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

by Jasper Rees

  Mrs Smith had just come off of a cruise ship

  And showed thirty-two slides of old frescoes

  ‘This white wine I discern, is it from the Auvergne?’

  ‘No, it’s two quid, it’s from Tesco’s.’

  The new songs were complicated to learn. ‘Lousy’ was an up tempo patter song about counting your blessings: ‘I could have nasty lodgers and never get them shifted / I could have famous bosoms and be forced to have them lifted’. ‘Photo Booth’ was a lilting reverie inspired by memories of Bob Mason:

  Found your picture the other day

  From that booth all those years away

  Chips and kisses and tears and joy

  What a lovely boy you were.

  At the last minute another new composition joined the repertoire. It emerged one night after Geoffrey had gone to bed, leaving Victoria to come up with a much-needed show closer: ‘I went down to her office at about eight the next morning to find her still at the desk. She said she’d written something quite long. She sang it and we both agreed it could turn out to be a corker.’

  The song shattered a rule long planted in Victoria’s head that songs should not outstay their welcome. This was much the longest she’d ever written. Its length made it impossible to learn in the few days before she opened, so she inscribed the lyrics in an exercise book, cut it into strips and sellotaped it to the inside of the lid of the grand piano at Harrogate Conference Centre, where, as an encore on Thursday 20 March 1986, Victoria for the first time in public sang

  Freda and Barry sat one night,

  The sky was clear, the stars were bright.

  The wind was soft, the moon was up,

  Freda drained her cocoa cup.

  She licked her lips, she felt sublime,

  She switched off Gardener’s Question Time.

  Barry cringed in fear and dread,

  As Freda grabbed his tie and said …

  It had been a fraught night. Thanks to a sudden spike in her fame, Victoria was now playing to the biggest venues on the circuit. On the first night of the tour more than 2,000 people had assembled to be entertained by her. In his first day on the job was a green young tour manager called Andrew Fell. He had been warned by his boss André Ptaszynski that Victoria ‘can be a little prickly but the only thing she’s worried about is the piano’. To him alone fell the task of lugging costumes and merchandise, checking sound and lighting, and ironing Victoria’s costumes. ‘I did a very bad job,’ he says. ‘What made it a million times worse was I could tell it was piling so much anxiety on Victoria when the last thing she needed was anxiety. The atmosphere backstage was very tense, very cold, very self-contained.’

  ‘We were more nervous than usual,’ says Geoffrey. ‘The first night at Harrogate was dominated by the dual drama of Andrew losing his nerve and Vic and I being aware that “Barry and Freda” could be a big thing.’ Its first performance seemed to go on for ever – eight minutes – in the middle of which there was a hiccup. After looking out to the audience Victoria turned back to her crib sheet and lost her place. ‘The whole thing ground to a halt for possibly three or four seconds,’ says Geoffrey. ‘But she collected herself, picked it up again and cruised through to the finish.’ At his suggestion she had doubled up the last verse to give Freda the triumphant final word. The idea they’d discussed for years was that Victoria could induce a standing ovation if she was clinical about it. From the side of the stage Andrew Fell witnessed it: ‘It stormed. They went absolutely crazy. It was the absolute standout of what was a jaw-dropping two-hour set.’

  As a piece of craftsmanship, ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’ was a complete expression of Victoria’s genius. Into the three syllables by which the song would be popularly known, she compressed the essence of her comedy. ‘Let’s do it’ said everything: it included, it enthused and it suggested sex in a brusque pronoun. The chorus was a homage to both Cole Porter and Noël Coward, whose song ‘Let’s Do It’ she’d praised on Russell Harty’s Musical Encounters. And ‘Let’s Do It’ was how she referred to her song at home. ‘But she realised the song might have legs,’ says Geoffrey, ‘so she didn’t want it confused with Porter or Coward and she changed it before it went public.’ On the original typescript she crossed out ‘LET’S DO IT’ and wrote ‘BARRY & FREDA’.

  The names were plundered from As Seen on TV. In a black-and-white spoof of British New Wave cinema, two northern lovers meet in a dark rainy alley. ‘By ’eck,’ says Barry, played by Pete Postlethwaite. ‘I never thought of myself as romantic, Freda, but you’ve got a cracking bust.’ From the very start Victoria had been writing about what does or doesn’t happen in the bedroom. She was far more preoccupied with sex, with ‘it’, than any other contemporary entertainer – its ins and outs and ups and downs, its dos and don’ts. In the beginning Victoria wrote songs about dreading sex. In stand-up she resented the way it blocked the view of the television. Only a few months earlier, spending a week with Geoffrey at a health farm, she tested a device where she sat in cold water and put her feet in hot water, then swapped. ‘Well that was worse than sex,’ said a woman in the next cubicle.

  Now she turned the tables. She came at sex from a perspective of a wife in midlife fired by a romantic desire to seize the day and ‘do it till our hearts go boom’. Freda’s ever more lurid fantasies find saucy new uses for items from the kitchen – an oven glove, a hostess trolley, an avocado – while Barry, who can’t or won’t show his hot-to-trot missus a good time, seeks refuge in such essential household tasks as grouting, lagging and vinyl flooring. Victoria edited her portrait of a marriage as she went along. Initially the song ended with ‘No pyjamas / Just dramas / You be Desmond Wilcox I’ll be Judith Chalmers’. She soon improved it to ‘Be mighty / Be flighty / Come and melt the buttons on my flame-proof nightie’. Then she flipped the last two verses to end with ‘Not meekly / Not bleakly / Flick me hard all over with a Woman’s Weekly’. Intuiting that this conjured up the wrong sort of image, she altered it to ‘Beat me on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly’. What happens at the very end? The lyrics don’t say, but the music does. No fewer than four key changes ramp up the tension towards an inevitable climax supplied by the audience’s orgasmic applause.

  ‘She was so happy with that song,’ says Geoffrey. ‘It was a massive breakthrough.’ Gradually, over twenty-two nights passing through Barnstaple and Edinburgh, Ipswich and Lewisham – and a slip in Portsmouth when she pulled up after a key change glitch – Victoria learned to deliver ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’ with effortless confidence. Her feelings about her tour manager did not change. ‘It’s the only time I knew Vic to be irksome,’ says Phil McIntyre. Back at the hotel after the final date in Halifax she gave Andrew Fell, in his words, ‘a lovely present’ and wished him well. With her exultant promoters she got drunk.

  After the tour ended in April, Victoria was ‘completely knackered’.37 But the scripts for As Seen on TV needed completing. As she wrote she felt a fresh burden imposed by her BAFTA: ‘Every time I looked at the award I kept thinking that people would be expecting so much more now and I just wouldn’t be able to live up to it. In the end, I just had to put the thing away.’38 With days to the deadline, she told Jane Wymark, ‘half the scripts are with the typist, some are in a scribbled heap on my desk, and fifteen minutes of crud remain to be written … I have to work every day and most evenings to get the bloody thing done.’39 She and Geoffrey had a day off as sole witnesses at the wedding of Roger Glossop and a very pregnant Charlotte Scott. Over lunch at a smart hotel in Derbyshire, a waiter asked, ‘Will you be having the intercourse?’ Victoria looked at the newly-weds and said, ‘They’ve already had it.’

  Her anxiety about As Seen on TV deepened at the potential unavailability of Julie Walters, whose agents had double-booked her to do a film with Mike Leigh. In the end she was pinned down to three weeks in the studio and, when the Leigh film collapsed, Victoria hurriedly wrote her the part of a hairdresser in one of the mockumentaries.
But first they were booked to make a series of television commercials for the advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, who were tasked with broadening the appeal of the ASDA supermarket chain. The creatives came up with the idea of famous shoppers pushing trolleys through countries where their food was sourced. Julie and Victoria signed up to shoot four ads in five days in three countries: Spain, France and a glacier in the Austrian Alps. Julie played a confident middle-class woman who knows her international recipes while a less-clued-up Victoria tags along. As with the songs for her One-Cal commercials, Victoria ended up taking control of the words. As they push their trolleys Julie asks for her opinion of Wiener schnitzel. ‘I don’t follow the tennis,’ she replies.

  Back in London Victoria spent three weeks casting the second series with Geoff Posner. For the mini-documentaries the parts remained tiny, but the show’s reputation now went before it. She had better luck than in the first series luring Anne Reid, who in ‘Mr Right’ played a drab single woman seeking a dull husband via a computer-dating agency. Victoria was delighted to secure two grand old actresses: Dora Bryan as her nymphomaniac mother, and Constance Chapman as a retiree living in a terrace who scoops a million pounds in a competition in ‘Winnie’s Lucky Day’. For ‘A Very Funny Young Man Indeed’, about a stand-up with a terrible perm who enters a talent contest, she invited Derek Hobson, who hosted her New Faces heat in 1974, to play himself. It was another mark of her growing clout that Victoria invited celebrities on. In a parody of the game show Tell the Truth three panelists, faced with three guests, had to identify the Labour politician from Dennis Healey, Claire Rayner and Frank Bruno.

  When the production assembled out of town, Victoria found herself dangling halfway down a cliff in Dorset, which she hadn’t bargained for when she sent Margery and Joan on an activity week for singles. ‘I thought it would all be faked,’ she wrote in some speech notes, ‘and I’d stand on a biscuit tin and they’d shoot it in close up.’40 Once more the documentaries were filmed in Birmingham, taking Victoria back to old student haunts. ‘I am at the HAGLEY RD!’ she told Jane Wymark. ‘I have been filming in the ELGAR ROOM where I used to play the piano. I have just been to the LAUNDRETTE in HARBORNE where I lived in first yr! Can’t cope. I feel I should have polo mint hairslides and be doing forward rolls …’41 (In the Elgar Room she was filmed singing opera badly in a documentary about tragically single flatmates.)

  The production came to London to record the rest of the show in late September. For the duration Victoria stayed in the Highgate flat of David Leland, who had found success as a screenwriter – Mona Lisa, which he wrote, was released that month. (At the end of her stay she left a thank-you note under the lid of the loo seat, where, she explained, only a man would find it; she also gave him a vintage banjo as a present.) Across the series Victoria cast herself as a tattooist, a nervous schoolgirl sitting an interview for medical school, a woman who goes mad with boredom after moving to the country and a cheerfully dim waitress serving pudding (‘Can you see it on the trolley?’). She made the biggest impression with Kelly Marie Tunstall, who stood at the bus stop in a tight short skirt, fishnets, heels and a messy peroxide crop. The sight of her legs ‘shocked the cameramen,’ said Victoria.42 Kelly Marie tells extravagantly tall stories while her friend stands by and gawps. (In the first typed draft, the roles were for ‘Vic’ and ‘Julie’, but the friend was played by Mary Jo Randle.) Words tumble out of her in an unstoppable torrent, blunt monosyllables punctuated by wildly unexpected references to Magnus Magnusson, the Limpopo or lychees.

  Kelly:So I come out of toilets, right, and he says hey scallop face your skirt’s all caught up in your knickers at back, I said I pity you, do you know why, he says why, I says cos it happens to be the latest fashion, I read it in a book, he says what book, I said Vogue, that’s what book, he said oh likely likely, when do you read Vogue, I said when I’m in the hospital having exploratory surgery, that’s when. So he said oh.

  Pal:He didn’t.

  Kelly:He did.

  Kitty returned. So did Susie Blake’s continuity announcer. Her smile still fixed in place, she grows ever more ratty at the indignities of working on television: wearing curlers for the breakfast slot, budging up to make room for a person doing sign language, having to make Wally the Wallaby hop for children on their birthdays. Victoria found Acorn Antiques trickier to write the second time round. ‘Last time a lot of stuff, like people banging into cameras, was put in by the cast and crew as we went along, so I was at a bit of a loss how to carry on. In the end I did what I had done originally.’43 She also shook things up. After two episodes the theme tune, previously played on Victoria’s tinny stylophone, was rendered on a spookily echoing piano. There was a new opening sequence, shot on film, in which Miss Babs trips on the pavement as she enters the shop (whose signage contains a typo). Victoria sourced the idea from the closing sequence of the Sixties show Dee Time in which a girl leaps into presenter Simon Dee’s sports car: ‘As she got in she fell and trapped her leg – and they showed this quite happily week after week.’44 One week the antique shop randomly reopens as a health club and leisure facility. In this episode the cast threatened to become almost as unprofessional as the actors they played. Mrs Overall enters into the spirit by wearing her own interpretation of work-out gear. ‘She had this sagging leotard with a scrunched gusset and a headband,’ says Julie. ‘Vic said, “Don’t show anybody till the actual sketch.” Then they all started to shake as they weren’t expecting her to be in anything like that.’ Victoria, Celia Imrie and Duncan Preston were wedged into a two-person sofa. ‘You could feel the vibration,’ says Celia, who was furthest away from the camera. Take after take had to be cut as the actors corpsed when Julie entered clutching a tray. The clock ticked towards ten o’clock when overtime would kick in. ‘We were doing our best, but it was extremely difficult,’ says Duncan. ‘There was a lot of anger upstairs.’ In the control room Geoff Posner eventually exploded: ‘I shouted, “If we don’t get this in the can, we are going to lose this!”’ In the final take all three kept their eyes off Julie, but even then Duncan struggled to control himself. The scene would become a defining image of the second series.

  There were two others. One did not involve Victoria but achieved such comic perfection that she and Posner agreed to close the entire series with it. The sketch, which Victoria titled ‘Waitress!’ but grew to be known as ‘Two Soups’, was inspired by an encounter Julie and Victoria once had in Morecambe when they ducked into a tea room during a downpour. ‘There was no one in there,’ says Julie. ‘It was huge and we sat and thought, where the fucking hell is anybody? And at the end of the room there was the double door with a porthole in it and eventually it opened and this ancient waitress took for ever to walk up to us. “Ready to order?” “What is the soup?” That was it.’ When Vic wrote it up she confided to Julie, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work.’ Geoff Posner had his doubts too: ‘I was uncertain how it would look until I saw Julie do it.’ The sketch might easily have ended up alongside others on the cutting-room floor – in one live-studio recording session in early October, no fewer than three scripts were shot but never seen, among them a long sketch for the four main stars, about a Tupperware party to shift Wendy Winters Marital Aids.

  Victoria specified that ‘Waitress!’ would work only if there were sufficient distance between the swing doors and the diners. ‘It’s a long way to the couple’s table,’ she insisted in the script. Once more, Julie’s performance as the deaf and tottering old waitress caused severe discomfort for her fellow actors. ‘Duncan and I never got through it in rehearsal, ever,’ says Celia. ‘Then we had to do it live. We had to keep still. If we’d gone, we would have had to start all over again. It’s a great feat of concentration. I got blood in my mouth from biting my cheek.’

  Songs in a blazing array of styles were distributed among the cast. ‘Counting Moonbeams’ was a delicious spoof of a schmaltzy Broadway duet; the cheery composer discovers to his horror that his a
mbitious young muse can’t carry a tune in a bucket. In a snippet of passionate opera in subtitled Spanish (translated from English by Geoffrey) a mezzo-soprano despairs that they’ve run out of trousers at Topshop. ‘I’m pig sick, Dennis!’ she sings with lung-bursting passion. Julie played a saucy star of Edwardian music hall giving sung advice to her daughter in the style of the BBC’s The Good Old Days:

  So please take this as your slogan,

  Go on Aspel, go on Wogan

  But for gawd’s sake never work with Roland Raaat!

  Victoria was one of three old Lancashire lasses – Marrie, Clarrie and Min – wearing big bloomers as they sing a rumpty-tumpty end-of-the-pier song. Her most touching song was ‘Crush’, sung in the voice of a lovelorn schoolgirl yearning to be noticed by a much older boy.

  As the second series loomed, Victoria hesitated about including ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’, wondering whether it would be better kept back for live performances. Eventually she realised she was a song short and played it to David Firman. ‘I thought it was terrific,’ he says, ‘but I also thought, what do I do that responds to the guts of the piece, and how do I try to indicate two different voices of Barry and Freda?’ For backing he summoned a banjo, trumpet, trombone, clarinet, bass, drums and washboard plus tubular bells, while he played a tack piano with pins attached to the hammers. The idea was that his barroom sound would provide a counterpoint to Victoria’s Steinway: ‘I wanted to be the reluctant man – that’s my texture. I’m doing something different that’s saying I can’t do it. To start with the band are keeping out the way and marking time. That was the idea so that as the temperature and the key got higher and higher, they should be part of that.’ In the end the tack piano was subsumed by the wind’s shrieks and howls until the tubular bells at the end mimic the sound of wedding bells, as if Barry and Freda’s nuptial vows are about to be renewed.