by Jasper Rees
There was the usual web of private and not so private references. As if putting a hex on other funny women of the moment, there were jokes about Marti Caine and Pamela Stephenson. Victoria could be ruthless about offending friends. A rip-off of talent shows called Search for a Star featured a ‘young hopeful mezzosoprano from Rhuddlan in North Wales’. This sly nod to her former flatmate Jane Wynn Owen was more explicit in the original draft, which refers to ‘Celia Wynn-Owen’. In a sketch expressing her disdain for beauty pageants, one of the contestants is named Marlena. Fidelis Morgan had entered her sister Marlena for Miss ATV, which she won, around the same time as she put Victoria’s name up for New Faces.
Wood and Walters began filming in October. After it finished in November, the Houdinis finally managed to make their escape from Morecambe to 22 Stankelt Road in Silverdale. The house was on the edge of the village and stood on the crest of a deep slope with a view out the back down towards Morecambe Bay. Victoria emphasised the discomforts when her sister was due to stay: ‘Am warning – it is v. primitive and dirty (everything covered in cement dust).’60 Granada vouched for Victoria’s income stream to help her to secure a mortgage.
The eighteen-month delay in taking possession had several causes. The elderly vendor’s son took against the buyers as outsiders while work commitments meant Victoria and Geoffrey were rarely together long enough to make decisions. Then a surveyor discovered all sorts of faults, the worst a pervasive damp whose source was discovered only when a builder in a smart suit asked to see under a trapdoor in the kitchen and promptly sank up to his neck into an old water tank. ‘The people who owned house – they really misled me,’ Victoria wrote in an article about moving house. ‘They disguised a damp cellar by putting in changing rooms and a diving board.’ The article, titled ‘Tile Though Your Heart Is Aching’, was a litany of distress caused by nasty decor, clumsy builders and bone-shaking cold. ‘There is ice all over the windows and I have to go into the garden to get warm … The pipes freeze so I cannot use the bath or the wash-basin. By this time I am crying a lot so my face is relatively dirt-free.’61
Victoria experienced these discomforts – and proudly put up her own bookshelves – alone that first winter while Geoffrey spent the pantomime season in Newcastle. They were reunited at Christmas as guests on Russell Harty at Home, hosted by the presenter in his own house on the edge of the Dales. The appearance was perfectly timed to remind viewers of Victoria’s existence.
Wood and Walters began showing on ITV with a repeat of the pilot on the first day of 1982. Victoria started talking the series down while it was still running: ‘Several actors who were wrong for the sketches were hired,’ she said. ‘I cut a lot out but some of it still makes me wince.’62 Despite her claim to have cut, she did not produce enough material for the seven episodes originally planned, so Granada tacked a compilation of the best sketches and songs on at the end. The finale was more Walters than Wood, with many sketches powered by the same dynamic of Julie’s character being comically foul to Victoria’s. ‘I would set myself up as a victim, and Julie would be the cruel one and I would be the one she was being cruel to. That was my own chip on my shoulder and my own insecurity about being fat or being northern or whatever that I felt insecure about I worked through in those sketches.’63 She went about this process pitilessly. In one sketch Victoria seeks advice about make-up. ‘It’s up to you, Porky,’ says Julie’s beautician. ‘I don’t suppose you go out much being so ugly.’ It was as if Victoria was using Julie as an instrument of self-harm. ‘I thought of it as a character,’ says Julie. ‘I felt we’re showing people what it’s like to be Vic, what she’s been through. And twats like this character say those kind of things: “What do you think this is, the elephant house?” That’s how she felt about herself.’
While applauding Julie’s abilities, reviewers acknowledged Victoria as the show’s creative genius. ‘Is there anything Victoria Wood cannot do?’ asked The Times.64 Only the Financial Times complained of ‘derivative’ or ‘pointless’ sketches, and songs that had all been heard before.65 During the run of Wood and Walters, Victoria turned critic herself on the television review show Did You See? She was placed in the odd position of sitting in judgement over rival comedy O.T.T., a late-night version of the rowdy kids’ show Tiswas, starring, among others, Lenny Henry and John Gorman. ‘I thought it was going to wipe Wood and Walters off the face of the earth,’ she told guest host Mavis Nicholson. ‘I thought it was going to be so good I’m going to look like a real fool. And then when it came on, I was quite relieved. I thought, well, it’s not that good; it’s a bit of mess.’ She then conceded the show grew on her.
As for her own comedy, Victoria had a sense of anticlimax over Wood and Walters: ‘I was very stressed about it all the time because I knew it wasn’t really very good,’ she recalled – yet the series was a rare achievement which established her as a unique writer‐entertainer who could talk honestly about the lives of women, about the female body and the sexual revolution.66 Above all, whether in sharp suits or babygrows, school uniform or poplin gowns, she and Julie cemented their reputation as a fresh and brilliant partnership.
Victoria’s arrival as a new voice in television comedy was underlined when, much to her surprise, the pilot shown a whole year earlier was nominated opposite Stanley Baker and the Two Ronnies in the light-entertainment category of the 1982 BAFTAs. ‘Vic was convinced she wouldn’t win, but the nomination was a nice compliment and she took it as such,’ says Geoffrey, who went with her. ‘In retrospect we reflected that the nomination was a gesture of encouragement to the first light entertainment show to feature a pair of women getting laughs.’ (The English Programme profile of Victoria was also up in the so-called ‘Flame of Knowledge’ category.) Granada dangled a second series, but Victoria was unsure. ‘I don’t know if we can go through a series like this one again,’ she said when the series was still running.67 At the same time, it was announced that Julie was to film Educating Rita alongside Michael Caine. Wood and Walters would barely be seen on TV together for nearly three years.
10
FUNNY HOW THINGS TURN
‘Anyway, this year, Victoria thought she’d do a show on her own. By herself. With nobody else there. Not even a fifty-piece orchestra. Not even a man with a mouth organ. I think she’s flipped her boko, but she says it’s going to be dead good. I suppose I wasn’t a very good person to ask, because I don’t find comedy funny.’
‘Victoria Wood, by the woman across the road’, Lucky Bag programme, 1983
Victoria’s dramas and sketches, written in the distinct and precise voice of the north, inevitably provoked comparisons with Alan Bennett. Although both were friends of Russell Harty, their initial encounter was accidental. ‘I actually first met Victoria in Sainbury’s in Lancaster sometime in the eighties,’ says Bennett. ‘It was, as she might have chosen herself, in the avocado section. I knew of her because Michael Codron who was always singing her praises. I was quite jealous.’ It was Julie Walters who first worked with him, in 1982, in a Play for Today directed by Gavin Millar, but Bennett imagined collaborating with the pair of them. ‘Alan Bennett sent his love,’ wrote Julie – ‘he wants us to perform his play Doris + Doreen, perhaps at Lancaster.’1
There may still have been talk of continuing their double act, but the stars of Wood and Walters now went their separate ways. Julie was propelled into a film career, while Victoria followed a twisting track towards an utterly new kind of stardom. The journey had to be made without any kind of map, because, until she decided to do it, no woman had ever walked onto a British stage alone as herself and laid on a whole evening of comedy.
Offers from beyond the world of television and theatre now began to come her way. Her high visibility on ITV had made her attractive to advertisers. Having mined her own weight issues for comedy, she was seen by one agency as the ideal face to front a campaign for a low-calorie drink called One-Cal. The approach initially required her to sing someone else’s jingle
, but she stood her ground and was allowed to compose her own thirty-second ditties. They displayed in miniature her mastery of wordplay:
Yes dietin’s disquietin’
And that’s exactly why a tin
Of One-Cal cheers a slimming person up.
She had less control over the design. In one ad she wore white-and-pink togs at a white grand piano in a pink studio. A second ad took her to the Bahamas, where, after she sang her piece, she took a sip of One-Cal as the camera pulled away to reveal the piano on a floating island. There were so many takes that Victoria had to be ferried back to the shore to empty her bladder. ‘It made us both sad that the ad industry saw her as a useful fatty,’ says Geoffrey, ‘but in the case of One-Cal at least, she enjoyed doing them and the money helped.’
Money was certainly needed. Victoria fretted about a popular misconception that because she was on television she must be rolling in it. ‘By the time you travel from place to place and run the car,’ she sighed, ‘there doesn’t seem to be anything left.’2 Her professional partnership with Julie being on hold, she and Geoffrey started working together again. Funny Turns returned for the first time in eighteen months with such a long stretch of bookings in London that they decided to rent a garden flat in Maida Vale. Victoria was now describing herself as a ‘new comic for girls’. Audiences in further-flung parts of the UK were not necessarily ready for such a conceptual innovation, yoked to a pretend-Spanish magician. In March there were two nights at the capacious Belfast Grand Opera House – a reviewer described their first-night audience as ‘undeservedly small’.3 The show was far better suited to the snug confines of the King’s Head, where they returned for four weeks over Easter. Victoria knew her audience here. ‘Don’t worry about being mugged when leaving the theatre,’ she reassured Islingtonians. ‘You are much more likely to be subsidised.’
For her return to live performance, the tweed jacket was ditched in favour of her canary-yellow suit, which she also wore to promote Funny Turns on BBC Two’s late-night variety show Friday Night Saturday Morning. This was not a happy booking. The show rotated guest hosts, and this misbegotten episode was presented by a supremely serious Diana Quick, fresh from Brideshead Revisited. After rope tricks from the Great Soprendo, Victoria performed ‘What We Find’, a richly allusive new song which recommended that women stop resisting the ageing process. To a chirpy, chuntering rhythm, she sang of bosoms falling, of anti-ageing cream ‘made from bits of sheep’, of ‘this painful fight / Against grey hair and cellulite’. Singing in a television studio was old hat for Victoria. Talking was visibly a struggle. Having failed to get onto Parkinson, at least this time she made sure she had lines prepared. ‘You can’t make jokes about nice things,’ she told Diana Quick. ‘If I go onstage and say, “I have a marvellous relationship with my husband,” then it’s not going to get a laugh (a) because it’s not true and (b) because it’s not funny.’
The stars of Funny Turns had a fruitful creative partnership based on honesty and trust. ‘It’s all right to take criticism from somebody who understands how difficult it’s been,’ Victoria explained. ‘If I’ve been up all night with a song, Geoff is the only person I could bear to show it to and have him say, “Well, I don’t think it quite works.”’4 Another of her new songs was a protestation of love, containing many private references that only Geoffrey would spot: wearing striped pyjamas, eating Weetabix without milk, leaving ‘books in the toilet so you can’t close the door’ and her tendency to lose her contact lenses. It was written from the heart:
I know I annoy you
And I make us have fights
But I love you.
At the same time something was shifting in their relationship. They were a pair of unknowns in their first run at the King’s Head. By the second, eighteen months later, Victoria was a television star who won the stronger audience reaction and the more glowing reviews. ‘That made her very happy,’ says Geoffrey. The show sold out. ‘You would run here for a year if you stayed,’ Dan Crawford told them as he crammed audiences into the King’s Head to perch on chairs, tables or any available flat surface. But Funny Turns had a much more prestigious booking: a year and a half on, Victoria was now free to take up Michael Codron’s offer of a West End residency, and Funny Turns was duly booked in for a stint at the Duchess Theatre.
This was a genuine turning point. A female stand-up comedian had never headlined in the West End before. ‘Women are just as funny as men,’ Victoria asserted as she prepared to open, and served notice that her brand of humour would avoid the obvious: ‘I want to go into stronger areas where the craft of the joke is more important than me saying knickers or Y-fronts just to get a laugh. I want to make it more original.’5 To mark their promotion Victoria and Geoffrey had a plush new set by Roger Glossop, Sheffield Crucible’s in-house designer who had become a friend. ‘It was massive for both of us,’ says Geoffrey, ‘made more so by the fact that we’d waited so long for it to come through as a potential big break. We were both frantically nervous – Vic handled her nerves better than I did.’ The audience on the press night in mid-May did not exactly teem with friendly faces. ‘We are only allowed 4 tickets,’ Victoria told Robert Howie, to whom she offered a lone ticket next to Celia Imrie.6 Most of their supporters were in the back of the circle, while their most useful ally in the stalls was Russell Harty, who walked onstage to introduce the show. Geoffrey had to choose the volunteers for his act from row upon row of critics. Despite his nerves, the Great Soprendo’s tricks and patter put the audience in a light-headed mood. ‘My second trick is …’ – and he paused slightly – ‘impossible, so for my third trick I am going to do some mind-reading. I want you all to be as quiet as pins and hear a mouse dropping.’ Victoria entered after the interval and proceeded to talk of cystitis and cellulite, hand-embroidered tampons and her Hollie Hobby vibrator. The raciest joke – the only gag that Victoria and Geoffrey ever constructed together – was about her attempts at sex with her first boyfriend: ‘He was dyslexic and had lots of these sex manuals. He spent ages lying in bed looking for my vinegar.’ Such talk made the Guardian opera critic’s flesh creep (‘this is all a tedious pose’), but everyone else applauded.7 There were ever louder ovations for the songs, some of them (‘Don’t Do It’ and, as a rousing encore, ‘Northerners’) imported from Wood and Walters. ‘If we do not count Guys and Dolls, the best available on the London stage,’ reckoned the Financial Times.8 ‘The best British lyricist (though emphatically not composer) since Noël Coward,’ said the Observer.9 The compliment which meant the most came from Jack Tinker in the Mail: ‘Miss Wood … has the confidence of a seasoned stand-up comic at the microphone.’10
The raves did not translate into ticket sales, however, so while doing eight shows a week Victoria threw herself into promotion. Two weeks into the run she told Robert Howie, ‘I don’t have much spare time as yet – doing as much to publicise the show as possible.’11 Most interviewers wanted to know about the advent of the funny woman, a phenomenon now sparking articles in newspapers. The competitor in Victoria did not particularly welcome being subsumed into a movement or trend. ‘A lot of comediennes are just men with frocks on,’ she snarled. ‘They haven’t written their own material, they’re getting men to do it for them. The emphasis is on glamour.’12
The best chance to promote Funny Turns came when Geoffrey and Victoria appeared together on Wogan. The booking was set up through Greg Childs, a researcher on the show whose wife Jenny Bialek worked at the King’s Head. Disastrously, Victoria clammed up. ‘Terry expected performers to perform,’ says Childs. ‘She was not very forthcoming in the rehearsal, and Terry froze her out when it came to the recording of the show, to the point that it was almost embarrassing. She didn’t fight her way back in. She just let it happen.’ Viewers would not have been persuaded she was worth the price of a West End ticket. (Her resentment of Wogan simmered for a long time. ‘He never pays much attention to what’s being said,’ she suggested years later, ‘and he’s patroni
sing to the women.’)13
Back at their flat in Maida Vale, Victoria and Geoffrey picked over reasons why the show was not selling. They fretted over Codron’s decision to bill it as a revue, evoking his bygone triumphs with Pieces of Eight and Beyond the Fringe, and worried that Wood and Walters had made the idea of Victoria’s equal partnership with someone else a harder sell. But the box office could not compete with a much more serious rival. ‘There were lots of excuses for failing that summer apart from the usual ones of not being very good or famous,’ Victoria recalled. ‘It was the Falklands. Things closed like mad. The Strand was nearly dark by the end.’14 Although Victoria and Geoffrey both grumbled about Codron’s softly-softly approach to marketing, there was nothing any management could do to stop theatregoers staying in to watch the news. ‘I ask my agent to get me a booking on “Newsnight”,’ Victoria joked in a diary column for The Times.15 After three weeks, Codron requested that Victoria and Geoffrey forego their fee and two weeks later gave notice that the show was to close early. In all the run lasted seven weeks, for four of which they weren’t paid. In her photograph album, over a snap of Funny Turns at the Duchess Theatre, Victoria scrawled, ‘SO FUNNY NO ONE TURNED UP’.
The closure of Funny Turns was a blow, but there were other opportunities. In the summer she made her debut on Just a Minute. Her train was delayed, causing Derek Nimmo to castigate her on air for being late. Victoria fought back when he challenged her for repeating the word ‘red’ as she described her kitchen. ‘They were different shades of red actually,’ she replied, much to the audience’s approval. She beat the three male contestants, including Kenneth Williams, to win the episode. In due course she accepted invitations from Give Us a Clue, Password, The Pyramid Game and Tell the Truth, on which she befriended Peter Cook. She was pragmatic about being a quiz regular. ‘I took it for what it was. It was useful to the job and also it brought you in some more money.’16 She also diversified, fronting a television documentary about pantomime dames for Channel 4 backed by the Arts Council.
