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

by Jasper Rees

  As she got to know the rhythms of life and language in Morecambe, she was inspired to write a radio sitcom about putting on a summer show there, drawing on local characters she’d encountered and riffing on the fun she and Geoffrey had playing bingo and slot machines in Snappyland and Bermudiana on the sea front. The commission came from Bob Oliver Rogers, a young radio producer she’d worked with on Beetles and Buckman’s Open Window. ‘I’m writing a radio comedy,’ she told her university friend Chrissie Poulter. ‘At least it’s supposed to be a comedy – hard to tell.’60 She called it Sunny Side Up. The opening episode, titled ‘All Quiet on Pigwood Front’, introduced Audrey Coakley, a girl in her twenties who has been left a coach ticket to Pigwood on Sea in her late aunt’s will. Various people bemoan the decrepitude of the town and its inhabitants, who ‘only wear their hearing aids at the weekend’. Audrey wonders how long it is since anybody won anything on the pier’s ancient fruit machine. ‘I can’t remember,’ she’s told, ‘but whoever it was left their gas mask behind.’ The pier looks ‘like a council house on a stick’. The script included Victoria’s first ever use of one of her favourite words. Audrey’s aunt got on her nerves because ‘she was always leaving macaroons in the toilet’. Rogers sent the script back, complaining that it had too many jokes: ‘I thought, how can there be too many jokes in something?’61 Sadly he died aged only twenty-nine and Sunny Side Up fell by the wayside.

  That winter Victoria acquired her first car, a clapped-out Mini Van in which she drove herself and Geoffrey to gigs. It was so unreliable they had to factor in extra journey time in case it broke down. While there were not many gigs to drive to, at least Victoria and Geoffrey had each other. ‘We came together as two people who wanted to be soloists,’ he says. ‘Vic and I gave each other the nerve to be what we had always thought we might be.’ His quest to become a magician gave Victoria something to think about besides her own career. ‘We spend many happy evenings with me tying his thumbs together,’ she told Rosalind, ‘or picking a card out of a trick pack.’62 Her live show had become a patchy source of income and a reliable cause of depression. At the heart of the problem was her lack of technique, brought on by paralysing shyness: ‘I would get a live gig and die on my arse ’cause I was so dreadful. I just sat there with my back to the audience, mumbled my way through twelve songs without any patter and they were bored stiff after three minutes. I was never booked to come back.’63 One performance at a student ball, when she was unable to hold the attention of a wildly drunk young audience, typified her experiences: ‘I felt so embarrassed when the social secretary came up and gave me the money and said, “Of course it’s not your fault. You were terrific.” And you know they don’t mean it. And they grudgingly count out 150 quid and you think, I haven’t done anything to deserve this money.’64

  There was a cautious boost for her confidence as a writer when Geoffrey encouraged Victoria to send Sunny Intervals to the Young Vic in London, which specialised in children’s entertainment. Denise Coffey, a director at the theatre, applauded the quality of the script while regretting that they couldn’t stage it, but she did invite them both to do a Saturday morning children’s entertainment in November. The Mini Van broke down three times on the M1 on the way south to perform ‘a play with music and magic’ that they wrote together and called Abracawhat? In a send-up of a standard magic show, Victoria played a woman who applies to become the assistant of the Great Soprendo:

  GS:I’m the Great Soprendo, Spanish man of mystery.

  VW:I’m Maureen, I’m not really mysterious, am I?

  GS:Don’t worry, I can be mysterious enough for both of us.

  VW:What will I do?

  GS:You can walk behind me explaining.

  Victoria sprinkled the script with references to Morecambe and her grandmother’s home town Chorlton-cum-Hardy, and did the two tricks she had learned. ‘The whole thing is a complete ego trip,’ she said soon afterwards in her oldest surviving radio interview. ‘I’ve certainly never got a grip of cabaret, so it seems the theatre is the safest place to put me. I don’t get heckled so much. It doesn’t mean you land in the scampi and chips at least.’65

  The interview was recorded late in 1977 for Sounds Local on Radio Blackburn. Victoria performed seven songs as part of a half-hour broadcast, among them staples written for Wordplay or The Summer Show. A new song expressed an aversion to the jubilee (‘Dear Queen, I cannot have a party in my street / Because I live between a mental home / And a workshop that makes artificial feet’). A perky song inhabited the mind of a Bunty-reading eleven-year-old convent girl asking favours of God such as ‘I’d either like to be a star / Or first in the class to wear a bra’. Her interviewer Wendy Howard shrewdly picked up on the stark contrast between the introvert who timidly mumbled her answers and the extrovert who sang boldly opinionated lyrics. ‘You seem to be very much an anti-person, a loner,’ she suggested. ‘I don’t like joining in things very much,’ Victoria agreed. ‘I tend to sit back and watch. I don’t like to compete with other people because I think I won’t win so I don’t join in and then I can’t lose, which may not be a very sensible way to live your life, I suppose.’66

  Sounds Local was broadcast on the first day of 1978 during a desperate period for Victoria with no income aside from a welcome repeat fee for The Camera and the Song. She had no work ethic to speak of: ‘I would do anything rather than sit down and work. Even when I had sat down at the table I would look up all my friends’ addresses in the A to Z, I would eat wine gums in a certain order, I’d plait my hair, I would work out different eye make-ups. But it sort of counted because I was sitting at the desk.’67

  Victoria was fearful of rejection after sending out tapes that came straight back. ‘They hear me and the piano and they think how boring,’ she told Wendy Howard. ‘I don’t really blame them.’68 Without an agent she had no easy means of putting herself in the public eye. She made an overture to Richard Stone, who represented Benny Hill and various sitcom actors. Lynda Ronan, who looked after cabaret for the agency, was sent to watch her at a small club off Tottenham Court Road: ‘She was painfully shy and raucously funny. I told her that I was bowled over but didn’t know what I was going to do with her because she was such a one-off.’ Victoria was all too familiar with this verdict.

  She spent the first half of the year drawing the dole and waiting for the phone to ring. ‘It’s v easy to sign on,’ she told Robert Howie. ‘I had a bit of trouble with them offering me jobs – 18 weeks on the beach as a kind of red coat.’69 While she waited she read up to three books a day, played bingo, enjoyed walking around town and went to keep-fit. The woman running the class, who used to be on the stage, loftily told her ‘it’s only luck anyway’ and mentioned friends ‘who “write very funny songs” but haven’t had the breaks’.70 Victoria hoped there was more to it than blind luck but, as she turned twenty-five in May, she did badly need a stroke of good fortune.

  8

  TALENTS

  ‘Julie – on a rainy day,

  You’re the girl that sings the clouds away.’

  Talent, 1978

  When the break came, it came quickly. The Bush, a tiny boxlike theatre above a pub in west London, was planning a topical revue for the summer of 1978. The show, titled In at the Death, was being created at short notice after another production had fallen through. More than a year after their previous appearances together, Victoria and John Dowie had three dates in early June at the Battersea Arts Centre. The Bush’s artistic director Dusty Hughes spotted something that nobody had yet remarked on: ‘She had a lovely warm relationship with the audience, who took to her straight away. I wasn’t sure that she would be interested but we needed music in the show.’ Victoria, who had to decide fast, as work was to begin in days, accepted but turned down his offer to be in it. ‘I just wanted to write the songs,’ she said, ‘because it was on for three weeks and I thought that was a terribly long time to be in anything and I didn’t like Shepherd’s Bush.’1

 
Victoria’s first encounter with the five other older male writers was not encouraging. They met in Clapham at the home of the playwright Snoo Wilson, who had recently installed a vintage guard’s van in his garden – the roof needed putting on and he enlisted the writers to help him. ‘It’s where I first heard the word “macho”,’ she would recall. ‘Oh God, I don’t like these people.’2

  ‘Victoria was a bit overwhelmed by the high bohemian large house,’ says Dusty Hughes. ‘Although she was good-natured about it, there was the feeling of “you London trendies putting something together and I’m going to be the antidote to that”.’ She gave vent to that anarchic spirit when meeting Ron Hutchinson, another of the writers, at the National Theatre. Spotting a poster advertising a play of his, she jumped up, disassembled the frame, rolled up the poster and handed to him. ‘You’d better have that,’ she said.

  The material for the new show at the Bush was to be drawn from events covered in that week’s news. Unpromisingly for a comic songwriter, it had to be about death. Yet Victoria felt liberated: ‘For the first time I wasn’t being told exactly what to do. I was able to look through the papers, and write about things I actually cared about.’3 She came up with a song inspired by London Zoo’s most famous inhabitant, a gorilla who died in an operation on his teeth after the public fed him too many sweets. She treated the chorus as a rhyming challenge: ‘Guy the Gorilla, Guy the Gorilla / Died of chocolate / Not usually a killer / In cottage flat and villa / They’re crying on their piller …’ More seriously, she wrote about a girl having an abortion and a teenage motorcyclist killed in a police chase. Her most enduring song was prompted by the acquittal of a man who had helped his dying wife commit suicide. Victoria took the story as a springboard to imagine a widower who, through embarrassment, missed his chance to tell his wife he loved her. With a simple delicate accompaniment and barely any rhymes, ‘Love Song’ was freighted with melancholy:

  Made your breakfast this morning like any old day

  And then I remembered, and I threw it away.

  For the first time Victoria was ‘trying not to be clever, or put in complicated rhymes to show off, but to say what I wanted to say as simply as possible’.4

  When the cast assembled, she played her songs and was elated by the reaction but still felt no incentive to be in the show: ‘I sat on Shepherd’s Bush Green with my boyfriend. I said, “This is really horrible round here.” Three weeks seemed like an awfully long time. I only did about three jobs a year so the idea of doing eighteen consecutive shows was like being in The Mousetrap for ten years.’5 Her view changed when she heard one of the actresses telling stories about nursing: ‘She was very attractive, and she had this sleeveless waistcoat on and these jeans tucked into cowboy boots. I just thought she was a really friendly person.’6 Her name was Julie Walters, and Victoria dredged up a memory of her audition for Manchester Polytechnic: ‘Vic said, “We’ve met before,” and I said, “No we haven’t. What do you mean? When?” She said, “I auditioned.” Then I remembered in my first year I was used as an usher, which I loved. An image of this little girl flashed up. “Oh my God, I do remember you being sick in a bucket.”’ That evening Victoria took the news to Jane Wynn Owen’s flat in Highgate, where she and Geoffrey were staying. ‘Oh, I know Julie Walters!’ said Geoffrey, having lived in the flat beneath her and Pete Postlethwaite in 1974 when they were all with the Liverpool Everyman.

  Julie’s presence made it easier for Victoria to join the company: ‘I thought, oh well, maybe if she’s going to be in this it actually could be quite fun to be in.’7 They were soon peeling off from the cast to lunch on liver boil and peas at the Café Rest in Goldhawk Road. On one occasion, they got stuck down a cul-de-sac in Victoria’s Mini Van, necessitating a three-point turn in which she dented a garden wall. ‘Don’t listen to me,’ her new friend advised her. ‘I don’t know what I’m saying half the time.’8 Instead Victoria listened as she had never listened to anyone before. ‘We made one another laugh straight away,’ says Julie. ‘It was cruel taking the piss out of other people. Awful we were, but it made us really laugh. God help someone if they were snobbish or silly. There was a chap in the cast. He had very stretchy Y-fronts. Probably needed a bit of a rinse. And we used to be in fits about this.’ One day they were looking down into Shepherd’s Bush Green and spotted Harold Pinter on the pavement below. Through the bay window Julie hollered, ‘Hey, Harold, you write plays, don’t you?’ ‘He looked rather bemused,’ says Julie. ‘Slightly cross at being shouted at.’

  In fact, there was a fresh source of material in-house. When Snoo Wilson failed to submit one of his pieces, Victoria sniffed an opportunity and asked if she could write something. Practised at composing songs to order, one lunchbreak she repaired to the ladies and, with Julie’s voice in her head, wrote at speed. The sketch she tentatively presented was titled ‘Sex’ and was set in a northern library. Julie was to play a naive librarian dumped by a man called Brett after a one-night stand. Victoria was a housewife who is scathing about sex and, in particular, the absurdity of male genitalia:

  I mean the basic equipment’s so ridiculous – how’s he expected to take you to the brink of ecstasy with something that looks like a school dinner without the custard?

  Victoria’s housewife is planning to send off for a test-tube baby (topically, the first baby ever conceived by this method was born in Manchester during the show’s run). Julie’s librarian, by contrast, thinks she may be pregnant and worries about the cost of an abortion:

  J:I’m only on 23 pounds 50 and I’m still paying my fine for shop lifting.

  V:What happened?

  J:A duvet fell into my shopping bag.

  Every night the line caused a detonation of laughter. In walks a hippie (played by Alison Fiske), who regards lentils as a contraceptive:

  A:What exactly is the problem?

  J:My period’s late.

  A:How late?

  J:Five minutes.

  A:When did intercourse take place?

  J:Beg pardon?

  A:Where are you in the menstrual cycle?

  J:Taurus.

  Victoria came to consider the sketch, and specifically this set-up and pay-off, as a life-changing revelation: ‘It was after four years of trying to be funny and being nearly funny, which is awful, I was funny. And then I knew how you wrote a joke.’9 She likened the discovery to striking a gong. Integral to this new sensation was an instinctive knowledge that she should not hoard the best lines when, in Julie, she had found someone she could be funny with: ‘When we stood on stage doing that sketch – and we both loved doing it – it gave me such a boost. You think, ah, now I know – now I know what I’m doing.’10 Julie had the same sense of a tectonic plate shifting: ‘The first night we did it, the audience had been quite muted. Her sketch just brought the house down. I’ll never forget “Taurus”. It was fabulous every night. I couldn’t wait to do that sketch. That really bonded us. I remember thinking the heavens had sent her to me, that she knew me. In my arrogance as a young person I thought no one else could do this but me. It was “she’s written this specially, uniquely for me”.’

  In at the Death opened in July. To the amusement of the cast, before every performance Victoria washed her hair in the basin and prepared her face with make-up she carried around in an art box: ‘It was important to me because I thought I was an act. I wasn’t an actress, I was a turn and I had to have a proper turn’s box. I’d do this great elaborate sketch by make-up and used to look like the back of the bus.’11 While Victoria enjoyed working with professional actors, she didn’t think highly of the show, nor the backstage facilities: ‘If you wanted a wee, you had to go down into Goldhawk Road and mingle with the audience in your costume, which, if you were dressed as I was, in grey flannel shorts and ankle socks, was a bit dodgy. So the ladies of the cast tended to rely for short-term relief on handy beer glasses, which from indolence we would leave on the windowsill of Dusty’s office. This led to the often-heard cry, �
�Don’t drink that lager!”’12 One night Victoria had an accident. ‘We were all onstage except her,’ says Julie. ‘There was a great crash backstage and she’d knocked one of them down the stairs. There was all this bloody wee all over people’s costumes.’

  It wasn’t difficult for the national critics to pick Victoria out. She spent most of the play upstage at the keyboard and when she first stood up to appear in a sketch by Ron Hutchinson about Northern Irish brickies she didn’t speak – she joked that thanks to her inability to do the accent she was cast as a deaf mute. So when she performed ‘Sex’, the impact was powerful. There was a cascade of praise: ‘Victoria Wood stands out in a vigorous company.’13 ‘Miss Wood is a real discovery, of whom much more is certain to be heard both as writer and performer.’14 ‘An outstanding comic and chanteuse.’15 ‘She gets more fun and more poetry out of Manchester speech than I have heard for years.’16 One reviewer issued a warning: ‘I am going to be very very angry if Ms Wood doesn’t get discovered in a biggish way very soon.’17