by Jasper Rees
As well as the script she composed a dozen songs. As a next step Nunn introduced her to his regular collaborator Gareth Valentine, who had recently worked on musical scores by Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim and John Kander. When he went to Highgate to hear what she’d written he was warned by Lez Brotherston that she was ‘terribly nervous “because you’re Mr Music”. We had a cup of tea and she played some rudimentary chords and a melody and sang some lyrics. The lyrics were second to none. The music was pretty derivative.’ The derivations were intentional: Victoria’s idea was to create a chocolate box of pastiches and parodies in an array of styles – from Annie to Sondheim, Les Mis to Bob Fosse, Sandy Wilson to the terrible Romeo and Juliet.
Victoria’s writing routine was accompanied by a strict exercise regime. In the gap left by Geoffrey’s departure, another friend to assume a central place in her new single life and become a regular visitor to the house, was the actress Harriet Thorpe. Their former marriages became a topic on long walks over Hampstead Heath. Then, early in 2003, they decided to take part in the MoonWalk, an overnight marathon dedicated to raising money for breast cancer charities. Their training sessions lengthened till eventually they were doing eleven-milers three times a week. On one walk they were near Kenwood House when Victoria spotted an acorn. ‘It was a rapturous moment,’ says Harriet. ‘She picked it up and took it home.’ For the marathon itself they donned pink bras and joined the throng walking through the night.
The following week, on 19 May 2003, Harriet was among the women with whom Victoria marked her fiftieth birthday. The lunch was held in a balloon-adorned private dining room at the Charlotte Street Hotel in Fitzrovia. ‘I invited all the friends that had helped me in the year. I decided it would be a celebration of ladies too.’13 She coyly said as much to her guests. ‘She made a brief speech,’ says Lizzi Kew Ross, ‘saying, “Thank you for being my friend and this has not been an easy year.” It was very warm. It felt a significant party, almost like a public moment where she could allude to something so private.’ Also in attendance were Lesley Fitton from Bury Grammar, Catherine Ashmore and Jane Wymark from Birmingham University, her hair and make-up designer Chrissie Baker, her PA Cathy Edis, her tour manager Amie Beamish, her friend in the north Charlotte Scott, Richenda Carey from the Quakers, plus Harriet Thorpe, Imelda Staunton, Kate Robbins and Julie Walters. Not every one of these friendships was to remain on the same level of intense familiarity, but for now each in her own way was a confidante on whose loyalty Victoria felt able to rely.
During the lunch Victoria seized the opportunity to sound Julie out about Acorn Antiques. ‘I thought, oh what a hoot,’ says Julie. ‘And then I thought, I probably won’t be able to do that because it’s West End. I may as well go to the moon and do it. And Vic knew that.’ There were mixed messages from the other originals. Duncan Preston, to whom Victoria mentioned it in the back of a cab, was sceptical: ‘My first reaction was that will not happen. I didn’t say it, I just thought it. But I said, “Yes, of course.”’ Celia Imrie was more vocal: ‘I said, “Vic, are you sure you want to make it into a whole musical?” I didn’t think it was a good idea and said so. Her reply was, “I’ll just look elsewhere.”’ But as Victoria carried on writing, and the prospect loomed of a get-together, Celia’s reservations were overcome: ‘I didn’t want anyone else to play Miss Babs.’
A wary feeling that Victoria could no longer simply click her fingers and summon the gang was fed by the opening in September of Calendar Girls. The film was shot on her doorstep in the Yorkshire Dales, and the rival company had employed Julie, Celia, Chrissie Baker, Harriet Thorpe and Ted Robbins. ‘Some of them were in Calendar Girls because I had actually mentioned my cast to them when I was pitching to get the idea,’ she said soon after the film opened. ‘I was a bit wishing I was with them when they were making it. I just thought, my girls are making a film when I’m not there. I wanted to be at the party.’14 She wrote to wish Celia well as she prepared, in Victoria’s phrase, to parade her la-las. ‘It probably doesn’t help,’ Celia replied, ‘and maybe even make you cross – but I’ve got to express my sadness that you’re not with us.’15 In Julie’s view Victoria would not have openly communicated her anguish. ‘That would be demeaning for her,’ she says. ‘She didn’t think it was much cop, I don’t think.’
Victoria would have her own party whenever the gang got back together for the workshop. Trevor Nunn offered a week in October but counselled holding off until February 2004 when he had a fortnight to devote to overseeing a semi-staged version. ‘We probably need another meeting,’ he wrote, ‘when you could give me the privilege of a command performance of the last two or three songs.’16 Thus, in a rehearsal room in the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Victoria performed a suite of songs from the show to Nunn and Gareth Valentine. It was the largest collection of her own songs she had played to an audience in twenty years.
With the workshop postponed until the following year, Victoria was free to turn her attention to a job that, in its own way, felt just as personal. At the start of the year she heard from Judith Holder, the television producer who was instrumental in bringing her to LWT in 1988. She was now with an independent production company and, emboldened by many tête-à-têtes about body image and food problems, proposed a documentary fronted by Victoria on the slimming industry. As friends with children of the same age, that summer they went on a canoeing holiday in France, which was not an ideal prelude for a working partnership. Victoria pronounced it ‘one of the best holidays we’ve ever had. It was on the Dordogne. On it? Some of us were in it.’17 Judith capsized her canoe on the first morning ‘and became a basket case. I don’t think Vic found it easy, but she took it upon herself to be strong. She would say, “OK, white water coming up here. I’ll go down it first.” She fell in too, but not that much.’
Dieting, which her mother first thrust upon her when she was twelve, had been a leitmotif of Victoria’s creative life for thirty years. She sang about it as a gloomy student in ‘Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Fat’, and it was a preoccupation in the early dramas and sketches she wrote for herself and Julie. ‘This is a boutique not the elephant house,’ says Julie’s sales assistant in Wood and Walters, aiming a sub-machine gun at Victoria. Not long before the series was broadcast, Victoria gave her measurements to a fashion editor who wanted to do a feature. ‘Do you wear kaftans?’ came the reply. It cut her deeply when at a fitting in a West End costumier a woman said to her, ‘If you’d only lose two stone, you could wear all these of Anna Massey’s.’ Her tactic in her early stand-up shows was to mention it before anyone else could. ‘You could dial my measurements,’ she said in As Seen on TV, ‘and get through to the Midland Bank, Bulawayo.’
This running theme was co-opted by the advertisers who made her the face of the low-calorie drink One-Cal. In the early Eighties the press kept landing on the same word to describe her. She was like ‘a plump and bashful schoolgirl’,18 exuded ‘plump placidity’,19 was ‘the plump, dimpled, dumpling one’,20 ‘plump and homely’,21 ‘dumpy and plump’,22 ‘a plump blue-suited Andy Pandy’,23 ‘comfortably and pleasantly plump’,24 ‘pert and plump’.25 It amounted to a form of group bullying. As Victoria’s fame grew, a pattern set in: she would declare that she was eating better than she used to and no longer worrying about her weight while continuing to obsess about it privately. ‘In interviews I always had to say I was quite happy,’ she said during the At It Again tour. ‘I wasn’t at all happy, but I felt that that was a good party line to take.’26 She began to watch herself after one journalist, who’d consumed far more than her over lunch, wrote down what Victoria ate. ‘After that I stopped eating when the press were around. Drank black tea.’27 Then she started to fight back. In her mid-thirties a magazine put her on their cover as slimmer of the year, and she forced them to publish a retraction. In 1989 Mens Sana in Thingummy Doo dah attacked the vapid despotism of health spas. A section in her 1993 stand-up show angrily confronted the slimming industry. Through Dolly and
Jean in dinnerladies she poked fun at women bickering about weight. The exercise routines in her last three shows made light of high-energy gym classes.
It was not until At It Again that Victoria was able publicly to admit to an eating disorder. ‘If you’ve got an eating disorder,’ she elaborated, ‘then eating replaces almost any need that you have. It covers up your feelings. While you’re eating, you’re totally blanked out, you’re not feeling anything. It puts up a barrier between you and people because people are scary but food’s not scary, you know exactly where you are with it, whereas a person is unpredictable. When you’re with somebody you’re thinking, well, I won’t have to talk to them much longer and then I can go and eat something. You are in a state of high tension that is only relieved by eating. It isolates you socially. You have to do it privately.’28
All of this went into the mix when she came to make Victoria Wood’s Big Fat Documentary. ‘I think I can do the programme,’ she said as she embarked on filming, ‘because it’s something that I’ve come to see doesn’t really go away. Whereas before I was always trying to find the thing that would solve it, so that I would no longer have any problem with food or eating, now I think I probably will always and that’s all right as well. I know what I think about certain things, but I’m willing to change my mind.’29
As she and Judith Holder worked on the two-part series, Victoria acquired another ally in the shape of Ben Warwick, who had created the look of Nigella Lawson’s first cookery series Nigella Bites and was suggested as a director. In her vulnerable state after the break-up he found her quick to confide. On his first visit to Highgate he spotted the BAFTAs on the bookshelves: ‘And yet I was talking to this very normal woman. I was overweight and I could identify with the subject matter. We immediately found ourselves able to be very comfortable and very honest with each other. When I saw her particularly crestfallen I’d give her a cuddle and hold her hand.’ He mentioned that once, as a floor manager, he had met Geoffrey and been let into the secret of a handkerchief trick. ‘My God, he must have liked you,’ she said. ‘He never showed anyone anything.’
To establish that this was a personal journey, the series opened with a piece to camera shot in Victoria’s home – the last such intrusion had happened in Stankelt Road in 1985. She imagined the pitch she would make to St Peter at the pearly gates: ‘I was on British television for thirty years, quite fat, a bit fat, not so fat, and in all that time I never brought out a diet book, a detox plan or an exercise video.’ The two films grew into something more than an attack on the profiteers of the slimming industry as Victoria investigated the epidemic of obesity caused by fatty fast food and sedentary lives, and contrasted it to the unnerving lack of flesh on celebrity role models. The pressures put on skeletal actresses was something she was determined to expose: ‘I’m interested in who’s writing these pieces in Heat and Now and all those magazines, doing twelve worst bottoms and twelve worst cleavages. I think big ugly girls are writing those articles probably.’30 In the event, none of those titles accepted the invitation to be interrogated by Victoria.
Many of the interviews were set up at her suggestion, among them with celebrities who had felt the lash of her tongue – Vanessa Feltz, Anne Diamond, Ann Widdecombe and the Duchess of York (who was a good hour late to their interview at the Berkeley Hotel). Victoria resisted the proposal to mock them behind their backs. One of the most powerful contributions came from Nina Myskow, whom she first met at the Edinburgh Festival in 1975 when they compared notes on food addiction. Nearly three decades on, Victoria wrote to request an interview. ‘I had never been asked to talk about it,’ says Myskow. ‘When the letter arrived I was utterly thrilled. I knew Victoria would understand on a literally visceral level. I felt I was having a conversation with somebody who understood completely what I was saying.’ On camera she told Victoria about the time she made a dozen scones in the middle of the night, wolfed down seven of them, hurled the rest in the bin, then fished four out in the morning and polished them off, leaving only a scone soiled by a tea bag. After the interview Victoria thanked her for her honesty. ‘I didn’t want to tell Nina,’ she added on the voiceover, ‘that in my most compulsive days I would have eaten all the scones, and then eaten the tea bag.’
In mid-November the production flew to Los Angeles. It was Victoria’s first visit. She had zero cachet as a celebrity to call in interviewees and, with less than a week to shoot in, the stressful schedule was subject to short-term changes – they were late for one appointment with a visibly cross author. But it yielded some eye-opening television. Victoria donned leggings to do high kicks at an exercise class for overweight women. The extrovert exercise guru licked the sweat off her bare shoulder – no one back home would have countenanced such an impertinence. To interview two belly dancers from Pasadena in a jacuzzi, Victoria consented to wear a swimsuit on camera for the first time since ‘Swim the Channel’ in 1984.
Victoria was determined that the programme would project good cheer. Near the production hotel in Santa Monica, she marched along the beach in pastel aerobics gear looking like a glam Californian native. ‘Hello, I’m Victoria Wood,’ she said in a mid-Atlantic drawl. ‘When I lived in England and was the star of such hit comedies as Wood and Waters and The Lunch Ladies, I was overweight, and could not even look in a mirrow.’ Then she hawked her colon-removal kit ColonToGO! Back in the UK Victoria enlisted actor chums, among them Harriet Thorpe and Andrew Dunn, to lighten the mood with chat and sketches about body image. Kate Robbins joined her in a black-and-white mockumentary about how women stayed thin in the war by digging, scrubbing, carpet-beating and, at the local fleapit, snacking on raw sprouts from a paper bag (just as Stanley and Helen munched on carrot squares when courting). She concluded with an inspirational two-minute rallying cry, delivered from the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square as the traffic roared in the background:
I’m not saying people shouldn’t lose weight if they want to do it … What I’m saying is find out about yourself first. You decide … You have to be able to face yourself in the mirror. If you think you’re all right, it doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks … And if life deals you a pile of manure, they say you should grow roses. So I say, if life gives you a belly, go dancing.
Victoria Wood’s Big Fat Documentary, finished in early December, was edited together at speed and broadcast in early January 2004. The sight of Victoria committing to a serious exercise in campaigning journalism prompted many viewers to express gratitude and share their own stories with her.
One Sunday night during filming Victoria went to the BAFTA tribute to Julie Walters, filmed at the BBC, taking Lez Brotherston as her guest. Her citation was the finale of the show broadcast on BBC One. ‘Before she went up to do her bit,’ says Julie, ‘she handed me a bit of paper and it said on it, “We’re missing Brideshead for this.”’ The private message looped them all the way back to grumbling pensioners at the Wood and Walters recordings. After everyone else had gushed, as ever Victoria saluted Julie by underpraising her for always learning her lines. ‘It’s kind of flattering really,’ says Julie. ‘It’s like the opposite of what she feels, and she can’t say it – that’s what I always felt.’
The BAFTA tributes, first made as one-offs, were now being done biannually – Victoria agreed to take part in another dedicated to Bob Monkhouse. The offer inevitably came to be the subject of one herself, but she baulked at the prospect. The reason she cited was recent personal turmoil. And yet, more than a year after Geoffrey’s departure, Victoria was beginning to recover. ‘Her spirit lightened,’ says her neighbourhood friend Norah Wellbelove. ‘It was a slow process. You could see it getting lighter and lighter. I think she was feeling free. She went back to having the odd glass, which she had stopped for a long time. She changed furnishings in the house. It was just like she was trying to reclaim her life. A lot of fun came back into her.’
Victoria’s feeling of well-being was underpinned by regular visits to a new th
erapist whom she saw as ‘somebody to accompany you on the journey. It sounds ludicrous, but when you’re separating from your husband you haven’t got a husband to help you go through it so the person that was in your corner that helped you along the way is suddenly not in your corner.’31 One of the issues she took with her into the sessions was a profound feeling of guilt about the end of the marriage: ‘I felt a failure, completely. That’s quite hard to live with. If you’re quite a punishing sort of person anyway, then, whoa, you’ve suddenly got the biggest mallet to whack yourself over the head with.’32 On the rare occasions she met up with Geoffrey to talk about the children, she would voice this thought to him too. ‘She told me more than once,’ he says, ‘that her distress and frequent tearfulness were caused by her sense of guilt and responsibility for the break-up, rather than feelings of abandonment.’
In February 2004 Victoria’s gang convened at the LWT rehearsal studio in Kennington, where some of the second series of dinnerladies was rehearsed. A small ensemble was drawn from the casts of My Fair Lady and Anything Goes – one Nunn-directed musical had recently succeeded the other at Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Thus Trevor Nunn entered the physical world of Acorn Antiques. ‘I thought it was a hilarious combination,’ says Julie, who had first met him when rehearsing Educating Rita with the Royal Shakespeare Company. ‘But I thought he will do it really well. I couldn’t wait for Mrs Overall to be able to sing.’ Another interested observer at the workshop was Lez Brotherston. In a sign that Victoria didn’t play by the conventions of theatre she insisted he be the designer before she’d even approached Nunn, in whose hands such a decision would normally lie. The workshop was the first time he had worked with Nunn too, so he and Victoria were less prepared than others for the duration of his welcoming speech. He talked about comedy and television and seemed to imply that the musical had been his suggestion. ‘Vic did her funny boss-eyed thing at me,’ says Lez. After a script-read round the table, director and principals began to work on scenes while the ensemble learned dance routines with Stephen Mear, whom Victoria asked for after seeing his witty choreography on Anything Goes. The songs were taught to the cast by Gareth Valentine. With Victoria taking notes and sticking to Nunn’s side throughout the workshop, her old role of Berta was taken by Janie Dee, who, acting alongside Julie and Celia, suffered from impostor syndrome: ‘I said to Vic, “Why don’t you play Berta? That’s what’s missing. It should be you.” She said, “I can’t. I’ve got to oversee it.”’
