by Jasper Rees
She hadn’t. But she had a notion of what it would be, and what it wouldn’t. ‘I didn’t want to do a domestic comedy,’ she later recalled. ‘I don’t like mother, father, grumpy teenage daughter – I don’t like all those sitcoms. It was going to be a group of people and you only saw them in their work setting. So everything you had to find out about them you could only find out from what they said to each other in casual conversation.’4 The setting she fixed on was a fictional factory canteen in the north of England. To get a flavour she did a discreet shift in a real one in Manchester and had lunch in her friend Lesley Fitton’s workplace canteen at the British Museum, while tapping into memories of school lunches at Bury Grammar. She also commissioned a researcher to supply her with technical information about toasters and the minutiae of who in a canteen did what.
Meanwhile, she started to think about characters and who might play them. On the first page of a notebook, Victoria listed and described five women: ‘Me – bit barmy, cheery – engaged for years but never got around to it? – Up! 2nd in command.’ There was a female boss who is ‘v much in charge, up for her rights and the rights of the girls – husband, kids – everything a battle.’ A younger woman called Anita was ‘only into really dim things … Tory. Much more old fashioned than the older women.’ The older women were called Annie and Thelma, after the actresses Victoria hoped would play them. One was ‘v. vague, picking up tail ends of conversation – a widow? Married to sex maniac? Not worked for years?’ The other was ‘Forever on a diet? Some mythic 6lbs she has to lose?’
Knowing they were friends, Victoria approached the two actresses separately. Her pitch to Anne Reid was ‘How do you fancy working with Thelma Barlow?’ Victoria had met Thelma Barlow only once, at a charity cabaret in Rochdale, but learned that after twenty-five years in Coronation Street she itched to leave: ‘I kept my ear to the ground and as soon as she was out I was in there.’5 She tried out pairs of names for their characters, perming from Doreen, Noreen, Maureen, Irene, Eileen, Nesta, Denise, Deirdre, Daph and Gilly before plumping for Dolly and Jean. They would be bickering friends – Dolly morbidly obsessed with staying thin and inclined to draw attention to the rounder dimensions and slovenly habits of Jean. ‘Someone’s old mother to come in,’ she scribbled on the next page. ‘All having completely unfocused discussions the whole time … Smokers go on fire escape.’ After a few more pages she relisted the characters, one of whom was now Asian, another pregnant. One of the women, she wasn’t sure which, should be ‘at it like knives’. In another list she added the name Dunc. Duncan Preston was duly sounded out to play Stan, a dour handyman given to irascible outbursts. She now mentioned a manager called Tony and a character who might be named after Petula Clark, who would be mother to Sandra.
Sandra became Bren, a single woman in her middle years. Her mother was Petula Gordeno, a grotesque figure full of fantastical reminiscences of celebrities she claimed to have known. ‘It just became apparent to me,’ said Victoria, ‘that she has this terrible mother who when she turns up Bren’s heart just sinks because she knows something terrible is going to happen.’6 Petula, to be played by Julie, was the last mother Victoria was to create while her own mother was still alive, and she once more returned to the theme of parental absenteeism. Petula says she has had ‘post-natal disinterest for forty years’, and actively boasts of having neglected Bren: ‘I put her in the orphanage and lost the address.’ Bren for her part is asked if she wants to spill the beans in an episode of Kilroy on ‘mothers who have let their daughters down’. The only other cast member Victoria rounded up before she started writing was Celia Imrie. ‘She described it as a very northern setting,’ says Celia, ‘which made me nervous, as I knew I couldn’t attempt to be one of them. So I suggested, how about I am simply zooming in and out all the time?’
These preparations unfolded over several months, but the writing would have to wait. Straight after returning from Australia, the show Victoria had been living with since the beginning of the previous year was captured in a live recording. The theatre she chose was the Swan in High Wycombe, a favourite of hers which provided both capacity and intimacy. As the rights to the performance were being negotiated, Alan Yentob proposed broadcasting the two-hour set over two nights at Christmas. Victoria, after discussing it with Geoffrey, preferred to mulch the show down to an hour. Although it would involve sacrificing a more generous advance, she also favoured keeping the video release till after transmission. ‘I am aware I am not likely to sell a large number of copies doing it this way,’ she told Vivienne Clore, then still her agent, ‘but I am more interested in making a big impact on TV, after a long time away.’7 In the end it was sold to ITV, who had to be persuaded to include an anatomically frank section on pubic clumping. As Victoria was nervous about nailing a new one-hour version of the show, her performance was recorded by Geoff Posner over two nights, which turned out to be a wise precaution: she told Maureen Lipman that on the first night ‘an entire step routine which had seemed hilarious in my office was received in stunned silence’.8
The intense gestation of her sitcom caused Victoria to reject a wide array of job offers: to act in a play by Jack Rosenthal, script an episode of Murder Most Horrid, be grilled by Jeremy Isaacs for the prestigious interview series Face to Face, doctor the script of Aardman’s forthcoming animation Chicken Run, play lead in At Home with the Braithwaites, adapt a novel by Mavis Cheek, write a memoir. But at the start of 1998 one extracurricular task Victoria could not resist came about as a result of an impending tour of Talent, twenty years on from its premiere in Sheffield. To provide a full evening of entertainment, the producer David Graham suggested stringing together the five Kitty monologues. Re-reading the scripts ‘gave me a good laugh after all this time,’ Victoria told him.9 Although she had not written in Kitty’s voice since 1986, she slipped seamlessly back into it to compose a new stage ending:
Anyway, I must go. Hopefully (name of actress in cast) will have finished her so-called Yoga by now. We’re sharing a dressing room and she’s at it the day long. I pop in to buff up my knack knacks and she’s there with her knee up behind her hair do. I mean Helen Murchison has her weak points but you can pass the time of day without getting a face full of groin.
Writing in the voice of Kitty was a cinch. Finding the voices of a large ensemble of new characters, then stitching them into their surroundings and six half-hour plots, was much tougher. One day Victoria concentrated so hard during a ‘script brainstorm’ that she left the car unlocked, allowing a burglar to make off with the stereo.10 Her social life and exercise routine shrank ‘owing to joke commitments. I have twenty pages to do before nightfall,’ she told Jane Wymark, ‘and Cathy is upstairs frantically typing so we have something to show Geoff Posner when he arrives on Friday, eager to know all about it. I don’t know much about it myself yet.’11 Her schedule had been further compromised by the departure of the nanny after six years to get married.
The first conversations with Geoff Posner centred on the feel of the recordings. Victoria was adamant that a live audience would force her to deliver a high rate of gags. An obvious influence for a gang comedy was Dad’s Army, but she also had two American templates in mind. The unlikelier of them was ER, with its long immersive takes and uncut movement around a workplace set. She even wanted to mimic the lower-case title that appeared in the opening credits – her show, she insisted, should be called dinnerladies, not Dinnerladies. The second was Cheers for the theatrical playing space visited by a random set of characters. She was also curious about a standard procedure in US comedy – to tape the final dress rehearsal so it could be studied before the evening recording. ‘I said to Geoff Posner, “I would really like to do this because I think until you’ve done it once in front of an audience, you don’t really know where the laughs come or where it sits and what you could improve. And he said, which was a very clever idea, “Well, let’s just do it twice.”’12 This had never been done before in British television and, at around �
�400,000 per episode, would render dinnerladies a third more expensive than any other sitcom.
‘It was hard for my finance guys to swallow,’ says Peter Salmon, who had taken over as BBC One controller the previous year. ‘Sitcoms were failing everywhere. You were starting to think, should I continue to invest in the genre? I felt it was a price worth paying.’ In fact, he green-lit dinnerladies before he’d even met Victoria. Three years her junior, and from Burnley, Peter Salmon was the first channel head to work out that she had trust issues with television management which needed to be assuaged: ‘She’s a genius, she’s the funniest person in Britain, but she comes in, she’s more nervous than her status might have suggested. I knew what she liked, which was enough reassurance but not too much interference. I had comedy experts who worked for me, but Victoria was bigger and better than any of them and what would they have to contribute?’
As if to re-establish her status as the funniest person in Britain, Victoria Wood – Still Standing was broadcast one Sunday night in April. The following week Victoria was on the guest list at a celebration of culture at Windsor Castle. ‘Word is there will be about 600 of us, so I will probably just skulk near the Kettle chips,’ she told Jane Wymark, affecting nonchalance.13 ‘I have painted my toenails blue and trimmed my fringe with the kitchen scissors.’14 To make a day of it she and Betty Jackson had tea at Cliveden before travelling on to their royal assignation, where Victoria made an impression on the staff. ‘This footman with a tray of warm gin and tonics was a huge fan and couldn’t get over meeting Victoria,’ says Betty. ‘Then this person shoved the footman out the way and said, “She’s on her route.”’ Joanna Lumley, who was standing with them, introduced the group to Her Majesty as ‘three natural blondes’. On the drive back to London, the two natives of the Rossendale valley talked about Bury and Bacup and the vast journey they had travelled. ‘Who would have thought?’ they said to each other in exaggerated accents. ‘I know! Who would have thought?’
The next month Victoria was herself treated like royalty when she and Geoffrey went to Woking to see the Kitty monologues and Talent. While she gave advice afterwards to the actress playing Kitty, she concluded that the experiment ‘didn’t really work as it was too rich a mix to have so many all at once, and it didn’t have anything to do with the play’.15
With new representation, and a supportive controller at BBC One, Victoria was well placed to assume tighter control of her new show than she had ever enjoyed before. There was ‘the most unbelievable palaver over the deal over the series with the production company who are making it,’ she told Lesley Fitton.16 Phil McIntyre did a deal to ensure she would own the television rights to dinnerladies, rather than – as felt outrageous to her – Geoff Posner’s company Pozzitive, and for the first time she took a full producing credit so she could be consulted on such matters as hats, overalls and tabards. She composed the theme tune, for which David Firman submitted a couple of arrangements – the one she plumped for she found ‘very sweet, rather like the character I play’.17 Meanwhile, she, Posner and a casting director sat through hours and days of auditions. To play a grumpy Mancunian girl known as Twinkle they saw ‘about 40 nervous girls, all in the same black bootleg trousers and huge trainers’ before they alighted on a recent RADA graduate with a loamy Bolton accent called Maxine Peake.18 Looking for someone to play the dim-witted Anita, she found ‘Asian girls are thin on the ground’ – the role went to Shobna Gulati, a young actress from a Hindu background in Oldham.19 Geoff Posner wasn’t there the day Andrew Dunn, a jobbing actor from Yorkshire in his late thirties, came in. Victoria was smitten: ‘I thought, oh what a great smile. I was very taken with the way he took the dialogue and made it sound very real.’20 (Off camera he would also provide the sound of Petula’s flatulence by blowing raspberries.)
Actors from way back answered the summons. Lill Roughley was cast as a protective mother whose teenage boy Clint is seduced by Petula. Sue Wallace was asked to play a charmless harridan brought in to run the canteen in Tony’s absence. Bernard Wrigley, who backed Victoria and Julie in ‘Northerners’ on Wood and Walters, was a factory worker. Andrew Livingston, Carl in the bus-shelter sketches, returned as Norman, a breadman afflicted by phobias.
Eventually, in early June, the cast met at the Groucho Club in Soho. For Victoria it was ‘a bit like a day long Northern cocktail party. At one point Eric Sykes was chatting with Dora Bryan, with Elspet Gray coming up on the rails and I thought, “What have I done?”’21 To act as stage manager Posner hired Jane Cotton, who had worked with Victoria at the Mermaid Theatre in 1975. There was a read-through of the six tightly plotted scripts, each of which had its own one-word title. ‘Monday’ introduced the characters. ‘Royals’ featured a visit to the canteen from a minor duke and duchess (the latter played by Victoria’s friend Richenda Carey). In ‘Scandal’ Petula’s engagement to Clint provokes outrage and ends up being featured on a Kilroy-type talk show. In ‘Moods’ the staff all bring a parent to work – Dolly’s plain-speaking mother (played by Thora Hird) boasts, like Helen Wood, of having no sense of humour. In ‘Party’ the factory’s Christmas celebrations shine a light on the staff’s romantic lives. For ‘Nightshift’ the canteen struggles under draconian new management when Tony is off having chemotherapy treatment. The Groucho readings reverberated with laughter, fuelled by regular deliveries of toast and chips. Victoria discovered that she’d overwritten every episode by seven minutes, obliging her to go home and trim.
On a Monday morning in June the company convened at the BBC’s rehearsal room in North Acton for a week of preparations. Theirs was to be one of the last productions to enter the building before it was converted to offices. There was a training day when the dinnerladies were taught how to chop vegetables and wrap sandwiches. Victoria was wary of the sharp knives: ‘The idea that we will come out with high class comedy dialogue while pulverising parsley in a high speed professional manner (ie not looking at it) is I think a little optimistic and may lead to a few missing fingers.’22 In the end they mainly spread marge.
As production began, a problem arose in the shape of a BBC radio comedy called Dinner Ladies. Victoria did think of appealing directly to the other show’s makers but was advised against it by Geoff Posner. They discovered that it was impossible to copyright a title, so it was down to the BBC to decide. Victoria was unflustered and in early July came up with an alternative in case: ‘What I’ve settled on just for today is Gravy Days for the title. Which I like as well in a different sort of a way.’23
At the start of rehearsals she began to keep an audio diary. Her thought was to make notes for a future memoir, so while describing the days of rehearsal and recording, she also called up memories, often suggested by addresses she drove past on the way to and from west London – the Bush Theatre, hers and Geoffrey’s first rental in Maida Vale in 1980, the home of the woman who made the dungarees she wore on New Faces. But she was much more focused on the six days it took to rehearse and record twenty-eight minutes of comedy. The first episode they worked on, ‘Royals’, was not the first scheduled for broadcast – a standard practice to ensure there would be no hint of actors finding their feet. The precaution was especially needed because, as they familiarised themselves with the script, Victoria felt an urge to improve it.
She went home and came in on the Tuesday with changes: ‘Although I’d done lots of drafts, when I’d bring the script in on a Monday morning and I’d hear it read, I’d always think, that isn’t right, I’m sure I can do something to change that.’24 She still expected the cast to know their lines by the Wednesday when she deputed Jane Cotton to underline every word that any actor got wrong. ‘If you’ve written an F sharp,’ she reasoned, ‘you don’t want people to play an E flat. It drives you mad. And if you’ve written that word you’ve written it for a reason.’25 In a coffee break those underlinings would then be circulated. The actors grew used to the idea that their lines were to be performed with no improvisations or variations. Victoria knew
Julie so well she felt able to read her face like a book. ‘Her R eyelid flickers when she’s about to dry,’ she privately noted.26 The rigorous discipline was a shock to Thelma Barlow, even though she had been forewarned by her producer friend Nicholas Barrett that ‘suggestions for even the slightest script modification were unwelcome’. ‘You just thought this is the way Vic works and it’s tough,’ she says. ‘It’s very hard on actors to have to keep on learning and learning in a short period of time.’ But Victoria asked nothing of the cast that she wouldn’t do herself. In her audio diary she confessed that she struggled to ingest Bren’s lines. It didn’t show. ‘I don’t remember underlining Brenda,’ says Jane Cotton.
On the Thursday the crew came in to do a tech run. Geoff Posner assembled the pick of the BBC’s sound and camera crews to solve issues which didn’t usually come up in sitcoms: how to film on several cameras and capture sound fluidly on a complex set. On the Friday they moved into the studio at TV Centre and Victoria was allowed to park at the front, ‘which I absolutely adore’.27 The audience reflected the breadth of her fanbase. ‘Sometimes you get a load of screaming queens,’ she said, ‘and sometimes you’ll get a load of OAPs from Purley.’28 Almost always there were friends in, and Geoffrey whenever he could make it. One night an overzealous woman on the door excluded anyone with a blue rinse. Rather than farm the job out to a warm-up act, Victoria welcomed the audience herself, opening with patter she’d been using onstage since 1983: ‘We’re out the house. We’ve said, “That’s it … we’re coming out!”’ After explaining the plot she presented the actors, gently ribbing Maxine Peake’s RADA credentials, and introducing Duncan as the tall one from the Beverley Sisters who now drives a Vauxhall Viagra. ‘I did Ceal’s nostrils, which is always good for a laugh,’ Victoria told her diary one night.
