to interview her in a packed cinema. Before we went on, she was quiet and self-contained. As we walked through the pass door onto the stage she seemed to blossom into her other self. Once the ecstatic applause had died down, I introduced her with a long respectful account of a distinguished career containing countless reinventions. The longer I went on, the more I could see cogs whirring mischievously. Eventually I finished. She looked at me with those twinkling blue eyes, measured out an immaculately timed pause and said, ‘Please could you repeat the question?’

  Let’s do it – while the mood is right.

  1

  FACES

  ‘I’ve wanted to be famous since I was tiny.’

  The South Bank Show, 1996

  She had an adoring female audience long before she drew her first breath. ‘The baby’s kicking,’ her expectant mother would say. ‘Come and put your hand on my tummy.’ Penelope, then seven, and Rosalind, two and three quarters, would feel their unborn sibling beating out a rhythm with her feet. Their brother Christopher, who was twelve, may have been less engrossed by another arrival. When the time came, Helen Wood entered a nursing home in Prestwich on the northerly outskirts of Manchester. Stanley Wood’s diary entry recorded the birth of ‘VICTORIA WOOD, 7 lbs 12 ozs born @ 8. P.M.’1 A proud father pronounced her ‘a lovely baby in every way’.

  The date was 19 May 1953. A quarter of a century on, the day of her birth would have a bearing on what Victoria Wood always considered her first properly constructed joke. In a sketch she called ‘Sex’, a confused young woman played by Julie Walters thinks she might be pregnant. ‘Where are you in the menstrual cycle?’ she is asked. ‘Taurus.’

  When mother and child were brought home in Stanley’s Austin 7 to 98 Tottington Road in Bury, they were met by paper bunting draped in zigzags across the yard at the back, fashioned by Penelope with Rosalind’s help. A message greeted the baby: ‘Welcome home, little Victoria’. For the next twenty years she would be known as Vicky – sometimes spelled Vicki – which is how, deep into her twenties, she signed herself in letters to her family.

  The baby’s name gave expression to her mother’s passionate interest in the Victorian age – its literature, its social history and, despite her republican leanings, its queen. Before Victoria was two weeks old Elizabeth II was crowned, and for the first time the Woods hired a television. Friends were invited round. Helen imagined the words running through the monarch’s head as the carriage processed across the screen: ‘I bet she’s saying, “I could do with a cup of tea.”’ Such family stories lodged in Victoria’s imagination and, decades later, would bubble up to the surface. ‘Oh, but I shall never forget the Coronation,’ says a gnarled washerwoman played by Victoria in Victoria Wood As Seen on TV. ‘1953. We all crammed into the one front room and stared at this tiny grey picture. Somebody had cut it out of the paper – nobody got television till the year after.’ Later, on a tour of the nation, the queen’s cavalcade passed through Bury. Helen, with Rosalind in tow, pushed the big coach pram down the hill to see it pass. They found themselves standing by a lorry, whose driver invited them into his cab so they could get a better view.

  In the beginning she was simply ‘the baby’. The baby cried a great deal in the early months, and only after she was weaned did she start to sleep. There was help from Penelope, who now had a second little sister to mother. When Helen went into Bury to shop, the baby with her big blue eyes was much admired. As soon as Vicky was old enough to walk, Rosalind would take her up the road to loiter at the nearby factory gates around lunchtime when the workers were streaming out: ‘Because she had these amazing ringlets, they would stop and say, “Oh she looks like Diana Dors!” And I could get sixpence.’ The money, which she shared, brought Victoria her first earnings.

  The house was a red-brick end-of-terrace to the north of the town centre. Its acquisition was, like the car, another mark of the Woods’ post-war progress. Helen and Stanley met at a Communist Youth League event on Boxing Day in 1937 when she was eighteen and he twenty-five. They had almost nothing in common. Stanley’s father worked for the Post Office in Manchester, which allowed the family to live in relative comfort in respectable Chorlton-cum-Hardy. He was an only child both indulged and neglected by his mother Eleanor, who was keen on golf and bridge and farming her son out for long periods to relatives. He grew up inured to solitude. From his mother he inherited tapering cheeks that hinted at smirking amusement; he would pass them down to Victoria. Stanley had a cheerful, even childlike, temperament and a tendency to slip out of confrontations. A gifted musician, he played the piano in big jazz orchestras and a piano accordion in his own trio, and would boast that he could play stride piano so fast you couldn’t see his hands. He wrote songs with waggish lyrics. One went, ‘I’m Carmen Miranda / I need a veranda.’

  Helen Mape, initially known as Ellen, was one of six surviving children who grew up in poverty. Her father, injured in the Great War, was unable to work, obliging her mother to make ends meet as a cotton spinner in the mill opposite their terrace, while he did the cooking and the childcare. She was a strong-willed girl who earned a reputation for bossiness. In a memoir she began writing before Victoria’s birth, she described herself as good at the written word but argumentative with teachers and inclined to wander the streets reading a book. Despite her intelligence, there was no question of staying on at school beyond the age of fourteen, and she found a job as a runner in a steelworks, where she was the only female among hundreds of men. Although of Irish Catholic stock, she had from infancy been a junior member of the Independent Order of Rechabites, founded by Manchester Methodists in 1835 to promote temperance. She took part in Rechabite essay competitions – entrants roamed as freely as they might around the subject of abstinence from alcohol. In the year she was to meet Stanley she won first prize and was chief guest in a Manchester meeting where she was awarded £1. She read out her essay titled ‘Alcohol – Health and Citizenship’ in which she fearlessly denounced the Rechabite leadership as ‘old fossils’. Her photograph appeared in an edition of the Rechabite paper: aged seventeen her dark hair is pulled back from a round and beaming face. The caption refers to her as ‘Sis. Nellie Mape’. She disliked Nellie intensely enough to change her name to Helen – though Stanley furtively called her Nellie Mape in his diaries. He had similar misgivings about his own name and urged her to call him Stan. With typical contrariness, for the next fifty years she addressed him as Wood.

  Helen’s other interest was politics. She joined the Young Communist League, a provocation too far for her father, who exiled her from the family home. Social sniffiness penetrated even this supposedly egalitarian body. The Young Communists set out on regular rambles from Manchester, and Helen would tag along in her only shoes. ‘Next week wear some proper shoes,’ a woman once told her. One night aged eighteen she decided to tramp across the moors in Derbyshire on her own. The hiking story resurfaced as a boast by Kitty, the Cheadle battleaxe played by Patricia Routledge in As Seen on TV: ‘I’m something of a celebrity since I walked the Pennine Way in slingbacks in an attempt to publicise Mental Health.’

  Stanley was much taken by Helen’s forthright personality and physical amplitude. Victoria would inherit these from her mother, while her father handed down a talent for music. A year into their courtship, he took Helen to a studio to record a couple
of his own compositions, with him jaunty at the piano and her smartly keeping time with brush drumsticks. In ‘If I Were a Lad’, Stanley comically flattens his Lancashire vowels, then Helen joins in, warbling confidently as she dreams of changing gender: ‘An’ I’d play a boop-a-doop / And moan an’ groan an’ shriek / An’ I’d join a blooming jazz band at hundred quid a week.’

  In Helen, Stanley found an antidote to his mother’s snobbery, but they were so poor that at the cinema they couldn’t afford sweets and would munch on chopped carrot squares they brought in a paper bag. The memory would reappear half a century later in Wood and Walters. ‘In my day there was rarely money for sweets,’ says Dotty, a middle-aged agony aunt played by Julie Walters. ‘But we didn’t care. Quite happy sucking a twig or a ball bearing.’

  Stanley’s mother was not amused when he brought home a working-class communist who had a job and wore neither heels nor make-up. The two women were thrust upon each other when Helen fell pregnant. She and Stanley married in 1940 when she was four months from full term, and had no choice but to move in with his parents. Eleanor did not spurn the chance to undermine her daughter-in-law. Once when Helen was going out for a social occasion, she carped, ‘Oh look, she’s wearing a skirt and a top instead of a suit.’

  Stanley entered the insurance industry as a claims inspector before trying his hand at journalism. Then in 1941 he joined the navy and was stationed in Hampshire. Helen escaped with the baby Christopher into lodgings. From then on, says Penelope, Eleanor and Helen ‘had nothing whatsoever to do with each other’. In 1943 Stanley was transferred to Devonport, and Helen moved to Plymouth to be nearby. Victoria’s knowledge of Stanley’s war record was sketchy: ‘My father only ever said that he’d been in the navy and he had his teeth taken out, and he did sketches and songs and played the piano and was in a band and did naval revues.’2 Later, when he put on entertainments at jumble sales to raise money for charity, she remembered ‘something he did where men came on in army boots and tutus, so that’s probably a thing that people used to do in the war and think was funny’.3 He also edited the naval paper Guzz. Victoria put a fleeting tribute to his war record into the mouth of Kitty: ‘Where were you when they bombed Plymouth?’

  In 1945 Penelope was born. To feed his growing family, Stanley had a go at writing fiction. In 1947 he had a novel published called Death on a Smoke Boat, for which he took the pseudonym Ross Graham. Set in the south-west in 1944, it told of the hunt for a fifth columnist sabotaging the estuary barges which sent up smokescreens to confuse German bombers. By now he was working as an agent for the Liberal Party in Bury, where he and Helen rented two rooms before moving to a modest semi in Ramsay Grove. With the birth of Rosalind in 1950 Stanley returned to insurance, joining Manufacturers Life of Canada, and the growing family moved up the hill to Tottington Road.

  The new home was large enough to accommodate Victoria when she arrived three years later. The sitting room was co-opted as a playroom where Stanley would spin music from his collection of 78rpm records on a wind-up gramophone. The furniture was pushed aside and, once she could walk, Victoria would dance like mad with her sisters to Harry Roy’s ‘Tiger Rag’ and the ragtime of Trinidadian pianist Winifred Atwell. Upstairs in her tiny box bedroom, Penelope devised games for her little sisters, who shared a bigger bedroom. The Three Boys, inspired by Dickens, cast the girls as maltreated boarding-school orphans who stole bread from the kitchen. With Helen having embarked on a secretarial course, Penelope would make her sisters’ tea, bathe them in front of the fire and tell them stories: ‘They were so sweet when they put on their little Winceyette nighties and had damp hair. I just loved them; they were like big dollies.’

  Behind a row of gardens around the back a gate gave access to stone steps which plummeted down through dense jungle-like vegetation towards a brook. Penelope led the way and mucked in with the rough boys who mustered under a low-hanging canopy of branches, fashioning weapons from Japanese knotweed. Rosalind and little Vicky nervously held back and watched. Just upstream was a paper mill which spilled its coloured dyes into the water, so their clothes came back with tidemarks of orange or blue or yellow or green until eventually Helen forbade the girls to paddle. In winter, when it was too cold and dark to play outside, a television was hired. Victoria’s earliest viewing consisted of Muffin the Mule and The Woodentops.

  Helen was not sociable and kept her distance from the Mapes. As a result, Victoria met few children of her own age. When her big sisters, whom she called Leppy and Lollind, left for school every morning she yearned to follow them. She would hurl herself at the front door and holler, ‘Lollind and Leppy, me go cool!’ When she was three, Victoria devised a strategy for being noticed. She would hide in the pantry and pop out wearing a comic face and weirdly contorting her body. ‘She must have done it when she was just with Mummy,’ says Rosalind, ‘and she said, “You must show everybody when they come home from school.” So we all lined up and she came out and we all applauded.’ The routine became formal enough to be known as ‘Faces’. ‘Do another!’ they’d all yell, and she’d run back into the kitchen. ‘She really made us wait before she came out.’ This was Victoria’s earliest memory of performance and her first intoxicating taste of audience appreciation: ‘It just gave me a good feeling. It was just something very, very deeply rooted and instinctive. I didn’t feel I had any choice in the matter.’4

  Victoria dated her craving for fame to this formative age. She remembered ‘sitting in our garden in Tottington Road and wanting be famous’.5 Her other goal was to be a man: ‘When I was about three, I didn’t know that if you were a girl you had to grow up to be a woman … I thought you could choose at eighteen which you wanted to be, and I wanted to be a man. I didn’t want to be a girl at all … I never liked girly things; I never liked frilly frocks.’6 Her songs and stand-up would burst with mannish schoolgirls and men who wear dresses or go under the knife.

  In early photographs the blonde curls soon straightened and darkened. Her hair was cropped into a bob or trained into bunches. Aged one she sits on Stanley’s knee at the beach in a bright dress, white socks and sandals, laughing. Wearing a smart coat with a bonnet she looks shyly away from the lens as Helen leans down and clutches her shoulders from behind. A year or so older, the little girl who dreams of celebrity stands to attention in a striped jumper, tartan skirt and zip-up ankle boots. She never made faces for the camera, unlike the extroverted Rosalind.

  Rosalind kept a diary. A snapshot from the first months of 1958 glimpses the four-year-old Victoria taking part wherever she could and looking on when she couldn’t:

  Vicky brought us a biscuit each instead of breakfast … I came home and peeping out of the window was Vicky … Vicky and I danced. Mummy and Daddy are going to a party, so I went to bed and Vicky too and Penelope began to twizz us … We played at giants and me and Vicky were children … took Vicky for a walk … went to Brownies with Vicky … We had dinner and went to the pictures to see Bambi and went home and had tea and went outside and played with our jewels and Vicky had a jewel box and Mummy gave her some and we went to bed … I was a girl baby and Vicky was a boy baby … VICKY’S BIRTHDAY.

  On 13 April 1958, the month before she turned five, Victoria was finally able to follow her sisters out of the door in the morning to attend Elton Primary nearby. Her previously narrow world expanded vastly from one day to the next: ‘You stood by the front gate till you were five and suddenly you had a quick spit wash and you were in a brick building with forty-seven other children. “How has this happened? Who are these? I’ve never seen any people of my height.” I thought I was the only child in Bury. I didn’t realise there were others. It was a terrible shock.’7 After two days at school she reported back to her parents that she had acquired three boyfriends and was ‘in a quandary as to which one to marry’.8

  The decision was taken out of her hands as she was there for only a term. The Woods were leaving Tottington Road. On the youngest member of the family the move wa
s to have an immeasurable impact.

  2

  HOUSE ON THE EDGE

  ‘At the top of Castle Hill Rd you turn left and just follow the road for about a mile, it becomes more of a track as it goes on, and my house is opposite the Golf Course and is (or was) a double fronted bungalow in a very big garden with fields behind.’

  Directions to television researcher, 1996

  When she entered her teens, Victoria was given a handsome photograph album. ‘Vicky Wood,’ she wrote on the opening page. ‘May 19th 1966. aged 13’. Below is a snap of Birtle Edge House, where she had lived for the previous eight years. ‘OUR HOUSE,’ she captioned it in red capitals. And above she added a parenthesis: ‘(WHERE IT ALL HAPPENED.)’

  What exactly did happen at Birtle? On the one hand, almost everything that went into forming her. On the other, almost nothing. Victoria would characterise it as ‘a prefab on steroids’.1 Helen first spotted an advertisement in the Bury Times for a former children’s holiday home overlooking the Rossendale valley. Stanley did not share her enthusiasm, put off by the price but also its poor state of repair. It was built in 1908 as a rural bolthole for Bury’s disadvantaged children. Among the more recent occupants had been Polish refugees during the war. A handsome red-brick exterior with elegant original features had long since been protected from the elements by cement render. The house had no electricity or running water, and no sewage system, and being a bungalow its expanse of roof was in constant need of fixing. The same went for the wind-buffeted windows. The courtyard had a delicately canopied colonnade, inserted by an architect who took an optimistic view of the house’s situation.