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

by Jasper Rees

  ‘I can’t say this often enough – it may be Hamlet, but it’s got to be fun, fun, fun!’

  ‘We think we’ve got hens in the skirting board. We found droppings by the pop sox.’

  ‘I thought what would the Queen Mum do? So I just smiled and said, “We shall have fog by tea time.”’

  ‘I were in meat packing before. Then an overall came free so I come here.’

  ‘What is it muesli?’

  ‘We’ll have more needlework hints next week when Philippa will be showing us how to stitch up the mouth of a talkative friend or relative.’

  ‘We stayed up for the News at Ten. Three bangles and a polo neck, thank you.’

  ‘She’ll never get ’ers clenched. Take two big lads and a wheelbarrow.’

  ‘I don’t do French, I do woodwork.’

  12

  DOING IT

  ‘Don’t start with the clapping. It’s a very long song, you know. You’ll get repetitive strain injury.’

  Advice to Manchester audience, 1996

  While Victoria Wood As Seen on TV was showing in the first weeks of 1985, Victoria was in digs in Bristol, where Geoffrey was appearing in Aladdin. He went out to work for eight hours a day and, encouraged by the producer Michael Codron, she sat down at a desk to attempt to write a play. ‘Finished the first draft of my play,’ she told Jane Wymark. ‘I suppose I had better take a deep breath and do a second draft, which I know will be the hard work.’1

  Like all other efforts since Good Fun, Victoria’s desire to break back into theatre did not bear fruit. Indeed, even after her triumphant TV show was instantly recommissioned – ‘She was delighted,’ says Geoffrey – she would spend a fallow year casting around for other challenges. The first job that came up was a piece of writing for children’s television. The commission came from Greg Childs, now a fledgling producer. Of all the big-name writers he asked, ‘Vic was the only one who said yes. She probably did it as a favour to me.’ She was given a deadline of two months and dashed it off in March. ‘I locked myself away in a hotel on the south coast for two days to write the story,’ she said. ‘Maybe it was the smell of seaweed that gave me the idea.’2 Molly and the Seaweed Hypermarket, rooted in her experience of arriving in Morecambe, had much in common with her unproduced radio comedy Sunny Side Up. It tells of Molly Seathwaite’s attempt to rescue her local variety theatre, which has no cash for jokes or a decent magician, and prevent her greedy uncle stealing her diamonds in order to build a Slimy Seaweed Hypermarket. A love letter to the stage which also touched on food fanaticism and child neglect, this was a playlet for children that bore Victoria’s signature. ‘I’m fed up with being a disappointment,’ says Molly. Unusually Victoria consented to the script being cut and edited without her involvement. Greg Childs asked for another one, but she politely declined.

  In March there was another tour. The promoters’ idea of a manageable itinerary struck Victoria as strange. ‘They keep sending me dates like Glasgow followed immediately by Barnstaple – they think as long as you don’t have to cross water everywhere in the UK can be managed in one day.’3 Her claim that the average journey was 200 miles was an exaggeration, says her tour promoter Phil McIntyre: ‘Obviously an artist thinks we’re idiots, we can’t read a map. Well, we can. It’s always venue availability. She never complained about it.’ The Midas effect of being seen on TV meant that the tour sold out. ‘Everywhere except Chatham,’ Victoria remarked.4 It left her feeling ‘a bit worn out – it’s the worry over what the piano will be like at each venue’.5 When she arrived at the venue she spent a couple of hours running through all of the songs. ‘I think if I don’t play through them, I’ll forget them. And this has proved to be the case.’6 New songs were added from the TV show. Another was a pastiche of Marvin Hamlisch in the voice of a dim salon dogsbody called Karina (‘I’m doing / shampooing / and I’m training to converse’).

  By now Victoria was so confident in her ability to entertain an audience on her own for two hours that she grew nervous – ‘keyed up’ as she called it – only an hour before performing: ‘The more I work the more I know, and the more I know what I want to do. And the less frightened I am that people won’t like me. I don’t care really.’7 A BBC documentary, programmed to run in an afternoon slot, captured the rhythm of her working life on tour. It was a BBC Schools commission, which perhaps explains why Victoria was happy to be filmed at Stankelt Road. Though eager, as she explained, not to be seen as one of those celebrities who ‘enjoy having everything seen by the public, their toilet paper and their duvet covers and their marriage – I don’t get any pleasure out of it’, she was filmed arriving home from a gig and, in unstarlike fashion, stuffing the washing machine with dirty clothes.8

  Increasingly, fame was something that had to be thought about and managed. At one party in the Lake District, Victoria stationed herself in the kitchen to mix cocktails and wash up. ‘Of course the longer I stayed in there, the more difficult it became to make an entrance without looking poncey, so I stayed in there all night and didn’t have to speak to anybody, which was great.’9 Friends, both in Lancashire and London, would avoid asking her about her work; one old friend irked her by never saying anything about the show when coming backstage afterwards. ‘I’m not very famous,’ she insisted when commissioned to write about fame. ‘When questioned, five out of ten people thought I had just played for the last time at Wimbledon, or committed suicide by walking into the sea with rocks in the pockets of my cardigan.’ The two Virginias – Wade and Woolf – remained handy tools for deflecting her stardom.

  To recuperate after the tour, in April she and Geoffrey embarked on their most exotic trip yet. ‘In those digs in Bristol we both felt successful for the first time ever really,’ says Geoffrey. ‘And we deserved a holiday.’ They booked a villa in St Lucia, where they enjoyed room service, swimming and sunbathing – or ‘lying on my back, toasting my doo-dahs,’ as Victoria put it on The Late Clive James.10 They encountered steel bands and limbo-dancing contests, but they mainly tore through books. As voracious readers – Victoria would devour up to three titles a day – they stuffed novels into luggage and supplemented their stash at airports. ‘Very sunny nice warm sea and the natives are friendly,’ Victoria told Rosalind. ‘We’re in a little cottage near the beach and having a nice time.’11

  She returned to Silverdale invigorated for the coming task. ‘I man the Bic for another crack at VWASOTVII,’ she told Robert Howie. ‘All those wigs to think up!’12 The BBC’s plan was to broadcast the second series in January 1986. Then in mid-May Victoria’s agent Vivienne Clore phoned with frustrating news: Geoff Posner was leaving the BBC and would not be available to make the series in time. ‘This call came on a day when I was with difficulty just scratching out to the first few gags and it put the mockers on it, cos I couldn’t write it without knowing when it would be done – so yesterday I packed up.’13 All the ideas that swilled in her head had to put in the deep freeze: ‘I’m writing them late November–April instead, otherwise they will go completely dead on me.’14 To vent her frustration she went swimming for a mile and a quarter.

  She now had to find something else to do instead. Earlier in the year she had been chuffed to be summoned to lunch with the veteran film director Clive Donner, who had shot scripts by Harold Pinter and Woody Allen, only to be underwhelmed by the film he wanted her to write: ‘It’s about a miserable fat person (can’t think why he thought of me).’15 Now, with nothing else on, Victoria overcame her objections and started on it in June, then after two days remembered ‘it was really a rather lousy, mawkish kind of “lonely fat girl” idea and I felt I’d been here before (especially in real life ho ho) and decided the true artistic course would be to write exactly what I wanted’.16 On one of her frequent trips to London she presented her outline to Donner and his producer and was pleased that they ‘laffed heartily when they read it’.17 But nothing came of it. In the same period she received a phone call from Vince Cross, who produced her Lucky Bag al
bum and had composed a single to tie in with Return to Oz, Disney’s sort-of sequel to The Wizard of Oz, which he invited Victoria to record. She turned up at his studio in Milton Keynes and soon intuited that ‘he loathes my voice, my phrasing (and who knows probably my entire personality), and really wished he had been allowed to record the song himself … I have never thought of myself as possessing a great voice but I definitely can put a song over.’18 The experience cured her of the desire to record other people’s songs.

  The success of As Seen on TV resonated in other unpredictable ways. She explored her musical enthusiasms in Russell Harty’s Musical Encounters on Radio 4 in May and then on Andy Kershaw’s BBC Two show Off the Record in June. Her tastes were eclectic, stretching from Peter Skellern via the Beatles to the music she encountered on her father’s wind-up gramophone: dance-band leader Harry Roy, jazz trumpeter Bunny Berigan and stride pianist Winifred Atwell. (For her thirty-third birthday, which they spent wobbling in canoes on Windermere, Geoffrey gave her a cheque to buy herself a trumpet – ‘tho’ I’m not sure if I should get one – as I haven’t anyone to play with’.19) That summer Victoria was asked by her university friend Bill Lloyd to join Jake Thackray and Melvyn Bragg as judges of a competition run by the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal to find talented young songwriters. She was less enamoured than the other two by an endless flow of ‘so many really banal anti-nuclear, Maggie T, pro-miners etc dirges’.20 When the judges gathered to pick a winner, says Bill Lloyd, ‘Melvyn was very snappy and Vic commented afterwards that he was unnecessarily rude.’ She and Bragg met again the following month at the Edinburgh Television Festival, where the creator of Acorn Antiques was invited to take part in a session chaired by Bragg titled ‘A Slippery Soap – is Soap Opera pulling drama down the drain?’ The panel of grandees included Julia Smith, the fearsome producer of EastEnders. The chance to observe her at close quarters was to bear fruit.

  With her autumn schedule messed up by the postponement of As Seen on TV, Victoria entered ‘a very bleak time work-wise’.21 It emerged that Geoff Posner would not now be able to produce the show until July the following year, so there was no point in starting on the scripts till January. She hoped to make another album, but the deal fell through. ‘I’ve sort of hit a brick wall and can’t come up with any ideas. I took to long walks to try and decide what I really wanted to do (7 miles is my record so far).’22 She tried writing yet another play – ‘no dice – duff idea’ – scrapping it on the grounds that it was too derivative of Alan Ayckbourn. Then Michael Codron suggested she write a film. He had just dipped his toe in cinema by producing Clockwise, from a script by Michael Frayn. Being asked by a theatre producer to do a film, she admitted, ‘confused me and I got stuck again’. She spent several weeks at her desk worrying that she was ‘all washed up’, changed tack and decided to ‘stop giving myself such a bad time, and see if anything pops up into my brain while I’m not looking. I shouldn’t complain anyway – I’ve had it very good the last few years, and I’m not broke, so fuck it.’23

  The other frustration was that there were no live dates to focus on as she had turned many down in order to write the series: ‘So now the calendar’s all chopped up with the odd one here and there (two days in November say “Geneva Friday Belfast Saturday” which I’m pretending will never happen).’24 It nearly didn’t. When Victoria got to Manchester to fly to Geneva she discovered she’d left her passport at home. Her cleaner’s husband drove at high speed to deliver it just in time; to her horror she learned only afterwards that he was banned from driving. Her friend Charlotte Scott acted as her tour manager: ‘We had to run to the furthest departure point onto a plane that was full of people. They just glared at her and then they realised it was her. We just couldn’t speak. It was terrible.’ The cabaret ‘went very well,’ Victoria reported, ‘considering the audience was 70 per cent male managing directors’.25 Then, at Belfast the next day, her luggage didn’t turn up till half an hour before the performance. The only other work Victoria had that autumn was recording some children’s stories for the BBC, during which she was alarmed to discover that, among many other voices, she would have to do a Spanish pirate. She asked to be excused so she could phone Geoffrey and be coached in Spanish pronunciation. ‘Thank heavens he was at home or I’d have been fucked. My parrot was a minor triumph, I feel.’26

  The year concluded brightly with the publication of Up to You, Porky, a selection of sketches and monologues from Lucky Bag, Wood and Walters and As Seen on TV. It took its title from the self-lacerating sketch in which Julie’s boutique salesgirl calls Victoria obese, ugly and a fatso. She dedicated it to Peter Eckersley, ‘who liked a laugh’, and introduced it with a short piece entitled ‘Thigs I Like by Vicky Wood age 32’ that riffed on her poor typing skills. ‘I like as well wen the man from MEPHTHUN(cant spell it)pone up and say we have some lambnatid covers gong begging do you have any old skechs we will pay hansomly but not for ages.’27 Geoffrey Strachan, a pioneer of humour publishing, was soon firing more ideas at her, among them ‘a miscellany of hitherto unpublished songs, sketches, and short essays culled from newspaper and magazines’,28 then ‘an autobiographical book, a discursive book, or a work of fiction’.29 Methuen were the publishers of the Clockwise script, so he was all ears about her own screenplay, not to mention any play she may be working on.

  Victoria went to London for the launch of Up to You, Porky, and sat through a day of interviews. One was down the line to Walter Love, a broadcaster in Belfast who tried to draw her on the title of the book. ‘I suppose that’s got to be some kind of comment on something,’ he said. ‘I suppose so,’ she replied warily before taking advantage of a bit of interference on the line to pretend she’d been cut off. ‘The interview closed with Walter bellowing into the ether “Hello? Hello? We seem to have lost Victoria Wood for the moment,” as I was happily walking out of the studio.’30 Unless her fans had gone to the trouble of videoing As Seen on TV, Up to You, Porky was the only way of reconnecting with the likes of Kitty, Margery and Joan, Carl and Gail, as well as stage characters such as Victoria’s half-witted guide to Haworth Parsonage.

  Then, early in 1986, the BBC repeated Victoria Wood As Seen on TV, where it gained a larger audience on BBC One. Victoria finally began to write the second series with a change to her writing regime. She had to give up her morning swim because the chlorine was affecting her eyes, replacing it with half an hour’s brisk walking to supplement a burst of the Jane Fonda workout. ‘Jane Fonda – go for the burn,’ she scrawled in a notebook under a page headed ‘Gags’. ‘I thought that meant you could stop for a bit and have a fag.’31

  She also opted for a new look, swapping her unruly feather cut for a trim blonde pudding-bowl crop. ‘Have had all my hair cut off and bleached,’ she informed Jane Wymark. ‘I look like a very old fat skin head but who cares?’32 She unveiled it at the Broadcasting Press Guild TV and Radio Awards, where As Seen on TV won best light entertainment. Three days later it was up in the same category at the BAFTAs. The ceremony was held in the Grosvenor House Ballroom, and she dressed up in a cream double-breasted suit. As her category was announced, a short clip from ‘Turkish Bath’ was shown: ‘Now that’s the blue of our Margaret’s new shower curtain – them varicose veins there.’ Nicholas Barrett, who was producing the broadcast for LWT, witnessed its impact: ‘Seasoned elder statesmen of the TV industry were suddenly besieged by their own unanticipated laughter at this blast of fresh air from the north. They had never encountered anything like it before.’ Victoria was not expecting to win – ‘Will probably lose to Two Ronnies or Spitting Image,’ she predicted – and her delight when she did was slightly dulled when the award for a show she had entirely written was collected, according to protocol and tradition, by its producer-director.33 After sheepishly following Geoff Posner up to the podium, she had her own moment in the Best Performance in Light Entertainment category – her nomination, she mused, ‘must be for the stand-up spot as the rest is only different wigs’.34 She c
ollected her statuette from Clive James and seemed reluctant to speak. ‘Well, I only do one performance,’ she said hastily, ‘so it’s very nice to get a prize for it.’ She shook the hand of Ronnie Barker, who had been nominated twice in the same category, on the way back to her table, where there was exultation. ‘You got used to the BBC paying for one bottle of wine to be shared between ten,’ says Geoff Posner, ‘but on this occasion everyone was so pleased for Vic that a second bottle was ordered.’

  Then, days after the BAFTAs, came another tour. There were new costumes to be made by ‘a very nice designer girl who doesn’t seem to mind that I have the same vital statistics as a walrus’.35 Because Victoria had been working on a play and the second series, and lost a week to flu caught at a Blackpool magic convention, not much new material had been written. To supplement ‘Love Song’ before the interval, and ‘Music and Movement’ and ‘Northerners’ in the encore, she frantically wrote four songs and two monologues: ‘I was terrified of people complaining that they’d seen it all before, but as I had only had a day to learn it all I was in a bit of a state the first few nights, and usually cocked up at least one song per show, but no body minded.’36 She dashed around London looking for a wig and any kind of outfit that would work for a second-half opener to replace Paula du Val, even though she hadn’t yet written it. The character she came up with was an usherette called Margaret, who explained to the audience that she was filling in while Victoria Wood nipped to the Happy Haddock Fish Bar to get a bag of chips and a jumbo sausage for the stage-door keeper. She described a racy lifestyle of wife-swapping and strip Trivial Pursuit and closed by drawing attention to collection tins to raise money for knackered usherettes. Another monologue, entitled ‘It Was Party Time in the Crescent’, was a comic verse recited in the chummy style of Stanley Holloway: