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

by Jasper Rees

  While Victoria performed in the evening, in the daytime she had another stab at a film script. This time she’d been paired with Not Quite Jerusalem, a Royal Court play which won its author Paul Kember the Evening Standard most promising playwright award the year after Victoria. The story, about young idealists going to a kibbutz in Israel, was hardly home territory, but the goal of the producers was to unite Victoria as scriptwriter with Julie Walters as star. It was to be made by Lewis Gilbert, who had directed Educating Rita. Victoria found him a frustrating collaborator. ‘I’d travel in, wait while he had a coffee and read the papers, then instead of working, he’d just give me a bit of script to read and say, “See you tomorrow.” Obviously not heard of the postal system.’39 At another meeting he asked for a couple of rewrites (‘page 32 – insert comic scene on camels etc’), which she did on the spot while he went off for lunch ‘since when I’ve heard nothing’.40 She referred to the project as ‘Not Quite Funny Enough’. ‘Lewis was a gorgeous man,’ says Julie, ‘but he was probably not the right person for her. He was very easy, very laid back and old school. He’d say, “You’re the writer, darling, you do it.”’ From a demoralising episode, Victoria salvaged one nugget for future use: Gilbert’s company was called Acorn Pictures.

  Back in Silverdale she read a book which would have a more stimulating impact on her scriptwriting and shared her enthusiasm with Jane Wymark: ‘This morning I finished ‘Nella Last’s War’ which is a diary 1939–45, kept by a 50 year old woman, in Barrow, for Mass Observation. Really interesting – mainly concerned with food and price of it and how to cook it, and saving things up for Christmas. I love reading about the war, I suppose compared with nuclear war it seems almost cosy.’41

  For the annual summons to Russell Harty’s Christmas show, Victoria dashed off ‘a hasty seasonal monologue a la Billy Bennett, which if not sophisticated, did get laughs’.42 While busy reinventing the landscape of British comedy, it was typical of Victoria to be steeped in the monologues of Bennett, who died in 1930 and exerted a formative influence on the likes of Tommy Cooper and Eric Morecambe:

  It was Christmas Eve in the crescent

  All the children were in their pyjamas

  All the parents were snappy

  Tense and unhappy

  Except two who were in the Bahamas.

  Father Christmas proceeds to get legless on sherry and is carted off by reindeer in the small hours. Julie and Victoria found themselves in a similar state at a knees-up in the hotel after the recording, singing deep into the night with half a dozen Liverpool businessmen. The morning after, following ‘a light breakfast of vitamins and Crest toothpaste’, Victoria had a meeting with Ray Cooney, who had the run of the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End and now offered her a fortnight’s residency in the new year.43 She found him ‘v pleasant and jolly and I don’t trust him any further than I could throw him’.44 Her warinesss stemmed from his suggestion that she whisk through the show without an interval. ‘That would make the change in Paula du Val a mite difficult,’ she wrote, ‘so I declined to agree. I’ll probably find it’s been re-cast with Miriam Margolyes.’45 But she accepted his offer.

  It was one thing to sell tickets at the King’s Head, another to fill even a small house in the West End. She submitted to all manner of indignity in order to flog tickets – answering questions fired by children on a kids’ TV show, talking about Valentine’s Day merchandise on Gloria Hunniford’s show, sitting next to Mr Universe on TV-am. ‘If I don’t get any full houses next week it won’t be for want of trying.’46 Among yet more glowing reviews, not every male critic was ready for a full-frontal tour of the unruly female anatomy. One groaned at songs ‘about cellulite, varicose veins, bosom-droop and all the other ills that female flesh is heir to’.47 Another sighed that ‘we can be reminded too often that the sex is mammarian and bifurcated’.48 Despite male squeamishness, the box office was healthy enough for Ray Cooney to offer a third week. Victoria turned it down. There was a new job calling her home.

  11

  SEEN ON TV

  ‘Sex always comes up at parties and it’s never been a strong point with me. It’s not that I don’t like it; I just don’t like things that stop you seeing the television properly.’

  Victoria Wood As Seen on TV, 1985

  ‘This week is week 1 of TV series. V nasty week as starting is v. hard and I hate it and feel I have lost the knack but no doubt it will be OK in the end.’1 On the first day of 1984, after two years away, Victoria began sketching her return to television. The idea had crept up on her while she learned the craft of live solo performance. ‘I was being asked by lots of television companies to sign up with them to do a series. And I eventually thought BBC Two would be the best thing. I just got a contract “to write six shows starring Victoria Wood”. That’s all it said.’2

  The overture came from the BBC’s head of variety, James Moir. His fondness for pinstripes and military metaphors gave him a traditional whiff of the Rotary Club, and yet he was an architect of change in light entertainment who had already brought in the likes of Lenny Henry and Tracey Ullman. Victoria, visiting his office to pitch, left TV Centre with a mandate never previously granted by the BBC: to be the sole writer of her own sketch show. ‘She explained that this is what she wanted to do,’ says Moir. ‘What was I going to say? “Let’s see a test page, some draft scripts.” It would have been foolish to try it. The business was done really quite quickly.’

  While Moir’s strategy was to rejuvenate mainstream comedy, it remained common at the BBC for jobs to be doled out on seniority rather than suitability. As she wrote the material for the show, Victoria soon grew alarmed that she would be assigned an old-school producer such as was foisted on her at Granada. She shared her anxiety with Jenny Bialek and Greg Childs, who both recommended someone called Geoff Posner.

  Geoff Posner was unlike anyone Victoria had yet encountered in television. In the late 1960s he had gone to some lengths to break into television: every time the BBC rejected him he did another media degree. He had three by the time he was recruited as a floor assistant in 1974. Slowly he graduated to directing Not the Nine O’Clock News and The Young Ones. Already an admirer of Victoria’s work – he saw Good Fun twice at the King’s Head – he was eager to produce her show and asked Vivienne Clore, her television agent at Richard Stone, to put in a good word. The machination worked. Exultant, he was keen to meet his new collaborator only to be told, ‘She doesn’t want to meet you yet. She wants to write the programme and then see what you think.’ He would have a long wait.

  ‘Have been working on TV series for 3 weeks now, and have amassed a few ill-written foolscap pages of extremely unamusing humour. We press on tho’.’3 The recipient of this and many other bulletins was Victoria’s university friend Jane Wymark, who had moved with her husband to Bangladesh. Victoria treated her to long and richly entertaining letters in which she talked about her life: dieting, exercise, improvements to the house and garden, mutual friends from Birmingham, Geoffrey’s adventures in conjuring, and the creation of her new television series. ‘If all else fails,’ she added, ‘I shall perform nude with a sanitary towel on my head.’4

  Victoria’s nocturnal regime was long over by now. She would rise at 6.45 a.m. and drive half an hour to Kendal, where she’d swim three quarters of a mile. Back at home she supplemented her breakfast with multivitamins – a new development as she committed to vegetarianism. (‘I’m all for killing animals and turning them into shoes and handbags,’ was the moral line she developed. ‘I just don’t want to have to eat them.’)5 Then she sat down to write all day, breaking off for homemade soup and a Jane Fonda workout. She described it as ‘a very lonely life. I sit at my desk gazing out at the sheep and cows, talking to nobody.’6 The solitude was compounded by the absence of Geoffrey, trapped in Nottingham in the longest run in pantomime history. For eighteen weeks he commuted home to find Victoria had written a little bit more. ‘Another day thinking up side-splitting dialogue,’ sh
e reported at the start of February.7

  The idea that took shape was a show which would hold up a distorting mirror to the world of television. It would spoof commercials and children’s entertainment, contemporary and costume drama, daytime magazine shows and video vox pops. There would be fly-on-the-wall mock documentaries and a send-up of a terrible soap opera. Threaded through would be stand-up, songs and sketches. Victoria had a half-formed idea for an in-vision continuity announcer with virulent opinions about class, culture and hygiene. ‘There are a lot of those girls around,’ she explained. ‘In the regions you get these awful condescending women in between programmes.’8

  The task was vast: to write six half-hours without any collaborative input. Her only sounding board was Geoffrey, to whom, on one of his weekly visits, she said, ‘I think I’m going to call this Victoria Wood As Seen on TV. What do you think?’ This was her show and hers alone, with no shared billing for Julie Walters, about which she was ‘quietly pleased and quietly guilty,’ says Geoffrey. ‘She was relieved that Julie appeared not to mind the change in their professional relationship.’ In fact, Julie, whom Victoria told about the series as she was writing it, felt the same way. ‘I was kind of relieved that I hadn’t got my name on it,’ she says. ‘The prestige was great, but I felt I didn’t write them so my name shouldn’t be on them.’

  It left Victoria free to explore her preoccupations. With affection laced with sometimes cruel honesty, she conjured up grim women and dim girls, explored entrenched working-class attitudes and middle-class pretensions. She set her sketches in shops, libraries and dry cleaners, cafés, restaurants and bus shelters. ‘The best sketches are confrontations,’ she explained, ‘and that’s where I come across confrontations.’9 Among her characters she liberally distributed her favourite funny words (varicose veins, moped, quiche lorraine, raffia, theodolite, cystitis, grouting, shoplifting, mangling) and names (Dick Francis, Liberace, Bunty, the Isle of Man, Taurus, Mavis Nicholson, Marbella). All were put in the service of a worldview that was uniquely female and distinctly northern.

  The mockumentaries took longest to write, being in such a specific register and requiring the invention of so wide an array of new characters. They were inspired by a life that she knew: the terraced streets of the north; the swings and roundabouts of theatrical life. ‘On Campus’, about an awkward girl who attempts suicide after being bullied in her first week at university, was ‘drawn from all the terrible people I knew at university’.10 Most autobiographically of all, in ‘Swim the Channel’, Victoria depicted a family home where the parents are so neglectful they’d rather catch a West End show than watch their teenage daughter Chrissie attempt to front crawl to France. They seem barely concerned when she disappears. ‘I’m sure she’ll turn up eventually,’ says her father. ‘Slow but sure, that’s our Chrissie.’ The mother has forgotten all about their other children too. (Victoria’s own parents were not perturbed by the subtext when it was shown. ‘They really loved that one,’ says her sister Penelope. ‘Dad said it was so moving he nearly cried.’)

  As Victoria accumulated material, she plotted it all onto a map. ‘I’d write a sketch, and I’d write its name on a filing card, and I arranged the whole series on filing cards on my carpet so it went song, quickie, song, sketch.’11 The opening slot was fixed: a three-minute burst of stand-up. This was the clearest way of identifying herself as the sole author of the show, but it was also part of a longer-term strategy: she understood that at least part of her future lay in touring, and it was a shrewd move to introduce herself as a stand-up comedian to a television audience.

  She took a big chunk of time off to promote and perform Lucky Bag at the Ambassadors in February. In March, at the request of John Dowie, she took part in a benefit at the Donmar Warehouse to raise £1,000 for the defence of two publishers on trial for using drug references in comics (they were acquitted). Dowie could not help noticing that ‘more people queued to see her after the show than I’d ever performed to’. Then in April, inspired by the idea of seeing the world ‘after spending 15 unadventurous years going nowhere’, she and Geoffrey went on a cheap package holiday to Marrakech.12 ‘Swimming a lot, very hot, done the Tombs,’ she reported to Rosalind, ‘have bought a rug to be shipped out – whether we ever get it remains to be seen.’13 It did arrive and was given pride of place at the entrance to Stankelt Road.

  After they were typed up locally, Victoria presented the sketches to Julie Walters. ‘I just love the scripts – I want to do it all,’ she replied. ‘Do you know who the director’s going to be?’14 Finally, Geoff Posner was summoned to Silverdale. Full of apprehension, she went to Lancaster station to collect a short man who fizzed with energy and wore a lavish walrus moustache. According to Posner, Victoria sought reassurance that the material constituted a series. ‘I said, “Vic, this is wonderful stuff. I also know how we’re going to do this together.”’ One concrete proposal he made was that she write extra material to ensure there was room to cut anything that didn’t quite land with audiences. After she put him back on the train several hours later, she shared her first impressions with Geoffrey: ‘She said he was pitching himself during the conversations and she felt he was a little too clear-cut.’ In due course he would prove to be a brilliant technical innovator, adept at providing a framework for her comic inventions.

  As with Talent and Good Fun, Victoria was reluctant to push herself forward as a performer, telling her producer she’d do ‘bits and pieces’. Her instinct to share out the parts dovetailed with anxiety about her acting abilities. ‘The nearest thing we had to a row,’ says Posner, ‘was me saying to her, “You’ve got to be in it. You do it best and it’s your show.”’ She also had grand ambitions for casting. ‘I am sending off a sketch to Alan Bennett in the hope that he will want to do it in the show,’ she told Jane Wymark in May.15 Bennett declined. ‘It is very funny,’ he replied, ‘especially the bit about the shuddering and the finish, only (and you are entitled to despise me for this) I can’t face playing any more men with dusters … Miss R.,’ he added, ‘is highly delighted with her coming contribution.’16 Miss R. was Patricia Routledge, whom Victoria hoped would play Kitty, a reincarnation of Betty and Dotty dispensing wisdom from an armchair. She wrote five Kitty sketches in five days (‘which is a very good way of seeing what your brains look like when they fall out of your nostrils’).17

  Eventually Victoria decamped to London, staying in a flat in Maida Vale lent to her by Roger Brierley. Working from Geoff Posner’s office at Television Centre, they did without a casting director so were free to make their own running. They started on the six documentaries. ‘All the parts are tiny, but must be very well done,’ Victoria reported. ‘So a lot of good people turned them down on sight, which was eggy to say the least.’18 Peter Eckersley’s widow Anne Reid was baffled by a script she had been sent. ‘It was just simply a waitress or cook shouting this menu. I didn’t get it and so I went to see her and Geoff in London and said, “I’m terribly sorry, I don’t want to do this.” ’ It was a slightly awkward moment. I think they were quite surprised. Victoria was a fan of the National Theatre of Brent, the comically overambitious am-dram troupe which staged epic stories with a cast of two, and booked both its members. Patrick Barlow was cast as a supercilious theatre director in ‘Whither the Arts?’, a merciless mockery of The South Bank Show. Jim Broadbent, who had been in Talent in 1979, was to play, among other roles, a plodding door-to-door evangelist who runs a telephone deodorising business in a film she called ‘A Fairly Ordinary Man’.

  Several other actors who had been in Victoria’s plays and dramas came in. For a parody of The Wednesday Play in which a married couple argue spitefully, she hoped to cast an actual couple she and Geoffrey had stayed with: Gregory Floy and his wife Deborah Grant, the bewitching star of A Bouquet of Barbed Wire. But Floy was committed elsewhere, so Denis Lawson stepped in. Victoria also proposed northern actors Geoff Posner had never heard of. Mary Jo Randle, whom she knew from the Rochdale Theatre Work
shop, was cast in ‘To Be an Actress’ to play an earnest young woman who can’t get a break in the profession. ‘I’d work anywhere,’ she says. ‘I’d even work in the north.’ At the King’s Head, Victoria came across Andrew Livingston, whose hangdog face was ideal for the unromantic halfwit Carl pondering life’s big questions in a bus shelter with his girlfriend Gail.

  While Julie had been booked in advance, Victoria needed to gather an ensemble of actors who would appear regularly. One New Year’s Eve a couple of years earlier, she and Geoffrey caught a Scottish sketch show called 81 Take 2, featuring a delicious turn as Lady Diana Spencer by Celia Imrie. ‘She always said she was a terrible actress and I took her at her word,’ said Victoria, who had seen less of Celia since moving to Lancashire. ‘I thought she was really good and what on earth had she been going on about?’19 ‘She saw me in that,’ says Celia, ‘and it gave her the idea that I’d be OK as, to all intents and purposes, the straight girl.’ Her marquee value had been boosted by a recent stint in Bergerac – ‘It meant that I was sort of known on television and I’m sure that helped.’ Duncan Preston was disgruntled at having to audition: ‘You always had to audition for her. I thought, she knows what I do. I’m not quite sure what to do here. Is she asking for something different? I made a right pig’s breakfast of it and thought, I’ve blown that.’