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

by Jasper Rees

  The band did one run-through when the artists and crew were at lunch. Because Victoria was sitting away from the rest of the musicians there were problems with syncing. ‘Christ, this is a disaster,’ muttered the bass player. They went back to address technicalities, played it through again, then did a camera rehearsal. In all the song had been rehearsed three and a half times by the time the audience arrived.

  The performance was kept back to the end of the evening, and the band’s anxieties had not been allayed. ‘This was quite a challenge for us,’ says Firman. ‘We were thinking, are we going to fall apart? It’s probably secure, but we’re all living on our nerves.’ Then they played it. ‘Because it’s such a long song you can smell the climax is coming – will it come? It’s coming … When Vic starts to stand up as she plays and sings the final verses with the big pay-off lines, she’s on a high. She just lays into it with every fibre. It finally arrives and the whole thing has gone off like a bloody rocket. I thought people would enjoy it. I didn’t realise that there would be this incredible tumult of ecstasy from a TV audience in a TV theatre. The audience went bananas. This was not processed applause that has been whipped. This was an audience going potty because of what they had just witnessed.’

  Victoria, with one last bounce on her piano stool, remained seated to take the applause. ‘I think she was pleased. I know she was,’ says Firman. In his headphones he got a message from Geoff Posner suggesting they do another take. ‘And I said, “I thought it was very good, Geoff, it’s the best we’ve been. What’s bothering you?”’ The news that another take was needed was broken to Victoria by the floor manager Roy Gould, who had watched the performance from behind the camera crane: ‘The energy coming off her was immense. Vic was very up and then I got Geoff in my ear saying, “Go and talk to her.” I crouched down by Vic and said, “Geoff wants to do another take.” She said, “Oh no, they won’t laugh again! What’s the matter with the first one, Geoff? I don’t want to do it again.” In the end I put my arm around her and said, “It’ll be fine.”’

  The audience did laugh the second time round, but Victoria could not quite match the exuberance of the first take, which was chosen for broadcast. Years later she could still recall the glow of her achievement: ‘The first time we ever did “Barry and Freda” in a studio, which is a very, very complicated song to learn, it’s got lots of keys changes and hundreds of rhymes … I was looking from camera to camera and one of my eyes has wandered around I was so tired. I was happy. That was a happy song to do.’45

  13

  AN AUDIENCE WITH GRACE

  ‘BOSOMS

  ACNE

  PERIODS

  DIETING’

  Stand-up prompt note, 1987

  After the long slow birth of the second series, Victoria was in a mood to move on. She told anyone who asked, from Marxism Today to Woman’s World, that writing for television had exhausted her. ‘I can’t honestly believe anybody actually enjoys writing,’ she groaned. ‘It’s an absolute agony.’1 Nor was she disposed to field yet more gruellingly predictable questions from tabloids about body image and women in comedy. One radio host she spoke to in New Zealand began by describing her as fat and plain: ‘I should have put the phone down but because it was live I didn’t have the nerve. How fucking rude, though.’2 Her main point was that, for the moment, she was no longer willing to endure the solitary confinement required to churn out sixty sketches at a time. ‘I’ve done what I wanted to do,’ she said, ‘and it’s time to go while people still want more.’3 The decision was partly driven by economic necessity. ‘I don’t earn that much from television,’ she explained, ‘because it takes me so long to write the bloody things.’4

  Victoria Wood As Seen on TV was moved to Mondays. This time round critics could view it in advance, and previewers all insisted that the show should on no account be missed. Yet there were dissenters. One fretted sourly that the first episode, which climaxed in ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’, ‘leans too heavily – and, in the case of the closing ditty, too desperately – on the sex-orientated joke and song’.5 Victoria avoided such critiques but heard one by accident one night after returning from a cabaret booking in Surrey: ‘Drove home in blinding rain, absolutely wrecked, got home, switched on TV – it was Points of View – someone had written saying “VW is about as funny as a nuclear explosion …” At least they didn’t say I was fat and plain …’6 The nation begged to differ. The viewing figures rose above 8.5 million – double the number who watched the first series – to make it the most viewed programme on BBC Two.

  During the run, Victoria, wearing a long silver coat, joined a vast cast of celebrities for the Royal Variety Performance at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. She was on straight after the synchronised tumblers of Peking Opera – ‘I was worried they might nick some of my material,’ she told the audience. In fact, she nicked some of her own and wove it in among jokes about the stars crammed backstage. The Queen Mother and the Duchess of York honked with laughter as she revived a long-serving punchline about her Playtex Discontinued, dating from 1982: ‘If God had meant them to be lifted and separated, He’d have given us one on each shoulder.’

  The evening reunited her with Marti Caine, who was now presenting a rebooted New Faces. As with all celebrities, Victoria considered her fair game. In her speech notes she depicted her lanky pal backstage ‘squeezing into one of those dresses – like clingfilm with buttons’.7 In the end she didn’t use it at Drury Lane and stored it up for a speech at a literary dinner held a few days later to launch the paperback edition of Up to You, Porky. Victoria’s most meaningful encounter at the Royal Variety Performance was with Paul McCartney. Her favourite Beatle wandered over before she was due to go on and quietly engaged her in conversation. ‘He clearly admired her but didn’t acknowledge it openly,’ says Geoffrey, who was a witness. ‘His friendliness and confidence spoke volumes enough.’ As for the evening itself, she privately found it ‘excruciatingly boring and HOURS LONG, Queen Mother nearly died of exhaustion. I did pretty well – got thro’ it with no mistakes which was the main thing.’8

  Another ordeal she volunteered for before the close of the year was to be grilled on Desert Island Discs. Asking the questions was Michael Parkinson, whose TV chat show she had failed to get onto back in 1980. On the irritations of fame she remarked that ‘mainly people want to know if you are who they think you are’. Who Victoria really was she instinctively shrouded from listeners – she gave nothing away about her solitary upbringing. ‘It was just very ordinary,’ she said of a childhood in which she had in effect already experienced life on a desert island. ‘She was furious about it afterwards,’ says Geoffrey. ‘She thought Parkinson hadn’t done the research, wasn’t interested in her.’ Her musical preferences were ones she’d expressed in public before – for Prokofiev, Gershwin, Eric Coates, Bunny Berigan and Noël Coward singing ‘Let’s Do It’ in Las Vegas. Coward, she said, was one of only two songwriters whose lyrics she liked listening to. The other, also selected, was Ian Dury. Her eighth record was by the Weather Girls, helpful for yomping up fells. For her reading she chose the collected works of Arthur Marshall, the former headmaster she’d made friends with on Call My Bluff, and for a luxury to keep her busy a mighty Wurlitzer. It was broadcast early in 1987.

  Victoria closed 1986 with three dates at St David’s Hall, Cardiff, under the title Victoria Wood As Seen at Christmas. She then went back to Silverdale for some much-needed time off. Among the succession of visitors was her school friend Lesley Fitton, who was the latest of her chums to become a mother.

  After years of cadging beds off London-based friends, at the start of 1987 Victoria and Geoffrey decided that the time had come to find a flat of their own. Victoria headed south so often that she was beginning to think of the motorway as her true home. ‘Most of the real living I do these days seems to be in my car.’9 After Geoffrey made all the arrangements over the phone, in January she had three days of ‘intensive snow trudging’ looking at flats
‘then half a day for a diabolical radio commercial which did at least pay for the hotel’.10 In the evenings she saw two friends in plays. One starred Julie Walters – ‘I’m hoping it won’t be anything like the play I have vaguely in mind to write,’ she fretted.11 Another evening she saw Alan Rickman in the sizzling hit she called ‘can’t spell it – Dangerouse’.12 They had a boozy night out that ended up at the Limelight Club. ‘All very café society and it seems rather a shame I wasn’t snapped with Alan and splashed all over the Daily Mail.’13

  Victoria eventually plumped for a flat in Maida Vale which she was shown by mistake – being on the second floor it was not convenient for lugging magician’s clobber up and down. ‘I cannot tell a lie, it is a very boring ordinary flat,’ she told Jane Wymark, situated on ‘a very boring road … But we only need somewhere to live while we work in London, it doesn’t have to be Shangri La.’14 The flat in Castellain Mansions, a red-brick block in the road where they’d rented in 1980, had a view over Paddington Bowls club. Geoffrey hadn’t seen it when they made an offer – he was doing panto in Liverpool and dashed down between shows: ‘I’m dreading throwing open the front door with an eager expression and him standing ashen faced saying “Oh no, Vic …” Tough shit, too late now.’ They took possession in May. There were no curtains or furniture or phone, and when Victoria first tried to cook she found the oven and hob in the freshly fitted kitchen had not been connected.

  In March she was back at the BAFTAs, where neither Victoria nor Julie won in the performance category, but for the second year running she and Geoff Posner collected the award for Best Light Entertainment Programme. There were other appointments in London – Call My Bluff, a recording of Allan Ahlberg’s Ten in a Bed for Jackanory, a grand dinner at the Royal Academy of Arts. Victoria was on a guest list with all the nabobs of the gallery world, plus the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the Lord Chancellor, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Isaiah Berlin and Iris Murdoch. She went down to Barnes to meet Hilary Hayton, who had made the children’s animation Crystal Tipps and Alistair and sought to interest Victoria in a cartoon about a dog called Rosie: ‘I wasn’t too bothered about this, except I thought there might be a few bob in it (in two years time, which is how long it takes to animate thirteen programmes) but I was very impressed with them.’15 In the end it took a lot longer than two years.

  Despite Victoria’s announcement about As Seen on TV, the BBC persuaded her to have one last reunion. Thus she spent the spring of 1987 writing fifty-five minutes of material for a forty-minute show. Just as the second series was being repeated on BBC One in June, the Victoria Wood As Seen on TV Special was rehearsed and recorded. ‘Let’s go out the same way we went in!’ Geoff Posner wrote on her shooting script. Casting this time was simple. Jim Broadbent was cast as a gobbledygook-spouting Doctor Who, along with several lesser-known regulars whose gift for comedy across both series Victoria had come to value and rely on – actresses such as Lill Roughley, Deborah Grant, Meg Johnson, Sue Wallace, Kay Adshead and Georgia Allen.

  The show opened with an announcement from Susie Blake’s continuity announcer that she was hosting a small sherry party and expecting some new curtains from Laura Ashley: ‘And at the end of the month I’m being fired.’ Having created a show about TV, Victoria decided to portray the end of As Seen on TV as a brutal decision taken by management. ‘We’ve been axed because we’re not a soap opera,’ she explained in her opening monologue, pretending to sound incensed.

  Rather than revive Acorn Antiques, she subjected it to the documentary treatment. The idea was inspired by a fly-on-the-wall film about the making of EastEnders shown the previous autumn. ‘It came on the telly,’ says Geoffrey, ‘and we looked at each other and said, “That’s a gift.” Vic particularly enjoyed the contribution of Julia Smith and decided that Acorn Antiques had to have a similarly driven producer.’ Julia Smith, the co-creator of EastEnders, was a formidable figure known as ‘The Godmother’, whom Victoria had met at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 1985. In As Seen on TV she became Marion Clune, the terrifying ogre at the helm of Acorn Antiques who has a weakness for nonsense lingo (‘molto libre’, ‘nila problemo’) and issues-led plots. ‘Let’s box a wee bit dangerous,’ she says as she pro-

  poses a storyline about earwax. ‘I’m talking off the top of my hairdo now.’ The quaking scriptwriter who reckons AIDS is a better bet is sacked on the spot and threatened with kneecapping if he bleats to the press. To incarnate Marion Clune, Victoria cast Maggie Steed, who played a horribly unkind actress in Happy Since I Met You. In another nod to Victoria’s past, the reporter visiting the set was played by Paul Heiney, one of Esther Rantzen’s sidekicks on That’s Life!

  But the sketch was also about thespian grandeur. The actors playing Mrs Overall and Mr Clifford were first glimpsed when their characters were axed at the end of the second series. Now Victoria fleshed out them out further. The actress playing Miss Babs is a hoity-toity ice queen who, unlike her character, knows how to pronounce Kirkcudbright. Mr Clifford does knitting and seethes with suppressed rage. As for the actress who plays Mrs Overall, never had Victoria been so savage about the delusions of celebrity. Bo Beaumont is afflicted by a monstrous ego and haemorrhoids. ‘I’m a huge, huge star – this is the price I pay,’ she simpers when the reporter asks about rumours of cast feuds. ‘Look how the press treated poor Yorky.’ When she wrote this, Victoria had only recently met the Duchess of York.

  The other highlight was a pitch-perfect recreation of Coronation Street, shot in grainy black and white. Victoria’s ear for the rich rhythms of the show’s dialogue came from years of study. She had been watching Corrie since childhood, her father had written an episode and now Bob Mason was a regular scriptwriter. The break-up of Ken and Deirdre would remain one of her favourite jokes in stand-up and song. In tribute, she cast herself as Ena Sharples, the sour-tongued battleaxe played by her grandmother’s old bridge partner Violet Carson. With a twist of the dial Victoria turned heightened northern dialect into clotted gobbledygook. ‘I’ve heard enough skriking in this bug hutch to last me from t’Weatherfield Viaduct to t’Whit Week Walk,’ says Martha Longhurst (played by Julie) as she sups on her milk stout in the snug.

  To round out the parody, it had to look right. Victoria’s make-up artist was Chrissie Baker, who had joined the show in the second series. In her interview in TV Centre she had nervously dropped her things on the floor. ‘You need to be better organised,’ said Victoria, who recognised something in the accent and, as they were leaving, asked where she was from. ‘I said, “You will never have heard of it. It’s just outside a little place called Bury, called Ramsbottom.” She shook me on my arm and said, “You’re going to do this job!” I said, “I really want to do it, but I am breastfeeding.” She said, “Bring them with you!” She stopped me dead. You were never offered that.’ They became lifelong friends.

  Chrissie soon learned that working with Victoria she had to be quick. As Seen on TV was recorded at a lick, and there was little time to switch from one character to the next. ‘She would be running down the corridor and shout out, “Come on, Baker!” She’d rip a wig off and be on to the next one. She loved the speed of it.’ But the task of transforming Victoria into Ena Sharples, and the application of prosthetic eye-bags, required time. ‘I thought, Vic’s not going to sit in the chair. She wanted to be out there watching what everybody was doing. We started really early in the morning and I said, “You can’t move.” “I won’t.” “But you will. Vic, I won’t be able to do this job unless you sit there.” “Oh for God’s sake! I promise you.” And she sat there for three and a half hours.’ When she walked on set the audience gasped at her transformation. A quite different challenge for hair and make-up was the show’s joyous finale, a northern homage to Grease in which the cast wore garish wigs and face paint to sing and dance through ‘At the Chippie’.

  After twelve episodes of mainly playing the feed, Celia Imrie was finally let off the leash to play a presenter of ‘McOnomy’, a
thrifty Scottish version of Margery and Joan’s consumer show, and a pleased-as-punch housewife who talks like a walking billboard for domestic products. As for Duncan Preston, Victoria conceded he ‘hasn’t been exploited properly in the show because I tend to write parts for women’.16 As if to include him, in one sketch he modelled a new bra for men. It wasn’t the only new bra in the show. In her monologue, Victoria explained that the show’s status as a special meant she had splashed out on a new one.

  Victoria’s sketch-writing reached a new peak of brilliance in ‘Self-Service’. Julie pulled on a maroon beret to play a ghastly serial complainer queuing with a tray at a crowded buffet counter. ‘Never touch prawns,’ she snaps. ‘Do you know, they hang round sewage outlet pipes treading water with their mouths open – they love it!’ Victoria played the feed (named Enid in the published text) who selflessly set up gag after quotable gag for Julie to nail. The sketch owes some of its uniqueness to the unusual camera angle: to save building a whole canteen for the set, it had to be shot from behind, with Victoria and Julie gamely performing over their shoulders. For other characters it was the end of the line. There was no more Margery and Joan, or Kelly Marie Tunstall. ‘I thought I’ll do another one and I couldn’t do it,’ Victoria said. ‘It’s gone dead on me. I couldn’t do any more Kittys with Pat Routledge. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.’17

  No sooner was the special in the can than Victoria put her television career on hold to go back on tour. A pattern for slowly feeding freshly written material into the act was now becoming established. ‘I don’t think you can start off with a totally new show,’ she reasoned before she set off. ‘You’d be all over the place. You wouldn’t know what worked.’18 So she started with the material from the Cardiff set at Christmas and over a series of summer festival appearances dropped in new sections. At one of them Geoffrey lurked and took notes ‘which was extremely useful as there were apparently a lot of things I was doing wrong performance-wise’.19 After the gig two women burst into her dressing room, threw on hats and she had to watch them ‘Doing One Of My Own Sketches. I shall say no more, but Geoff’s toes curled so much he had to have an operation.’20 The final warm-up was in Edinburgh, before the official tour began in September with three nights in Dublin and two in one of her favourite theatres, the Grand Opera House Belfast. Everywhere she went she told her audience that ‘this is the theatre where Sooty was heckled’.