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

by Jasper Rees

  One visit to the flat Victoria did sanction was by a documentary crew from Thames Television. The English Programme observed her working at her desk as she explained her process in composing a song for the Equal Opportunities Commission. Geoffrey worked on a rope trick in front of her. They both found the intrusion of the film crew intensely awkward, and it showed. When the programme was broadcast in March, the contrast between the downcast eyes of the interviewee and the bright commanding gaze of the performer was conspicuous.

  Victoria’s introverted side could act as a drag anchor on her career. When a researcher from Parkinson came up to Morecambe to audition her for the most prestigious chat show on television, she clammed up and reported to Geoffrey that ‘the researcher had no idea who she was or what she might be able to offer and had annoyed her from the word go. So Vic’s shyness – perhaps better described as ennui or simple lack of interest – started to kick in. When that happened, nothing could shift it.’ She didn’t get on Parkinson for another twenty years.

  But there was plenty of other exposure to be had. In March, before an audience in Manchester, Victoria took part in the pilot episode of The Little and Large Party, to be broadcast on Radio 2. She sang ‘Never Spend a Fortnight on a Health Farm’ from all the way back in 1975. ‘We’d never really heard of her,’ says Eddie Large. ‘She seemed really shy and introverted and we were thinking, why have they booked this girl? As soon as she gets on the piano she was a genius.’ The rest of the songs, also from her back catalogue, were recorded and slotted in over the six-week series. She contributed songs to a Mother’s Day anthology on Radio 4 called The Price of Daffs Has Doubled and sang on Mid-Week: Russell Harty’s People. In April she made the first of many appearances on Call My Bluff, and formed a warm friendship with the avuncular wordsmith Arthur Marshall, whose passion for Crossroads matched her own.

  Victoria and Geoffrey had always avoided travelling for fear they’d miss out on a career-changing break if out of the country. When they took a spring holiday in southern Spain it was Victoria’s first time abroad since the Wood family caravan trips. Geoffrey assured her it would be hot. ‘We’re in Marbella watching the rain fall and English people being rude to the waiters,’ she told Rosalind on a postcard.37 They stayed in cheap B&Bs and got about in ancient trains. Among their holiday reading was Keith Waterhouse’s satire Office Life, which they read aloud to each other. Back at home Victoria sent the author a fan letter which soon resulted in lunch. She felt a kindred spirit with him because ‘like me he’s a jolly person who writes about sad things’.38

  In May Victoria embarked on a short northern tour of village community centres arranged by North West Arts. This was a way of staying in shape as a live comedian, but it was also an important step: at a time when this was still more or less unheard of, Victoria completed two halves of an evening’s entertainment. She was wary of making such a bold step – ‘I had to persuade her,’ says Geoffrey. With audiences minuscule wherever she went, it was a chastening comedown after the high of Funny Turns. Then, for several months, Victoria was chained to her desk. ‘Do come up and stay in the summer,’ she urged Robert Howie. ‘I’ll be here on my own most of the time writing episodes 2-8 of “Wood and Walters”. (I’ve just been paid for it all, which has made it all frighteningly definite.)’39 To Rosalind she described herself ‘chewing a biro every night trying to write sketches’.40 Helpfully, Peter Eckersley remained happy for her to submit existing songs, and Jim Parker was set to work ‘Music and Movement’, ‘Don’t Get Cocky’, ‘Fourteen Again’, ‘Love Song’, ‘Comedienne’ and ‘If Only the Blood Matched My Dress’. There would also be guests, among them Jill Summers and John Dowie. To look for fiery young alternative talent, Eckersley took Victoria to one of the new comedy clubs in London. Rik Mayall was booked and alarmed Victoria when he mentioned a new comic pairing: ‘He said, “Have you heard about these girls French and Saunders?” I thought, I don’t like the sound of them. We don’t need more girls in comedy, thank you. I kept well clear of them for years.’41

  As she wrote, Victoria was encouraged by her producer. ‘You did say keep the thoughts coming,’ he wrote, proposing she be inspired by a Janet Reger underwear catalogue or an item from National Lampoon magazine about homosexual beekeepers. He envisaged a slow pan ‘of girls in boob tubes. The first three look really like sisters, then the slow pan reveals mum, dad, suckling child … Can’t think of a punchline. This is what is known as an ill-formed idea.’42 Victoria worked it up into a parody of the clean-cut Irish girl group in gold-lamé tunics who include an alcoholic, a nymphomaniac and kleptomaniac, with a lead singer who would rather work a till at the Co-op. She called it ‘The Reluctant Nolan’ and on the lyric sheet specified that it should be sung by ‘Vic and three genuine singers preferably a current sister act’. Eckersley’s suggestions could be quite vague: ‘two women in adjoining hospital beds’; ‘two women on a coach-tour’.43 He warmed to her Women’s Institute character from Funny Turns and suggested a weekly monologue on training dogs or sex education or cosmetics. While Victoria did do her WI speech, the regular item became Dotty’s Slot, in which Julie dispensed tips on a random variety of topics: burning bras, flatulence, insulating your loft with dog biscuits, culture (‘I think Shakespeare did awfully well for a Brummie’). Victoria used Dotty as a way of savaging middle-class pretension: she receives one letter from a woman ‘with all the trappings of success – a loft conversion, a ceramic hob and a daughter with anorexia’.

  Eckersley couldn’t let one old idea go without a fight: a pair of characters who discuss life and love in a weekly sketch. ‘Could we make them two barmaids? (Called, perhaps, Julie and Maureen.)’ He imagined them crushing the romantic approaches of ‘various smoothies, oiks and dickheads’.44 He would sign off affectionately: ‘All the best, kid. P’; ‘Love, Pete’.

  His letters also covered the recording of the soundtrack for Happy Since I Met You, which took place in Manchester towards the end of July. Victoria’s uncertainty about the drama lingered. ‘The producer and I had another 15 minutes taken out of it,’ she told Robert Howie, ‘and that improved it a lot.’45 Billed as ‘a love story with songs’, it was broadcast on 9 August. ‘And hammered on Monday Aug 10,’ she wrote on a clipping she cut out of a TV preview page.46 In fact, although it was savaged in the Guardian (her admirer Nancy Banks-Smith was off duty), the other reviews were positive.

  It was to be her last creative interaction with Peter Eckersley. That month he was taken ill; tests revealed that he had cancer and it was at an advanced stage. Victoria visited him in hospital and asked if there was anything she could get him. ‘There’s a very nice blouse in Lewis’s window,’ he said, a wag to the last. He died on 26 August 1981, aged forty-five. Among his achievements the obituary in The Times mentioned ‘the first television plays of the dramatist, Victoria Wood’.47 After the memorial in Manchester his widow Anne Reid presented Victoria with a photograph of her mentor, which she kept near her for the rest of her life. ‘I will never forget him, nor will anyone else who ever worked with him,’ she told his father James Eckersley. ‘I’ll never have another friend like him, because he wasn’t just a brilliant producer, he was a friend and he used to make me laugh so much. I’m so glad I knew him.’48

  While Eckersley’s death devastated Victoria, only days later she had to fulfil a booking at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, one of a series of all-star entertainments to raise funds for Amnesty International. The only other woman on the bill was Pamela Stephenson. Victoria was too shy to appear in the opening line-up of gnarled comics and rock stars. Wearing a canary-yellow suit she had recently acquired, she performed ‘I’ve Had It Up to Here’ from Good Fun. ‘This song is indicative of my deep interest in the act of physical lovemaking,’ she announced. ‘It’s very short.’ She got no laughs on the first night from an audience fed nothing but blue comedy by the male comedians. On the second night she decided to ‘go filthy because that was the only way I
could keep my head above water’.49 When the publisher Methuen rushed out a book for Christmas to tie in with the Amnesty show, Victoria contributed a short defiant paragraph: ‘Tampax. IUD. Pre-menstrual tension … That’s the feminist part of the evening over with. I’m worn out. Pamela Stephenson and me are doing our best, but these boys are very demanding: “Suck that cock.” “Mark that thesis.” Fortunately they’re getting on a bit.’

  In the autumn Victoria joined her doctor pal Rob Buckman in a series of comic lectures about medicine for Radio 2 called Get the Most Out of Your Body. She was reluctant to write songs to order and, having first turned down the commission, squared it with Buckman that she could sing old ones instead. The Times critic spotted that her songs ‘were not noticeably medical’.50 Try as she might, she had less success negotiating with Granada, who despite Eckersley’s death insisted she go ahead with Wood and Walters. Her new producer was Brian Armstrong, whose experience in comedy was with middle-of-the-road marital sitcoms with titles like Can We Get on Now, Please?, Have I Got You … Where You Want Me and Chintz. ‘I’m having to shoot my mouth off,’ Victoria grumbled during production. ‘We have to explain so much. Somebody will say, “Why don’t you have so-and-so as a guest?” and I have to waste time saying, “He’s a boring old git and I don’t want him.” When I read now that somebody’s supposed to be difficult to work with I just think ah, that’s somebody else trying to get it right … Peter cared about every detail. He’d say, “I don’t like your eye-shadow, you should say this or wear that’ – but somebody has to fuss.’51 Julie also felt exposed: ‘There was a feeling for both of us that nobody really understood once Peter had gone, who was our mate. We were this little bubble of “nobody else gets it”.’ Roger Brierley, who had been in Nearly a Happy Ending and played author-

  ity figures in the show, later recalled Victoria and Julie ‘slumped on the Granada rehearsal room floor, alternatively despondent and fucking furious at the inability of whatever that producer’s name was who couldn’t provide you with what you needed and who seemed to have little understanding of what you were trying to do’.52

  There were other signs that comedy was not in Granada’s DNA. To direct the pilot, and then the series, Eckersley selected Stuart Orme, partly because he was under contract. His experience of comedy was confined to working as a floor manager for Benny Hill and Tommy Cooper. At least he knew Victoria, having filmed her for the Granada profile Celebration. ‘I didn’t have any experience other than that one documentary of illustrating I knew how to deal with comedy,’ he says. ‘I suspect she realised that. She knew a hundred times more about comedy than I did. She seemed contained, confident and yet vulnerable. But definitely somebody who knew how it needed to be to make it work for the audience and for her.’ Jim Parker also felt out of his depth: ‘It was a mistake on my part. I’m not very good at being a musical director. I had to play the piano and I wasn’t very happy with my own performances.’ (In the pilot episode he was introduced as ‘Jim Parker on antidepressants’.)

  Each episode took a week to complete, comprising a read-through, rehearsal, tech run and taping, done on midweek afternoons, with the disastrous result that the audiences were drawn from the senior end of the demographic. Victoria reported to Geoffrey that it was like ‘a jigsaw club for the recently bereaved’. ‘We’re missing Brideshead for this,’ one audience member was heard to say. It proved so hard to get a reaction from them that Ted Robbins, a former Butlins redcoat hired to warm them up, resorted to desperate measures. ‘Vic and Julie often laughed about this audience of retired ladies,’ he says. ‘In one of the pauses the floor manager said, “Get on and keep them amused.” It was much bigger than anything I’d done before. There was a huge break for twenty minutes. I said, “I’ve nothing left to do.” In desperation, the old rugby player in me came out and I dropped my trousers. It didn’t get laughs but a terrible embarrassed silence.’ At least Victoria found the disgusted reaction of one woman funny: ‘She’d been through two World Wars and a Depression. It was going to take more than Ted’s bum to make her crack a smile!’53

  Victoria was going where no comedian had gone before: the burden of writing and starring in a mainstream sketch comedy had never fallen on a solitary individual. ‘I didn’t realise quite how much stuff you needed to write in order to be able to throw half of it away,’ she later judged. ‘I only literally wrote enough for six half hours and it wasn’t enough. I should have written more. Some bits of it were good and some of it was deadly.’54 Ted Robbins was aware she wasn’t happy: ‘The pressure to deliver got to her. If anything was a bit of a damp squib, you could see it hurt her.’ Once, when he could sense her misery, he gave her a consoling hug in a lift: ‘I suddenly saw this girl from Bury. She looked so fed up. She hugged me back.’ Gregory Floy, who took on most of the younger male roles, encountered a different Victoria to the one he’d known in Good Fun. ‘Vic was very much the perfectionist in control. I had not really seen her in that mode before. I did think, ooh God. I’d better be careful because she’s not in gag mode at the moment.’ She was aware of how she must come across: ‘Rehearsals consist of lots of biscuits and me saying “You said nearly instead of almost.” How they all love me.’55

  Victoria and Julie were at least dressed as they wished to be in the first recording, with ties at half mast and in suits made for them in Soho, but even here there was angst. ‘We spent the first few days buying lots of clothes,’ Victoria told Lesley Fitton, ‘which was lots of fun when they fitted and v. humiliating if not.’56 They introduced the series as ‘the comedy show with a difference: it’s zany, it’s offbeat, it doesn’t get laughs’. Canned laughter, they promised, would be delivered before the end of the programme. Victoria came to regard the ‘hello good evening’ segment as misconceived: ‘We used to go on together, which was a mistake, I think, because Julie never liked going on as herself. She liked to put a wig on or a false back on or something. So they were always a bit eggy, those bits.’57 But the material bore Victoria’s unique kitemark. As her schoolgirl practised the piano, she was heckled by Julie’s tightly permed old char. ‘Do you know “Dream of Olwen”?’ she asks. ‘It’s lovely, that. That were on in women’s surgical the night I had my cervix cauterised.’ Victoria stood in the crook of the piano to recite her own rhyming verse about the waxwork museum in Morecambe, inspired by her visit there with John Dowie:

  The dummies don’t change year to year

  They’re Sabrina and Anthony Eden

  And one that we think’s Molly Weir

  And the one that had been Muhammad Ali

  They’d taken this towel off his head

  They’d drawn a big line through his label

  And put Lenny Henry instead.

  One of the most innovative items, shot on film by a canal, was a documentary-style interview with two bored Scouse girls truanting from school (‘they don’t teach you anything important like how to inject yourself’). Victoria lent one of the girls a joke from In at the Death – ‘a duvet fell into my shopping bag’.

  The series brought Victoria’s first assaults on the kind of television she found ridiculous: terrible advertisements, panel shows, game shows, a poncey classical-music quiz. She even attacked a literary talk show just like the one she’d been on presented by Russell Harty, although she redirected her fire towards another professional northerner: ‘Next week I’ll be talking to Melvyn Bragg about his twenty-ninth Cumbrian novel.’ For the first time Victoria cast a celebrity. The sketch was about a star who gets a knock on his dressing-room door from two giggly teens. One name considered for the role was Trevor Chance, the singer who worked with Victoria on The Summer Show. ‘No, he’s not washed up enough,’ as she said. In the end they cast Alan Lake, the third husband of Diana Dors, a sleazy seducer who gets more than he bargains for when the girls eagerly strip to their baggy undergarments. ‘God love him, he did take it,’ says Julie. ‘There was something about him that was great fun to puncture, we both felt that.’
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br />   In one sketch a woman doesn’t realise her husband is trying to get rid of her. ‘It was actually his idea that I should swim the Channel,’ she explains. The weirdest sketch, touching on the theme of parental neglect, featured Victoria as the mother of 740 babies. ‘This is your problem not mine,’ she said to Brian Armstrong when she handed in the script. An ad was put out for volunteers and eventually there were seventy tots on screen. ‘I’ve never heard such a row,’ said Victoria. ‘I’d imagined doing it with dummies, never thought of doing it with real babies. It was awful.’58 A press photocall harvested letters from cross mothers complaining of cruelty. The closing credits raced through all seventy names, including a baby from Rochdale called Victoria Wood.

  Alongside existing songs, there were new numbers. After all those sad songs about dreary marriages that she wrote in the 1970s, Victoria produced a fist-shaking anti-matrimonial duet called ‘Don’t Do It’. ‘Northerners’ was a rollicking patter song about entertainers cashing in on the clichés of their roots, possibly a riposte to the Guardian review of Happy Since I Met You, which attacked Victoria for peddling ‘vulgar speeches, which were supposed to reflect the great warm beating heart of the North’:59

  You just go, tripe, clogs, going to the dogs,

  Wigan and Blackpool tram.

  Brass bands, butties in your hands,

  Whippets and next door’s mam.

  Cloth cap, hankie full of snap,

  Shawls and scabby knees.

  Hot-pot, seven to a cot,

  Headscarves and mushy peas.

  The song ended on a dark note: ‘Dead at forty-five / From a backstreet abortionist’. Victoria and Julie in headscarves were backed by a trio of male singers in flat caps. One was a well-disguised John Dowie.

  Victoria’s anxiety about the show was revealed in little items bookending each episode. She and Julie struggle to get into the studio without ID or wait for a compliment from the producer that never comes. Julie reads out an abusive letter from a viewer who turns out to be her mother – Victoria was perhaps thinking of her own. In one sketch, two actors agree that auditioning for Wood and Walters is a new low. It was as if Victoria was attacking herself as a form of defence. ‘Usual ITV garbage.’ ‘I see this one’s written by Victoria Wood.’ ‘Can’t write for me.’ ‘Totally unconvincing when she writes for me.’ They agree to rehearse their script, which turns out to consist of the lines they’d just been speaking.