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

by Jasper Rees

  Victoria’s confidence took a further blow while she was on tour. Jude Kelly’s Solent People’s Theatre had already embarked on their first tour of pubs and clubs, and in the Stage announced a Christmas musical ‘which is being written by Victoria Wood for the company’.23 The autumn season leaflet went into some detail about the plot: ‘This riotous adaption of that age-old fable “Beauty and the Beast” combines ludicrous situations with lively entertainment.’ The script which Victoria submitted, typed out by Geoffrey with a cassette of song demos enclosed, didn’t quite adhere to this blurb. She heard nothing back for a nerve-racking fortnight until the deafening silence was broken. ‘Jude turned my script down on the grounds that it was badly written, unfunny, too short, unsubtle etc etc,’ she told Robert Howie. ‘She asked me to go down and write them another scenario for the actors to improvise on, and I could write down what they improvised. She said it would be stimulating for me. I declined. I wasn’t really in the mood for stimulation.’24 Her first attempt to broaden her professional portfolio had ended in rejection.

  ‘It could not have come at a worse time,’ says Geoffrey. ‘She was going through this desperate uncertainty and not sure if anything she did was any good or not.’ One person who could still be relied upon was John Clarke. In October he commissioned Victoria to write music for a studio discussion in which six guests criticised one element of Midland life. He titled it Knockers. On top of £35, Victoria got two more quid when it was repeated in January. It was her last commission from him, and their connection fizzled out. ‘She kept reappearing on Pebble Mill,’ says Clarke, ‘and every time she called my office and I was out. So I wasn’t able to renew our acquaintance.’

  Victoria’s precarious position communicated itself to her father when she stayed at Birtle Edge House while recording a pilot for Radio 2 in Manchester with Beetles and Buckman in mid November. He drove her to the recording and sat in the audience wishing it was for television: ‘All very good. Let’s hope it comes off. (But only radio.)’25 The next month her parents motored down to Leicester to be introduced to Geoffrey, who was appearing in The Tempest. ‘Vicky was cussing surphuriously [sic] under her breath all the time in the theatre,’ wrote Stanley, ‘because the M.D. was hopeless, the lighting appalling, the direction putrid, and Geoffrey did not get a square deal at all.’26 Of her new boyfriend they greatly approved. Stanley described him to Rosalind as ‘a big rather moon-faced lad with specs and a gentle amiable manner’.27 ‘He is the cuddly type. (Didn’t say so, of course),’ added Helen.28 Geoffrey for his part was shocked by Helen’s volcanic bossiness in the passenger seat: ‘Whatever he said, she would say, “OH WOOD. YOU SILLY MAN! OH WOOD, YOU DO ANNOY ME! WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, WOOD, YOU FOOL!” I’ve never heard anyone speak so loudly in a car.’ When they visited Birtle Edge House, he was able to observe for himself the tendency of everyone to keep to separate rooms; this status quo extended to him and Victoria, who were expected to sleep apart. He pronounced the kitchen the filthiest he had ever seen.

  Geoffrey was appearing in his third Shakespeare that autumn and was close to the end of his tether. ‘Poor old Geoffrey is practically at screaming point at the Phoenix,’ Victoria wrote. In rehearsal the company would lie on their backs and share the previous night’s dreams: ‘Geoff always denies having dreamt anything, which always launches a full discussion about how interesting and they wonder why that is.’29 His actual dream was to become a full-time magician. After commuting throughout the autumn between Leicester and Birmingham, practising tricks on trains and in waiting rooms, he handed in his notice and moved permanently to Priory Road in early 1977.

  Everything was changing in Birmingham, where the last of Victoria’s friendship group had graduated the previous summer. The romantic agonies of the ones who stayed on provided comic fodder in her gleeful letters but were also an exhausting source of tension. Victoria even fantasised about ‘attempting to break off diplomatic relations’ with a particularly trying friend.30 ‘When/if I get an agent and jobs,’ she added, ‘I’ll be able to nip around a bit more and see my real friends.’ She’d heard that an agent was interested in her, but nothing came of it. That January she sold two jumpers to a friend ‘to boost my finances’. In February she found herself down to her last 10p ‘so I can either go somewhere on the bus and walk back or have a bath’.31 That winter she and Geoffrey shivered under a duvet lent to them by Rosalind. The only warm place in the flat was the bathroom, to which Geoffrey retired to read in the bath whenever Victoria was writing. As she found she worked best in the owlish hours of the night, theirs was an unconventional bedsit romance.

  Victoria still had enough self-belief to acquire her first personalised stationery, an off-the-shelf set of cards with a V printed in two solid black blocks. Later she would frame her ambitions for this period as modest: ‘to get off the dole … to have enough income to get a mortgage and to get a car’.32 But the distance from her true goal, to achieve stardom through performing her compositions, was the cause of much anguish. The reality was that the stage persona she communicated through her songs, some funny but others downbeat, was simply not outgoing enough to make it happen. One night she was booked as the second half of a concert at the Centre for the Arts in Birmingham, the first half consisting of orchestral Vivaldi and Mozart. ‘Victoria Wood entertains,’ said the flyer. ‘(DIDN’T)’ she added in her scrapbook.

  At least she and Geoffrey were in the same boat. She pictured the pair of them as the Start-Rite kids, after the advertisement for children’s shoes featuring an animation of a boy and a girl walking optimistically along a path towards the horizon. ‘We are both writing off to agents etc, hoping to blossom into professionalism and prosperity soon,’ she told Robert Howie, who was appearing in panto in Swansea.33 In February, when they took their first holiday together to visit him, he recommended Victoria to the manager of the Swansea Grand: ‘He’d seen her on New Faces. I said, “Why on earth wouldn’t you book her?” He said, “Oh no, people don’t think that sort of thing is funny.”’

  So when they came in the spring, the piecemeal dates organised by John Dowie through his contacts were ‘like the sun coming out,’ says Geoffrey. ‘John was like a ray of sunshine for her. He was completely new.’ Like Jasper Carrott, Dowie had a halo of ringlets and a thick Brummie accent, but his act swivelled away from the mainstream towards what would later be identified as alternative comedy. Waif-thin, barefooted and decked out in zany costumes, he chased laughs down dark alleys. Singing in a neurotic punkish drone, he twitted English xenophobia in ‘British Tourist (I Hate the Dutch)’; ‘I Don’t Want to Be Your Amputee’ was his taste-free rant about romance gone wrong (‘the day you cut my left leg off you caught me on the hop’). Victoria’s songs followed her own preoccupations. Her opening contribution was ‘Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Fat’, written in 1974 to challenge the myth of the cheerfully overweight person. It was pronounced the ‘high spot of the evening’34 at their sparsely attended first performance at the Birmingham Rep Studio by a critic from the Birmingham Post, who didn’t see the irony of describing Victoria as ‘plump and jolly’.35 Another critic applauded her ‘better-than-Jake-Thackeray [sic] songs’.36 That night Victoria rang home ‘sounding very pleased,’ said Helen, ‘and hurrying off to be interviewed on the radio’.37

  ‘I’m definitely not a song machine,’ she told a journalist before they performed in Sunderland, admitting her dissatisfaction with the process of writing topical songs to order.38 Working with Dowie released her from that treadmill. ‘The show I’m doing now is more my thing,’ she told Rosalind. ‘It’s with a guy called John Dowie who does songs about amputees and cripples and halibut.’39 There was some truth in one of their cheerful promo images, which had them perched on a stepladder with Victoria seemingly propped on her co-star’s shoulders. In another she climbed up a stepladder and planted a foot on his head.

  John Dowie had checked up on Victoria in performance before they started to write together and,
noticing that she rushed from one song to the next, gave her notes about developing some patter. ‘But she had very little chance to develop that,’ he says. ‘It was ad-libbed.’ They assembled the show over a couple of months in Birmingham. There was a session or two at Priory Road, where Victoria’s co-writer sampled her catering: ‘She made a disgusting meal once. I don’t think in those days her cooking skills were very pronounced.’ He brought his own repertoire of sketches. One was a script from The Archers with, to save time, all the vowels removed. They wrote material together, including the set-up in which Victoria played a Women’s Institute secretary in a tweed suit and slingbacks. ‘The original idea was that we’d do a whole show based around some kind of a theme,’ says Dowie. ‘We had the beginning of it and thought, oh, that’s all we need.’ In another sketch he played a husband leafing through a sex manual. ‘I was saying, “Let’s try this to liven up the marriage. Let’s start with foreplay. There’s only two of us. Oh well, never mind.” I think she probably wrote the punchline, which was “Oh sod this, I’m going off for a fuck.” Our humour was a little broad.’

  Mostly they performed alone – another song in Victoria’s set was her murder-mystery parody ‘If Only the Blood Matched My Dress’. They soon found that, their acts being so far apart in style, only one of them stood a chance of being to the taste of any given audience. If he got laughs, she wouldn’t, and vice versa. Thus every night one of them died. When performing in Cardiff they imagined the final tantrum of a dying comic. ‘We decided that the ultimate route for that kind of comedian was to go “fuck shit tit wank bollocks!” and then stalk off,’ says Dowie. ‘So every time we crossed over, the one who did badly would always go to the other one, “fuck shit tit wank bollocks”.’ Not that audiences were ever substantial. It prompted Dowie to wonder out loud whether a veteran of New Faces and That’s Life! might have drawn more of a crowd. ‘She was a bit miffed.’

  That spring another avenue opened up when the publicist at the Phoenix Theatre suggested Geoffrey and Victoria do consecutive late nights in Leicester. To prepare she sat in Leicester Library and wrote her first ever comic monologue. Expanding on the incomplete idea hatched with Dowie, she chose the voice of a patronising Women’s Institute president who outlines forthcoming events such as a talk titled ‘Life has a lot to offer even if you’ve got no bowels’. Using the character’s voice Victoria took on a subject she had often addressed in her songs – the joylessness of sex in the marital bed. Reporting the results of a questionnaire on ‘the bedroom aspect’, she announced that ‘63 per cent said the best excuse was a headache – in fact most of them had had continuous migraines since the Coronation’. In search of something else to pad out the songs, she learned a couple of tricks which Geoffrey had bought and no longer had use for. She flagged one of them with a joke: ‘And now I’m going to get a man up.’ The trick involved putting a card unseen in an envelope, pretending to identify it wrongly and then getting it right. ‘She hated doing it,’ says Geoffrey, ‘because she hated talking to the member of the audience.’ The other was a decapitation trick involving a head-chopper device and a Black & Decker saw. The two nights were attended, she reported, by ‘the proverbial 2 lesbians and an Afghan’ on the first night and then ‘screaming hecklers who’d come mainly for the late bar’.40

  The low point of the tour with John Dowie was at a pub in the West Midlands, where in the back row there was someone with a portable iron lung which emitted distracting clunks and whirs. There was an uneasy silence when Dowie asked for the noise source to be switched off. The culmination of the tour was a week at the ICA in the Mall. Previewing the show, the Sunday Times described Victoria as ‘a rose with several thorns’.41 On their first night a band of teenage punks asked if they could perform in the interval, having been booted out of the coffee bar for making too much noise. Dowie agreed. Victoria appeared in her WI tweed two-piece with the skirt undone due to a broken zip. ‘Does anybody have a safety pin?’ she asked. Sundry punks extracted pins from lips and lobes and brows. Thus Victoria was present at the performance debut of Adam and the Ants. ‘We had a good review in Time Out,’ she told Robert Howie.42 It proclaimed Victoria ‘the evening’s revelation with her musical soliloquies on fat girls, convent schools, ante-college families, double talk, who-dunnits, and who didn’ts’.43

  Victoria would come to regard her dates with John Dowie as her first break into comedy, when she could feel herself edge in the right direction: ‘We never played to more than about seventeen people, and that was good experience because there was no pressure. The pressure was on him and I was just the support.’44 It coincided with a gravitational pull away from Birmingham, her home for the previous six years. The same month as the ICA dates, Geoffrey was asked up to the Duke’s Playhouse in Lancaster to act. When he told them he was a magician he was offered, sight unseen, a slot in their Victorian music-hall show at the theatre at the end of Morecambe pier. He barely had fifteen minutes of material, but it was enough to put him top of the bill: ‘I learnt how to be a magician in that show. It gave me a lifeline. Vic didn’t have that lifeline – she was sitting in a bedsit being the girlfriend. It was a really, really tough time.’ The gales and the rain also got to her. Geoffrey had to do a matinee a week outdoors from a bandstand on the promenade with the audience watching from deckchairs. The wind blew his cards away. ‘It was just next to the Aquarium,’ Victoria would recall. ‘I’d hear all this applause and it turned out they were clapping the bloody dolphins.’45

  More work came in, but none she found fulfilling. There was ‘an awful pilot for Thames which will never get on but I’m glad of the money’.46 Another client asking for topical songs was Start the Week, the Radio 4 flagship presented by the patrician BBC TV newsreader Richard Baker. She was booked by the producer Ian Gardhouse, who had seen her showcase with Beetles and Buckman at the Mermaid Theatre. ‘I have to be at the studio at 7.30 am,’ she told Rosalind. ‘Thank God it’s not television and no one will care about red piggy eyes and crumply hair.’47 The programme was often built around a topical theme. Victoria wrote a spiky attack on magazines which tell readers how to live their lives, based on advice its writers don’t follow themselves:

  On wobbly tables in seedy flats

  With fibreglass curtains that smell of cats

  Tiny minds type for a tiny fee

  Those jolly articles full of fun

  Crammed with sense and the occasional pun

  Are actually written by ratty old bags like me.

  She called it ‘Just Believe What You Like’ and was paid £30.

  Then came a call from Granada in Manchester. ‘I’ve just been writing songs for a programme called “Pandora’s Box” (puke),’ she told Roger McGough.48 The series, broadcast in late summer, featured Joan Bakewell as host discussing topical feminist issues with guests Victoria characterised as ‘people from “Spare Rib” magazine with dirty jeans’.49 She privately expressed unsisterly contempt for the format: ‘they all sit around for 6 interminable programmes whining about their ovaries’.50 The show began with Victoria at an upright piano playing a short feisty theme tune, then she sat through the talk ‘trying to keep awake long enough to sing my song (which of course comes at the end by which time the only people left listening are not the people I care to sing to)’.51

  Pandora’s Box was as close as she would ever stray to an overtly feminist project. At least in public, she made the right noises about equality, but she was wary of being a mouthpiece. ‘I mean I know I’ve got ’em,’ she would say of her own ovaries, ‘but I don’t want to sing about ’em.’52 Later in the year she did two nights at a women’s festival in London ‘and they were terribly boring’.53 She came to regard Pandora’s Box as a nadir. ‘I knew it was the end,’ she said. ‘I went into a decline and just sat at home moaning and whining. It’s all a bit of blank but for six months I couldn’t force myself to do anything. It was depressing and I was very unhappy.’54

  In September 1977 the Start-Rite kids
moved to Morecambe. Thus ended Victoria’s time in Birmingham. She still only had a provisional licence, and Geoffrey didn’t drive at all, so Celia Imrie drove the rented van with their effects up from Priory Road. The tailgate didn’t work so they had to lower everything up and then down via a three-foot ladder. The biggest problem was presented by Victoria’s blue upright piano. ‘Geoffrey and I are both Cancerians,’ says Celia, ‘and get into a terrible panic. He and I tried to lift this piano up the stairs. We were both shouting and screaming and sweating. It was pretty hellish actually. We had fish and chips afterwards.’

  Their new home was a rented maisonette in Oxford Street, a sloping terrace not far from the sea front. Freshly renovated, it was all floorboards and naked bulbs. The new tenants set to painting and putting up shelves which they filled with her vast library of paperbacks and his magic manuals. ‘As we are quite poor it is hard to get the things we’d like to furnish it,’ Victoria reported – they looked for bargains in an auction room round the corner.55 The homemaking process took a while. Months later her parents visited and Stanley found ‘Vicky slumped in a chair – with paste brush in her hand utterly exhausted’.56 He declared it ‘a smashing flat, very Bohemian/Chelsea/Habitat’. Spread over two floors, their new home provided room enough for two people with incompatible rhythms. Geoffrey could now sleep while Victoria, with a deadline looming, composed on the piano until six or seven in the morning.

  Geoffrey often heard her argue that moving to Morecambe ‘was a bad decision because we should have moved to London’. At the time her judgement had been clouded by Alan Bennett. Sunset Across the Bay, his tragicomedy for Play for Today directed by Stephen Frears about a couple from Leeds retiring to Morecambe, was broadcast in 1975: ‘I thought it would be funny to live there. Well it’s not funny to live somewhere just because you’ve seen it on the television. I mean it was mad.’57 They soon developed a love-hate relationship with the town. On national television the Mancunian stand-up Colin Crompton had characterised Morecambe as a ‘cemetery with lights’ where ‘they don’t bury their dead, they stand them up in bus shelters’. Victoria took up the theme of Morecambe as a living mortuary when she observed the bunting that lingered long after the celebrations for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. ‘I don’t think anybody’s told them it over,’ she said. ‘They probably don’t know the war is over in Morecambe.’58 The agedness of the population struck her when making a first foray into a local exercise class. ‘The women are all 83 yrs old (pretty young for Morecambe),’ she informed Robert Howie, ‘and have huge stomachs and spindly legs. They wear leotards covered with beige bouclé crimplene cardis, and ordinary tights. I created quite a stir in my bright red footless tights.’59