by Jasper Rees
During auditions Victoria and Geoff Posner developed a system of nodding to each other when an actor was on the right track, or discreetly shaking heads if they weren’t. There was a lot of head-shaking as actresses came in to read for the continuity announcer. The character’s scripts were initially much longer, and Victoria had not yet formed the idea of having her cue up the next item. One night she went to the King’s Head to see a series of one-act American plays and was so struck by a particular actress that she collared her afterwards and asked her to come in. ‘I wasn’t familiar with her work apart from having seen her sing at the piano a couple of times,’ says Susie Blake. ‘I sat on a chair in front of Geoff and Vic – both were behind a desk. And I started laughing. It was hysterical. There were two or three of these long speeches.’ Her audition made it clear that she understood how to capture the character’s daggered smiles and toxic snobbery. ‘She came in and could do it, just like that,’ said Victoria, who was so encouraged that she scrapped the longer speeches and started again with shorter, sharper segments.20 Susie Blake grew to inhabit the character so thoroughly that, in private, she dreamed up a name for her: Pamela.
A decision was taken early on not to water down the impact of Susie Blake’s powerful screen persona by putting her in other sketches. As a result, more actors had to be hired, pushing up the cost, although this didn’t seem to be a consideration. ‘BBC producers were delightfully cushioned from the realities of cost,’ says Geoff Posner. ‘I wasn’t entirely sure how much the budget was.’ Thus the production could afford to hire a coach and pair to canter up the drive of a grand old country manor – a splendid flourish Posner bolted onto the front of a sketch in which Duncan Preston’s top-hatted Mr Wilde knocks on the door and asks if Mr Dickens is in. ‘Oscar Wilde?’ says Celia’s pert housemaid. ‘Well, I’m not bleedin’ Marty Wilde, am I?’ Placed high up in the first episode, it would act as a fanfare announcing the scale of the show’s ambition.
Victoria was short on confidence about her stand-up spots, ‘which are the hardest to do … I feel I can’t do them at all, actually, but as I absolutely have to there’s no point worrying about it.’21 The traditional optics of stand-up didn’t sit well with an intimate television studio. Viewers were used to Ronnie Corbett’s chair, or Dave Allen and Jasper Carrott perching on stools, but Victoria, who would be sitting at the piano for her songs, decided to stand at the microphone, feet planted firmly apart. Rather than double the jeopardy with new material, she proposed to borrow liberally from Lucky Bag.
The songs, however, were mainly new. Victoria had written more than necessary and, taking soundings from Geoff Posner, picked one per episode to reflect a range of styles and moods. ‘Seasons of Love’ was a lilting ballad with a sting in the tail (‘We made love in the firelight / You turned to me and said / Whatever made you think that you were good in bed?’). ‘Pissed Off with Love’ was a cheesy pop duet in which ex-lovers slag each other off – she sang it in matching suits with Denis Lawson. ‘Go Away’ was an angry experiment in jazz funk. The musical arranger chosen to supply the backing was David Firman, whom Victoria knew from Good Fun. Her habit was to record the songs at her own piano and then hand him the cassette. ‘I’d try out a few vague ideas with her,’ he says. ‘Then people left me alone to write it.’ For backing he enlisted principals from the leading orchestras or, for the soppy northern ballad ‘Skellern in Love’, an entire brass band.
Another composition to arrive by cassette was the theme tune, in which Victoria sang the melody and played the chords. David Firman scored it for a quartet of clarinets, a euphonium and a violin in the cheerful key of A major. ‘I thought that would say something about her and the writing. The first run-through didn’t go well at all, because A major is not a key that clarinets and euphoniums play in. What it actually has is an edge to it, because all those guys are right on the edge of what they can play. They’re having to really work.’ It was Victoria’s idea to have the music play over a claymation sequence in which a pink-jacketed figurine twirled at a microphone, only for her arm to fall off and be replaced by the animator.
The trust and understanding between Victoria and her arranger is audible in a heart-melting demo version they made together of ‘One Day’, which was written as part of ‘Whither the Arts?’. The film’s wider aim was to skewer a ponderous arts documentary as it reports on rehearsals for a silly musical about fat schoolgirl Bessie Bunter. Absurdly, a wafer-thin actress, played by Deborah Grant, has been cast in the title role, and ‘One Day’ is her big number. It’s a ridiculous parody of Marvin Hamlisch – or ‘Hamly Marvisch’ as the director calls him – and at the same time one of the most yearning songs Victoria ever composed. She followed it with her raunchiest: the thin actress is booted out and in comes Victoria as Bessie, whipping off her boater and school tunic to reveal a basque underneath:
I’m gonna go bleach my hair
Wear clothes that show my tits!
At the Ritz!
I’m Bessie the Blitz!
I’m gonna make Dolly Parton look like Meryl Streep
I mean cheap
I mean bad
Drive men mad to make this girl surrender
Will they get to my pudenda?
Don’t answer that – dance!
Victoria’s vocal prowess was also on display in ‘Shopping’, a raucous gospel-blues ensemble number set in a tea room packed with hollering ladies of a certain age. Victoria held her own as a soloist alongside some full-throttle larynxes David Firman recruited from musical theatre. She even stepped in to do the three-part whistling solo in ‘Knock Knock’, an Andrews Sisters spoof shot in black and white. It was sung by a cheerful trio of crack session singers who were also meant to whistle in tight harmony, but it proved beyond them. ‘They can’t whistle!’ said an aghast Victoria.
Before the production got anywhere near a studio, in June Geoff Posner took cast and crew away to shoot the exteriors. Birmingham was chosen for its variety of locations, from back-to-back terraces to accessible countryside. The idea was also to create a pleasant and stimulating atmosphere as actors arrived the night before shooting and rehearsed in hotel bedrooms. Then they moved to Norfolk to film, among other things, Victoria’s scenes on a shingle beach as Chrissie. ‘Tomorrow I am being filmed Swimming the Channel,’ she told Jane Wymark, ‘which I know will be Fucking Freezing and I will have to be a Jolly Good Sport about it. It’s a night shoot in the North Sea (yet again, who wrote this?).’22 There followed a day shoot in which she had to swim further out to sea. As she set off with her satchel roped over her shoulder, Victoria couldn’t hear anyone repeatedly shouting ‘cut’ and swam into the distance, far further than was required for the shot.
She was so busy on the shoot that when her parents drove down from Bury to visit she was unable to spend much time with them, while they couldn’t be persuaded out of the car to greet her colleagues. The strain got to her. She overdid her morning swims, had palpitations and had to be given injections to stop her vomiting. Then when filming the dance sequence as Bessie Bunter, she was kicking some fluff out of shot and fell into the orchestra pit, cutting her head and bruising an arm.
There was a two-week gap before the company convened at the BBC’s rehearsal space in North Acton, where the stresses continued. ‘Was vomiting from germs, then nerves,’ Victoria reported a month in.23 She burst a blood vessel in her eye, which meant some of her duet with Denis Lawson had to be shot in profile. ‘I do find it hard work,’ she conceded in August, ‘because most weeks I have my own bit or a new sketch to write and I’m writing slowly now having been at it since Jan 1.’24
The schedule began early in the week when scripts were read and blocked out. On the third day the crew would arrive to plot lighting and camera angles; Geoff Posner warned the cast not to expect the crew to laugh, ‘though they always did’. By the fifth afternoon they gained entry to the studio at TV Centre and set about filming pre-recorded material. Without an audience to play to, the one piec
e of direction Victoria gave Susie Blake, now dolled up in pussy-bow blouses and a Thatcherite perm, was to pause: ‘She said, “They’ll be a laugh here so just give us a smile.”’ On the sixth and last day of the schedule, the dress run was at four o’clock before the audience arrived at seven.
Although there were to be no cutaways to show them laughing, the audience was as far as possible handpicked. Word was spread around theatres by the BBC’s audience department. Posner didn’t want anyone under thirty who might expect Victoria’s comedy to be alternative: she didn’t swear, nor, aside from a couple of barbs aimed at the health secretary Norman Fowler, did she stray into politics. After the debacle at Granada, he didn’t want pensioners either. His guiding principle was to avoid the errors that loaded so much pressure onto Victoria in Wood and Walters. Rather than sprawl over several hours, the recording was designed as an evening to last two hours, with an extra half-hour if needed. There were no bookings for warm-up comics who might detract from the impact of Victoria’s own stand-up. Instead there were musical acts to keep the audience entertained in the breaks: an a cappella group; a yodeller in lederhosen – the only misfire was a potty-mouthed accordionist. Above all Victoria was given comfortable, colourful outfits and a set design that, in contrast to shiny Granada studio, reflected the intimacy of the material.
When the audience arrived Geoff Posner went out to introduce the show and explain what the evening would hold, then Victoria sometimes came out to say a few words. She was often intimidated by the scale of her responsibility: ‘She had this feeling that she’d written rubbish and it would go down badly and all these people would blame her. I would have to go in and coax her in the early days.’ She was so anxious before the audience was shown ‘Whither the Arts?’ that she turned to Susie Blake and said, ‘I’m so nervous. Susie, do you hug?’ But there was barely time to worry. The hectic pace meant the principals were changing in and out of costumes at speed. After one stand-up routine Victoria dashed offstage so quickly, removing her jacket as she went, that it couldn’t be edited out of the final cut.
The material was not recorded in the order it was later broadcast. Because the set wasn’t configured the same every week, Victoria might do as many as three stand-up routines in one evening. These were finessed up to the last minute, and always run by Geoffrey first. To reduce the burden on her, for her songs she often mimed playing the piano to a pre-recorded track.
Her co-stars felt the intensity too. Posner’s idea of making the show run as an evening put pressure on the actors to get their lines right first time. ‘Very quickly,’ says Susie Blake, ‘we all realised that Vic wants this known before we all arrived.’ Even Julie, a veteran of Wood and Walters, ‘found the show quite nerve-racking. It was fun in rehearsal, but it built up to this Saturday night. It was quite tense-making, because Geoff didn’t get what actors went through in order to learn lines. He and Vic were quite in tandem over that. We all felt the pressure.’
With her lone name in the title, Victoria felt mandated to assert herself. She insisted that her gags had to be delivered her way, as written, and she would remind ad-libbers of her long lone months chewing a biro. ‘I probably tried to add bits,’ says Celia. ‘And you only needed to be told once.’ There was a reason for her perfectionism. Victoria had waited many years for this validating break. She had spent those years sifting the alphabet for the right rhymes, honing rat-a-tat dialogue in plays and dramas, and learning how to land jokes in front of an audience and a camera crew. Every word had its place on the map. ‘I go around kicking their ankles if they say it wrong,’ she admitted.25 Her dialogue was so precise that Duncan Preston initially found it ‘not easy to say – it has its own rhythms’. When he played a salesman in a commercial for new homes designed to look horribly lived in, he had to claim, ‘There’s an old tissue under every pillow in a Bunbury Home!’ ‘She said, can you say it with stress on “every”? I did it like that and of course it got the laugh. You wanted it to be right for her and there was a pressure to get it right first time and if you didn’t there was a kind of silence. It was a bit prickly. Eventually you learned how to say her stuff.’
All of her principals experienced an intense desire to do well for Victoria. But she had a Lancastrian parsimony when it came to doling out praise, so they would only know they’d got it right if she threw her head back and laughed. ‘To get the approval of Victoria was always a thrill,’ says Jim Broadbent, who earned it for his gawky turn in ‘A Fairly Ordinary Man’. ‘She always quietly let you know if you were missing a trick.’ Celia Imrie grew to fear displeasing her. ‘If Julie or I went wrong in front of the audience,’ she says, ‘Vic would turn to the audience and say, “Tracey Ullman wasn’t free.” It made us feel like shit.’ ‘That wasn’t about Ceals, that was about me,’ says Julie. ‘People used to confuse Tracey Ullman and me all the time. Vic could be cutting in a very funny way.’
Most nervous of all was Patricia Routledge, who had never performed in front of a television audience before. ‘Pat Routledge … wouldn’t rehearse if anyone else in the room was moving, or blinking, or breathing,’ Victoria told Jane Wymark.26 Her anxiety centred on the lines – not knowing them ‘was complete anathema,’ says Susie Blake. ‘She stood in the wings and would just cling on to me shaking.’ Once in front of the camera, she disconcerted the audience by yelling ‘Yes?’ whenever she dried, which was a risk because Kitty’s were much the longest speeches Victoria asked of any performer. Stuffed with gems, they were crafted with a precision that made great demands.
Kitty inherited elements of Stanley Wood’s mother, who was hoity-toity and played bridge. ‘My grandma used to talk about Cheadle,’ Victoria explained. ‘It’s just one of those funny words like pudding that make you laugh. My grandma might have been from there, or lived there for a time. It’s just a trace memory.’27 Kitty’s brand of homespun wisdom leapt from the specific to the surreal and back again. She introduced herself with a watertight three-part gag which set her up as a fastidious, do-gooding spinster: ‘I could have married, I’ve given gallons of blood and I can’t stomach whelks, so that’s me for you.’ (This was an improvement on the first draft – ‘I’ve had a boob off and I can’t stomach whelks’ – which somehow made it into Up to You, Porky, the sketch book published a year later.) Kitty is proudly self-reliant and indifferent to adversity. ‘I’ve had my share of gynaecological gyp,’ she confides. ‘I still can’t polka without wincing but we’re spunky in Cheadle, we totter on.’ A blinkered suburban Thatcherite who takes a dim view of sex, she knows her place in England’s class system. Her lofty intolerance of the lower orders comes out when her TV gets mended. ‘Well, I say mended – a shifty-looking youth in plimsolls came and waggled my aerial and wolfed my Gypsy Creams, but that’s the comprehensive system for you.’ At the end of the series, Kitty gaily celebrates with a bottle of sherry and is all set to pass on an old Didsbury saying ‘given to me by a plumbing acquaintance of my father’s’ when suddenly she blanks and dries. The joke of Kitty forgetting her lines would not have been lost on anyone who had seen Patricia Routledge’s battle to remember hers. For all the anxiety she generated, her performance turned out to be magnificent.
Geoff Posner was credited as producer and director of five episodes, and one was directed by Marcus Mortimer, a younger production manager hired to share the load – it fell to him to shoot ‘Swim the Channel’. In fact, Victoria often ran proceedings from the studio floor while Posner occupied the control booth. ‘She was always on Geoff’s shoulder directing,’ says Susie Blake. ‘He didn’t direct, certainly not the first series. At that point she was very much in charge. She knew exactly what she wanted.’ Robert Howie corroborates this. Victoria asked her university friend to perform a skit, one of six she wrote spoofing a new vox-pop show on Channel 4. ‘For my couple of days on As Seen on TV, Victoria effectively directed the performances,’ he says. ‘Any messages from Geoff Posner – about an eye line, say – were passed on by a floor manager.’
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nbsp; Robert Howie played a naff old-school comic who objects to Channel 4 employing drug-addicted alternative comedians. At his costume fitting he saw a nametag inside his jacket: Roy Walker. ‘Exactly the object of Victoria’s satire,’ he says. Like several of the ‘Video Box’ scripts, it didn’t make the cut. ‘It was a shame,’ Victoria wrote to him. ‘My fault for writing too many little bits and bobs we didn’t have time for.’28 Over the phone she added that the selection bias was in favour of sketches featuring herself and Julie. A whole series of short skits set in a dry cleaner, and more in a library, were recorded then dropped. Also axed was a spoof of Mr and Mrs in the style of Noël Coward starring Celia Imrie. The omission did little to dispel Celia’s perception that she had been hired as a feed to cue up laughs for Julie and Victoria. ‘It was pretty clear. Often she’d say, “Play it straight, play it straight.” Very often I’d like to put something on it and of course it doesn’t work. You have to have a straight girl. There were times when Duncan and I got quite down in the mouth.’ Celia inadvertently made a further contribution. In a cheesy ensemble song, Victoria and the gang are randomly joined by a nameless man in a tuxedo. ‘He’s with me,’ explains an embarrassed Celia. ‘It’s very casual, we both see other people.’ ‘Is he married?’ asks Victoria. ‘Yes, but we haven’t slept together for ages.’ ‘When I had an affair with a married man she put that in,’ says Celia. ‘I was thinking, oh my God. But she would do that.’ When Victoria was casting about for names of two posh girls in ‘Just an Ordinary School’, set in a private boarding school, she plumped for Babs and Ceal.
Geoff Posner was successful in dissuading Victoria from handing out too many plum parts that felt rightfully hers, and she was cruelly unsentimental about the northern women she incarnated – a thick checkout girl in a scuzzy supermarket, or poor dim Gail trying to coax loving words from her plodding Carl. In a laundrette a gritty old shrew groans about hard times of yore: ‘Clogs on cobbles – you could hardly hear yourself coughing up blood.’ To Julie, meanwhile, went the characters with a hard streak – an overeager self-help guru, an insensitive local reporter, a cultureless amateur-theatre director. Victoria and Julie came together to play an array of old crones and spiky gossips in a series of indelible sketches: ‘Shoe Shop’, ‘Turkish Bath’, the snippy TV presenters Margery and Joan fronting an inane magazine show. With her fake tan and chirpy manner, Joan was widely assumed to refer to Judith Chalmers. ‘I actually came out looking more like her than I intended,’ Victoria conceded. ‘I’d hate to think she minded. If she did, I’d stop.’29
