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

by Jasper Rees

  The Betty Jackson effect was instant. Having begun the tour in a garish outfit of blue-and-purple spotted trousers, orange shirt, green-and orange jacket and mauve desert boots, by the time Victoria recorded the show for video release at the Mayflower in Southampton she was wearing a loose white suit with forthright shoulder pads over a blue top from M&S. To jazz up the visuals, the upstage backdrop featured vast images of Victoria. The director Marcus Mortimer suggested she do an extra section for the video only, so Victoria wrote a sketch in which she was grilled in the interval by a journalist from Neighbourhood Watch, whose tape recorder doesn’t work and who doesn’t let her interviewee get a word in. It was a sly attack on all the sloppy interviewers who had ever poked a microphone at her.

  The tour had a sunny postscript when Victoria was booked to do a cabaret in the Paradise Island resort off Nassau in the Bahamas, courtesy of the boiler manufacturers Glow-worm. There was just enough slack in the schedule to put her feet up. Back home, one of her last acts as a resident of Silverdale was to go with her university friend Alison Lloyd to see the Silverdale Village Players perform Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus. Bennett’s Sunset Across the Bay having lured her to the area fourteen years earlier, her Morecambe Bay story had come full circle. ‘I know living in the flat we won’t have the wide open spaces and the Smallbone fucking kitchen but at least every job won’t mean 3 days away with 2 days on the motorway.’26

  One of the last letters she received in Cove Lea was from Geoffrey Strachan asking her to update the title or subtitle for a new edition of her Lucky Bag songbook. She scrawled an image of the pianist’s bare bottom by Beryl Cook and wrote ‘EVEN BIGGER!’27 At the age thirty-eight, Victoria became a Londoner.

  16

  HENRY AND ALBERT, MARGARET AND PAT

  ‘I didn’t know what love was till I bred my first Afghan.’

  Pat and Margaret, 1994

  ‘I gather that Victoria Wood is making a video of her current tour,’ Jonathan Powell, controller of BBC One, wrote to James Moir in April 1991. ‘Are we in the market for this? Shouldn’t you be bidding for it?’1 As Victoria’s year-long tour came to an end, the tug of war between the BBC and ITV resumed. In the battle to claim her for their network, London Weekend Television resorted to covert tactics. ‘Marcus Plantin wanted to do another programme involving Victoria,’ says Nicholas Barrett. ‘I said, “She and Julie are so close, why don’t we approach Julie and that would be a way of Victoria also appearing?” The idea for a showcase to be called Julie Walters and Friends was born.

  The concept was similar to the An Audience with … format, with the wealth of the material to be written by Victoria, while Alan Bennett, Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell submitted one monologue each. According to Barrett, ‘Victoria jumped at it. She said to me, “I want you to know I’ve got lots of stuff and if you’re running under let me know.” Victoria wrote three sketches soon after the spring tour, and ended up doing three more, as well as a beautifully crafted ballad for Julie to sing. The show became, in effect, Wood and Walters a decade on.

  Filming was delayed for some months owing to the illness of Julie’s daughter, who had been diagnosed with leukaemia. It was eventually shot over two days in late September in a bare, shiny studio with minimal sets and props. If it had been postponed any further, it would have endangered one of the four sketches Victoria and Julie performed together. In ‘8 Around Me Breakfast Bar’ they play two northern women going through the complicated arrangements for what sounds like some sort of sleepover. At the end, when they remove their dressing gowns, they are revealed to be wearing tarts’ basques. At that point, after another meticulously planned conception, Victoria was two months pregnant.

  The sketches Victoria wrote were designed to suit Julie’s astonishing range as a character comedian. Julie played a little girl from Lancashire in ‘Jayne Mansfield’s Balls’, sitting on a wall in around 1960 and trying to coax her friend into a rude word game. In ‘Old Bag’ she became a posh, bedridden crone who reminisces about the ‘Roaring Twenties’ before revealing that she didn’t have sex till she was sixty-seven, ‘and that was only because I couldn’t find any small change for the window cleaner’. In ‘Offensive Old Man Dancing’ Julie wore a moustache and a combover as a revoltingly sexist Desert Rat. In ‘Mary Brazzle’ she was a glacially calm middle-aged woman who breaks down from the mounting stress of recording a video to promote her failsafe relaxation routine. The health guru secretly addicted to toxins was a favourite joke of Victoria’s.

  In her song for Julie she changed the mood. ‘Between the Lines’ was a downbeat flipside to ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’. Another portrait of an ordinary marriage, from blind date to breastfeeding, it offered a piercingly sad glimpse inside the mind of a young woman straining for happiness:

  They’re stuck at the airport, a three-hour delay,

  They sit in their new clothes with nothing to say,

  He stubs out his fag in a throwaway cup,

  She touches his hand but he doesn’t look up.

  A modern romance.

  The pulsing melody unexpectedly surges towards optimism as the young couple pledge to keep going ‘because love can struggle up between the lines’. Victoria never recorded or performed it, and yet ‘Between the Lines’ was the most profound expression of something she had been straining to say about the bumps and blessings of love and marriage in twenty years of songwriting.

  At the recording the four writers all did a tribute to camera. Victoria chose to veer away from gushing sincerity. ‘Julie Walters is a person,’ she said, sounding nervy and Lancastrian, ‘a woman type of person sort of effect. And, erm, she has hair and, um, some feet and, er, she does washing up … and drying. And that’s really all … all I know about Julie.’ Before the recording, writers and star all gathered for a publicity shot. ‘It was awkward,’ says Julie. ‘Writers don’t usually meet and there were all those egos. Vic was awkward too.’ She was similarly reserved working with a new producer. ‘There was never a moment where I looked into her eyes and she looked into mine and we had a conversation where we knew we were talking to each other,’ says Nicholas Barrett. ‘The reserve coloured everything.’ In the same month as Julie Walters and Friends was broadcast, Victoria sent word through her agent that she wanted to return to the BBC to make a one-off special in just under a year’s time.

  While pregnant with Grace Victoria had accepted the most daunting challenge of her career. This time round she arranged to keep a clear schedule. Her tour video, titled Victoria Wood – Sold Out, in honour of the run at the Strand, was released near the start of her pregnancy. To promote it she made her first return to Wogan since the disastrous debut nine years earlier. Cued up by guest host Gloria Hunniford, she ran through some of the material in a polished metronomic performance that gave nothing away about herself. Towards the end of her pregnancy the video was shown on ITV.

  Free from other obligations, Victoria decided to fulfil a long-held ambition and write her own original film script. Encouragement came from LWT, which had enjoyed modest success putting Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones on the big screen with a film of Tom Sharpe’s crime farce Wilt. The idea she hit on was suggested by Surprise Surprise, the LWT show hosted by Cilla Black in which long-separated relatives were thrown together in front of a studio audience: ‘I always wondered what happens when the lights go down. It’s all very well to have a big kiss in front of the cameras. But what do you do then with this terrible relative you’ve not seen for so much time?’2 Her interest in family estrangement had a more personal source. Her mother Helen had refused throughout her adult life to engage with any of her siblings and had long since broken off contact with her only son. While Victoria had occasional contact with her brother Chris, she had nieces and, via her mother, first cousins of whom she knew next to nothing. ‘It was completely normal,’ adds Geoffrey, no more intimate with his own family, ‘for both of us not to see siblings for months or sometimes years on end.’

 
She worked on a script about the reunion of two sisters separated when young. One lives in a bedsit and works in a motorway café, the other is the glamorous star of a Hollywood soap who has suppressed the facts of her past on her rise to fame. In these mismatched women, Victoria saw a chance to act in a drama with Julie again for the first time since Nearly a Happy Ending in 1980. ‘I rang Julie and said, “I’m writing a monstrous part for you. A horrible megalomaniac called Pat.” She was thrilled.’3 So was LWT, to which she submitted a draft with the working title of Sisters. Having read it, Julie’s enthusiasm was tempered by an understanding it would require surgery. ‘I thought I want to play that woman,’ she says. ‘I loved the character. The speeches were hilarious. But I felt it needed a lot of work on it. It was very early days and I thought, well, if they’re going to make a film of it, it will be edited. I was worried that she might not want to do it.’ But negotiations with LWT began with a view to signing contracts within weeks. Marcus Plantin, who had commissioned An Audience with … four years earlier, was now LWT director of programmes, in which capacity he announced the film at the Montreux Festival in April 1992. ‘I have read the script and it is scorchingly funny,’ he said, mentioning a prospective budget of £6 million. ‘We could not have hoped to put our money into a better movie than this one.’ The controller of drama Nick Elliot chimed that it was ‘not just hilarious but very moving too’. Production was confidently predicted for 1993, LWT sent Victoria the CVs of potentials directors and within a few months she was corresponding with Geoffrey Strachan at Methuen about publishing the script for Pat and Margaret, as she was now calling it.

  In the autumn of 1991 there was another project: to look for a new home to house a growing family. Thus the geography of London was on Victoria’s mind when, in the middle of house-hunting, she appeared in Clive James’s Postcard from London. Sitting in Gibson Square in Islington, where she had first kipped in the house of Rob Buckman in 1975, she reminisced about her scuzzy early experiences of the capital. ‘I don’t think it’s changed,’ she said. ‘I think you change yourself and if you get more money you go to nicer bits of it.’4 The nicer bit that she and Geoffrey plumped for was in Highgate in north London. They were familiar with the village, having first lodged there with Jane Wynn Owen in the 1970s. It bordered Hampstead Heath, giving Victoria hills to yomp up. The size of the house they eventually bought reflected the magnitude of Victoria’s success. It was a Grade II listed early Georgian terrace in Highgate West Hill, with enough space for the family, a nanny and two offices. The purchase was not contingent upon selling the Lampard House flat – indeed their flat in Castellain Mansions was still on the market too, as was Cove Lea in Silverdale. They couldn’t move in until the crazy DIY exploits of the previous owners had been corrected, which consumed several months, so they eventually took up occupation early in 1992. Grace, who was upset by so many changes of address, extracted a promise from her mother that there would be no more upheavals – Victoria went so far as to make a public pledge on their change of address card: ‘Victoria Wood, Geoffrey Durham and Grace Durham are moving on January 22nd’, it said. ‘After that they are never moving again’.5

  Victoria’s desire for Grace to feel settled found her making friends on her behalf. One day after a step class in Marylebone she was in the changing room when a little girl started talking to Grace, then three. The child’s mother had been in the same class. ‘We were standing naked,’ says Lizzi Kew Ross. ‘I don’t even know if I knew who she was. She said, “Do you want to come and have tea with us?”’ She invited my daughter to go and have a playdate and that was it.’ The children’s friendship was outlasted by the mothers’. Lizzi, a choreographer and a vicar’s wife, became her exercise-class friend. Victoria’s celebrity was not always so easily bypassed. When Grace started at her new nursery school in Highgate, to help her overcome her shyness she was paired with a girl called Emma Wellbelove. Wanting to invite Grace on a playdate, her mother Norah asked the teacher if she could be introduced to Grace’s mother: ‘The teacher said, “She will be here in a minute, but I need to tell you who she is. Her mum is Victoria Wood.” I said, “No, I can’t talk to her!” All of a sudden Vic was there covered in paint. They must have just moved in because she was decorating.’ The girls became friends, but so did the mothers. ‘I had nothing to do with show business at all,’ says Norah, who worked as an educational welfare officer. ‘We were both northerners. I understood that she was quite a quiet person, and she understood I wasn’t expecting her to make me laugh.’

  Once established in London, Victoria was able to nurture friendships which had previously been conducted long distance, most regularly with Jane Wymark, who lived down the road in Stoke Newington and became another gym buddy. Though a regular visitor to the house, just as often they would meet somewhere in north London, says Jane, for ‘a cup of tea, a bun and a laugh’. At the same time, motherhood and new proximity to a greater number of friends made Victoria a less assiduous letter writer, which was reversed only with the acquisition of a fax machine – and a more full-time assistant – later in the 1990s.

  On Sunday 2 May, Victoria gave birth to a boy in the Portland. This time her labour was not induced, there was no epidural and she accompanied her contractions with ‘yelling and screaming and letting myself go’. When a nurse warned her she’d get a sore throat she replied, ‘I really don’t care. I want to shout.’6 The new arrival, weighing in at 8 lb 2 oz, was called Henry William.

  It was in the months nursing him at home that Victoria found herself switching on the television in the mornings, where breakfast shows gave way to vapid hours of daytime entertainment hosted, in a relative novelty for British television, by paired presenters. The sheer badness of such programming was catnip to the creator of As Seen on TV. She found them ‘unintentionally funny because they’re on every day, and of course things are going to happen and things are going to sound banal. You can’t interview people on a daily basis week after week after week after week.’7 The crowning absurdity for Victoria was the fact that Judy Finnigan presented This Morning every day on ITV in harness with her husband Richard Madeley: ‘I just love the idea of them being married. I think that’s so funny to be sitting next to your husband and having to be nice to him.’8

  The idea for the special first mentioned to the BBC at the end of 1991 now crystallised into a Christmas special called Victoria Wood’s All Day Breakfast, set partly in a daytime TV studio presided over by married co-presenters Sally Crossthwaite and Martin Cumbernauld. Victoria imagined petty aggravations simmering just below the surface. ‘No, I love him,’ says the domineering Sally after every laser-guided slapdown. Martin gets his own back when he pointedly trails an item on ‘wonky wombs and faulty fallopians’. Their random roster of phone-in subjects includes tranvestites, split ends and the self-assembly coffin. The show has its own right-wing fitness instructor called Jolly Polly.

  This Morning, and its new BBC competitor Good Morning with Anne and Nick, were not the only sitting ducks on television. Although she had fronted an advertisement for Maxwell House coffee a couple of years earlier, Victoria took aim at the Gold Blend commercials, which over five years had taken on the character of a long-running drama. She invented Romany Roast Fine Blend and put it at the heart of a slow-burning medical romance between two suave coffee fanciers. He is ill, but even on his deathbed he is fed fine coffee by intravenous drip. An unused instalment was set in a cemetery, where the deceased’s gravestone reads, ‘He really appreciated the true smokey flavour of Romany Roast’.

  For the special there was a calamitous new soap to feast on as well. Eldorado, shot on the Costa del Sol, was born two months after Henry, and Victoria was much tickled by its cackhandedness: ‘You couldn’t hear it, or when you could hear it, it was in a foreign language, it looked awful, they had people called Bunny and Fizz, people who couldn’t act, people who couldn’t talk properly. Apart from that it was jolly good.’9 To lampoon it she created ‘The Mall’, which flits
between three outlets in a shopping mall in Gloucesterford. Pippas Nix (the apostrophe was missing from the signage) is a lingerie boutique stocking aerobic girdles, flesh-tone cleavage grippers and fishnet groin enhancers. Pippa (played by Celia Imrie) is in the habit of making pointless interjections. ‘You know I had that ludicrously irresponsible unprotected sex session in that remedial jacuzzi in Hove?’ says her perky assistant. ‘Near Brighton?’ Opposite is a café owned by a rampantly camp barista and his much younger French boyfriend, enabling Victoria to play with gay clichés. ‘In my day,’ the jealous Roger tells young Pierre, ‘cookery class meant breaking eggs with one hand, not licking melted chocolate off the pectorals of a Salvation Army trombonist!’ Pam’s Chox is a confectionary run by a toxic gossip and language vandal. ‘It’s all very que sera de brouhaha,’ says Pam. Victoria, who earmarked this role for herself, delighted in giving Pam crass expository dialogue: ‘This mall’s been open – what? – eighteen months and she’s – what? – the sixth business to go in there?’ Pippa eventually sells the premises to a shady woman whose name she can’t quite recall: ‘Was it Mac or Gabardine? I’m sure it was some kind of garment.’ Thus in the finale Bo Beaumont as Mrs Overall makes her wobbly re-entry, clutching a tray and still not knowing her lines. She reopens Acorn Antiques with the legacy left her after her employers died ‘in a mysterious food poisoning accident on the M42’.