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

by Jasper Rees

  Some of these sketches were shot in full view of the audience; others that contained a reveal were filmed out of sight and relayed on screens. One section was always filmed in an empty studio and only then relayed to the audience. ‘And now it’s time,’ said the continuity announcer, ‘for the first of our twelve visits to Acorn Antiques, Manchesterford’s favourite antique shop. And after last week’s exciting cliffhanger, let’s see if they’re any further on with mending that umbrella stand.’ Over Victoria’s plinky bossa nova-ish theme tune, recorded on her Casio stylophone, the show’s title appeared in a dated daytime font. Beyond it, the camera hovered on an elderly couple intently inspecting a glass vase before it swivelled round to Celia, wearing thick blue eye shadow and a peroxide wig and seated in front of an ornate retro telephone. Behind her Julie in a pinny clutched a tray and hovered uncertainly in shot as if awaiting her cue to enter. The episode lasted less than four minutes. The studio audience, who had not been advised that this was a parody, emitted barely a titter. In their first ever sighting, Miss Babs, Mr Clifford and the hunchbacked Brummie char Mrs Overall were greeted by confused silence.

  Victoria had been warned this might happen. ‘I had an idea when I wrote it that it was going to be really, really funny. Other people said, “I don’t get it.” I said, “Just wait. It’s like this. They won’t get it till they see it.”’30 The first person not to get it was Geoffrey. ‘She wrote Acorn Antiques very baldly and very barely. I said, “There’s not a lot here; it’s a bit thin.” She said, “That’s all right, we’ll put in lots of clichés.”’ An auditioning actor voiced a strong doubt about how funny it was, not realising he was speaking to the author. Victoria was so confident it would get laughs that she insisted it be recorded without an audience. ‘We knew we would never get through it. They would be laughing and it had to be done as a soap would be done in the daytime in a cold studio.’31

  When the first episode didn’t get laughs from the studio audience, Posner took the decision to screen the second straight after – he had three in the bank, all filmed the day before. The hope was that the penny might drop with more exposure. Something shifted when Julie was seen to enter with her mouth full of biscuit and, being unable to say her lines, collapse in giggles. When they shot the scene again, Posner decided to retain the old take, separating it from the new one with a brief blackout. This edit wasn’t in the script and went far beyond the rules of the parody, but the audience twigged, started to laugh and didn’t stop until after the cast credits had bumped diagonally across the screen. Victoria then went on to introduce the first episode again and clarify what they were watching. This time it was greeted with much more laughter, prominent among it Geoffrey’s booming guffaws.

  ‘Acorn Antiques … took all the worst things from television,’ Victoria explained to Russell Harty soon after it was broadcast, ‘like wobbly sets and people drying and people being seen before their entrances and the backcloth at the back swaying from side to side and the same two extras looking at a jug every week and then putting it down and moving to the back of the shop – all the things I love in television.’32 Often asked about its inspiration, Victoria would never quite settle on a definitive answer. She cited ‘the really abysmal dialogue’ of Waggoner’s Walk, a Radio 4 serial featuring three women leading racy lives in a flat in Hampstead, which ran through the 1970s – at one point Fidelis Morgan was in the cast.33 She also nodded to The Archers, while television gave her The Cedar Tree with its sludgy plots about a grand country house between the wars. ‘Vic used to collect examples of soapy phraseology with great delight,’ says Geoffrey, ‘and The Cedar Tree was particularly fruitful. One of the great pleasures for Vic was watching Joyce Carey dry stone dead and then savouring how she would painstakingly worm her way out of it. It happened a lot and showed how low the budget was.’ Another inspiration was Take the High Road, the cult Scottish soap begun in 1980 and set in a Highland village. Victoria was particularly taken with the grumpy cleaning lady Mrs Mack, which gave her the name for Mrs Overall. Then there was Crossroads, which she had devoured so avidly as a student. She seized on the way the script sought to confer glamour on itself by dropping in references to international locations. In the first two episodes alone Miss Babs receives a phone call from a mysterious man from the Middle East, Mr Clifford (played by Duncan Preston) returns from Zurich and the father of Victoria’s character Miss Berta is shot dead in Dhaka – the Bangladesh capital was on the airmail envelope of every letter Victoria addressed to Jane Wymark. She was also seduced by Crossroads’ ridiculous plots: ‘Everybody is related to everybody else and every week there is some sort of denouement wherever somebody turns out to be related or have amnesia.’34 Babs has triplets who are heard of but not seen, while she and Berta are supposed to be identical. ‘As they are played by me and Celia Imrie, of whom I am twice the size, we both wear the same suit but I have a wig that makes me look like Pat Phoenix.’35

  Geoff Posner had a sharp scholarly eye for the look of things on television. He was meticulous about capturing the grammar of documentaries, right down to the way the title of a film would bloom on screen just after an interviewee had uttered the key phrase: ‘Swim the Channel’, ‘Just an Ordinary School’, ‘A Fairly Ordinary Man’. When Victoria first introduced Acorn Antiques to him she read out the stage directions: ‘This is a soap opera with shaky sets and extraordinary acting.’ He launched into an intense study of Crossroads in order to identify and then exaggerate its tropes. It was his idea to introduce the ever-present couple who never say anything: they were inspired by the figures played by so-called background artists who would check into the Crossroads motel without speaking, because if they had lines they’d have to be paid more. A scene would begin with a close-up of fingers pointing at a map before the camera pulled away. The set was designed in such a way that the actors found themselves moving like sardines around clutter, or blocking one another thanks to a badly positioned camera, or in one case walking so far forward they leave the set altogether. Props took on a life of their own: a lampshade impeded an actor’s exit or obscured them from view; the telephone would not ring at the right moment. The main generator of technical errors was Mrs Overall, forcing other actors to cover for her. ‘I’d look at the monitor and shove my tray into shot where it shouldn’t be,’ says Julie. ‘Or be really late coming on. A lot of that we did on the day. With the lines there was no improvising. Vic would not have that, and I never wanted it. But in terms of who Mrs O was, I decided. She would enjoy me doing whatever I did with it. It was just unsaid.’

  Apart from Julie choking on a biscuit, everything was painstakingly rehearsed. Acorn Antiques took so long to film because it required cast and, especially, crew to unlearn everything they knew about technical competence. Geoff Posner coached cameramen to hold still when a character stood up, rather than rise with them. In the second series, when Duncan Preston bangs his head on the boom microphone, it took several takes to persuade the boom operator to go against his instincts and not lift it. ‘Everybody could jump in,’ said Victoria, ‘and the cameramen could bump into each other and all the things they try valiantly not to do most of the time they could do.’36

  Others also consulted Crossroads for inspiration. Celia based Miss Babs on Noele Gordon’s performance as Crossroads motel proprietor Meg Mortimer. ‘Noele Gordon seemed to keep the whole thing together,’ she says. ‘Miss Babs was in charge and no matter what was going on around her she was going to keep the ball going.’ Her appreciation for the actress’s personal style was rooted in an outing she once took with Victoria and Fidelis Morgan to a charity football match in Stratford-upon-Avon: ‘There was this magnificent moment when she wore this turquoise suit and brought out this turquoise handkerchief.’ The sky-blue eyeshadow was Celia’s idea; Babs’s telephone manner she copied from her agent’s. Duncan based the pinstriped Mr Clifford, with a silk handkerchief frothing from the breast pocket of his three-piece suit, on Ronnie Allen’s performance as absurdly plummy mote
l shareholder David Hunter. ‘I wasn’t taking him off,’ he insists. ‘I had him in mind.’ Julie felt Mrs O ‘should be like Amy Turtle: she should have a Birmingham accent and she should be old.’ A wig was prepared but then the moment came for Julie to put her long hair up in a net: ‘Vic and I were being made up and we both looked at one another and went, “Don’t need the wig.”’

  Three more characters helped Victoria to send the plot spinning out of control. Derek, a Scottish handyman, is found to be Miss Berta’s twin and Mrs Overall’s long-lost son. A pert young cockney called Trixie is discovered to be Babs’s daughter and ends up entering a nunnery. The role of Spanish lothario Cousin Jerez was played by Peter Ellis, whom Victoria knew from the original cast of Talent. When he asked if the character was modelled on the Great Soprendo, she didn’t deny it.

  The attention to detail in As Seen on TV ran through to the closing credits, which needed to be different from the juddering, accidentally overlapping credits for Acorn Antiques. Geoff Posner took advantage of a recently invented gizmo: the digital video extender enabled him to make the screen bob and swirl through 360 degrees so that the credits could roll and flip. The idea was to hold the viewer through to the finish, when a short extra piece might be appended. ‘And there’ll be more attempts at fun from the overweight comedienne next week,’ said a male announcer as the credits rolled. Victoria had not quite shed her habit of joking about her size. The first ever episode concluded with a weather check from the continuity announcer, who is relieved there is to be no heatwave: ‘Whenever it’s hot a lot of the girls here come to work in sleeveless tops and some of them are very overweight and I get quite depressed having to look at their enormous arms all day long. Of course obesity is a tremendous problem for a lot of people – a lot of weak-willed, self-indulgent guzzlers, that is. Anyway, the weather …’

  In August, when it was still being recorded, Victoria Wood As Seen on TV was announced as part of the BBC’s autumn schedule. The initial transmission date was October, which was then put back to November and finally January 1985. In the meantime, a collection of Victoria’s songs was published by Methuen, titled Lucky Bag and stretching stylistically from the widower’s lament ‘Love Song’ through to Paula du Val’s salty ditty ‘Nasty Things’. The cover image of a round-buttocked blonde at the piano, naked but for a blue corset, was supplied by Beryl Cook, whose images of big brassy women Victoria loved. The book was launched in Manchester. In a speech reflecting on her life as a songwriter, Victoria looked back to the mock ad for Cupid’s Kiss Cornplasters she wrote at Bury Grammar and her early collaborations with her boyfriend Bob Mason. Her first book – and her first retrospective speech – felt like a milestone, even if at the same event the queue for Beryl Reid’s memoir was much longer. Victoria competitively sized up the discrepancy and told her publisher Geoffrey Strachan, ‘Next year I’ll do you a sketch book.’

  In an introduction entitled ‘Playing the Piano the Victoria Wood Way’ Victoria had no practical tips to pass on: ‘I don’t play with my left hand … You can if you want to. We’ve put some notes in for clever chaps who do want to go bashing away with both hands at the same time, boring everybody stupid.’37 She had long since stopped practising the piano and blamed her deterioration on the logistics of performance, explaining the problem to Russell Harty: ‘You’re trying to pull funny faces, you’ve got to breathe in very hard to project your voice and you’re doing something flashy with the hand they can see, and the hand they can’t see you think, oh well, never mind.’38 The better she sold her songs to audiences, the less she valued instrumental technique. The performance was all.

  She now returned to performing on a tour originally timed to coincide with the broadcast that autumn. It was proposed by André Ptaszynski, whom Victoria knew from Sheffield Crucible. He had since capitalised on the boom in alternative comedy by presenting live tours by Rik Mayall and Ben Elton, and he introduced her to a Preston-based former music promoter called Phil McIntyre, who had valuable experience of touring acts on the regional circuit. The venues they booked were much larger than any Victoria had yet played – Leeds Grand, Plymouth Theatre Royal, Birmingham Rep. When the postponement of Victoria Wood As Seen on TV robbed the tour of marketing potential, these thousand-seater venues did not instantly sell. There was even talk of pulling the tour altogether, but McIntyre urged Ptaszynski to hold his nerve. ‘We realised it could turn round late,’ he says. ‘We toughed it out. Vic always remembered that – that we had faith in her.’ She sat through a gruelling round of interviews to plug the show and the book. No promotional opportunity was too small. ‘I’ve been asked to unveil a pub sign in Telford by Graham Woodruff!!’ she told Jane Wymark – her former drama lecturer at Birmingham had moved into hostelry. ‘How could I refuse?’39

  Lasting six weeks into mid-December, this was Victoria’s longest stretch on the road yet. She had a quip ready for every venue. In Warwick she muddled Coventry Cathedral with Habitat. Plymouth was ‘classy and yet seedy’, a line she would use for a lot of theatres. New material was slipped into the existing set: a haiku about bangers and mash, a new song languidly spoofing Brecht and Weill (‘I vill go to bed viz you if you pose as a Black & Decker drill’). Everywhere she went she was greeted by thunderous applause and ecstatic reviews, if not always full houses – Ramsgate was even cancelled. ‘I’m enjoying it a lot more than I expected,’ she reported. ‘I have a stage manager Liz and she takes care of all the technical side, the ironing and the chivvying up of large crews of sullen men, the part I always disliked.’40 She couldn’t help noticing that she had acquired ‘a following of overweight lesbians (can’t think why ho ho) who cluster round the stage door and ask me for Julie Walters’ phone number’.41

  As the year ended Victoria reintroduced herself to potential audiences for the forthcoming TV show. She sang ‘Don’t Get Cocky’ on Bob Monkhouse’s Radio 2 show, while she and the Great Soprendo once more guested on Russell Harty’s Christmas special. ‘Our Vicky,’ said Harty over the applause for ‘Northerners’. ‘Our Vicky Wood.’ The episode ended with the cassocked choir of New College Oxford singing ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’, joined by Victoria and various celebrities. They included Terry Wogan, on whose chat show she had once clammed up, and Tony Blackburn, who was part of her song cycle for The Camera and the Song. Mainstream fame looked an ever more comfortable fit.

  Victoria Wood As Seen on TV was scheduled for Friday nights on BBC Two starting in January. Readers who turned to the listings were none the wiser about what to expect. ‘“Chipper” Patel,’ went the blurb for the first programme, ‘arrived from New Delhi in 1962 with an artificial leg and five pounds in his pocket. He now controls a multi-million pound vinyl flooring empire. He didn’t want to be filmed. So here’s a tatty old comedy programme with some women in it.’ The entries for the following weeks were no less opaque. ‘Would Jane Austen have used a food processor?’ ‘Managing without Opera. It’s the third week of the experiment …’ ‘Two years ago a woman from a North Lancashire village forgot to stoke her solid fuel boiler. An award-winning camera crew follow her determined and often heartbreaking attempts to light it.’ Victoria wrote these billings at the prompting of Geoff Posner, whose idea was to extend the flavour of Susie Blake’s continuity announcements into the show’s publicity material. Victoria even boldly slipped in capsule reviews from the newspapers. ‘Fairly amusing (DAILY TELEGRAPH).’ ‘I loved it (DAILY MAIL).’

  On the night of Friday 11 January some of the cast gathered in the basement of a restaurant in Shepherd’s Bush to see in the series. The opening credits, depicting a woman with a feathercut wearing pink and standing at a microphone on a colourful set, gave way to the real thing. Conscious that she hadn’t been seen on TV much at all other than in cheap, cheerful game shows, Victoria used her first monologue to address this head on. A taxi driver arrives to take her to the television station: ‘He says, “You’re on the television tonight.” I said, “I can’t be on television because The Pyr
amid Game’s finished.” The next thing I knew, here I am talking to you.’

  The cast at the restaurant received a phone call advising that the show was a success. ‘We all went home on a complete high,’ says Susie Blake. But broadsheet newspapers which had often reviewed Victoria overlooked her return to television. This was partly because the BBC did not let reviewers see its light-entertainment programmes in advance, partly because the Saturday papers tended not to carry overnight reviews. The Sundays had more time. Russell Davies in the Observer professed instant addiction to Acorn Antiques. Astutely, he spotted a change: ‘The shadow of self-pity used to lurk behind some of Miss Wood’s material, but she has now abandoned this in favour of ruthlessness.’42 Critics were also distracted by the simultaneous launch of Dempsey and Makepeace. ‘You are currently missing the treat of the week on at the same time,’ hollered Nina Myskow in the News of the World.43 One columnist proposed a week’s hard labour watching TV-am for anyone who missed the show. A Glasgow Herald leader on westernisation in China even cited Kitty: ‘How can you really respect any nation that has never taken to cutlery?’44 This line and others would seep into the collective consciousness of an audience which peaked at four and a half million. In Victoria’s spectacular reinvention of the sketch show, there were many of them to memorise: