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

by Jasper Rees

  At the very first performance at the end of the month some of Victoria’s anxieties were calmed by the reaction of the audience – ‘They went absolutely mad,’ says Julie. ‘People were throwing Marigolds on at the end’ – and the previews continued in that vein. One night Victoria stood at the back of the dress circle behind a glass panel with Lez Brotherston, looking down on row upon row of middle-aged men with crewcuts roaring with laughter. ‘Old Compton Street must be a wasteland,’ she said.

  Five days later came the first night. The grandees of musical theatre – Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cameron Mackintosh, Elaine Paige – presented themselves. So did Ronnie Corbett, who had a video cameo as the father of Mrs Overall’s triplets. The celebrities were intermingled with what Julie calls ‘a dead belly of critics in the centre downstairs – people with pens’. Victoria watched in horror from the dress circle with Stephen Mear. ‘It was nothing compared to the previews or any show after that,’ he says. ‘It was the worst show. She just grabbed me in disbelief and said, “Why have we got this audience tonight?” It was so sad to see. She stood at the back in the second half. She didn’t want to hear anybody’s opinion.’

  In the very first draft of the show, after the cast take their bows the assistant stage manager brings news that the first review is already online. ‘Any good?’ says Bo. This hostage to fortune was cut before the workshop. In commercial terms, Victoria had been invulnerable to reviews for nearly twenty years but nonetheless hoped for favour as they came in over the weekend. ‘It’s the supreme cheek of the endeavour that will irritate some and exhilarate the rest of us,’ predicted the Independent.46 Most reviewers fell somewhere in between. ‘Mischievous, good-natured, charming,’ said The Times. ‘But a comic masterpiece? Not really.’47 The Observer relished ‘some ridiculously enjoyable moments’ but found it ‘a muddle and a mess, and at least a third too long’.48 There was a consensus that the show couldn’t decide if it was a love letter to theatre – with its flying scenery, jokes about Stephen Baldry and Sir Trevor Eve, and spoofs of Brecht and Fosse – or a ruthless mugging. The most crushing verdict came from Michael Billington of the Guardian, who professed ignorance of the original sketches and awarded the production one star.

  ‘The reaction wasn’t good,’ says Julie. ‘We didn’t hear anything from Vic, and we all thought she’s going to be feeling down. I texted her and said, “Look, there are queues around the block, that’s all you need to know.”’ Victoria had to show her face on the Monday evening, as she was due to understudy Julie.

  Playing Mrs Overall was another source of apprehension. In the rush to get the show on, her access to rehearsal time was limited. Aside from blocking calls and a dress rehearsal with the band, she had barely any preparation before she acted in a theatre for the first time since Good Fun in 1980. She gradually emerged from her shell as Mrs Overall but never quite escaped the shadow of Julie. A Radio Times cover shot by Patrick Lichfield depicted Julie as Mrs Overall proffering a flute of champagne on a tray to Victoria on a throne wearing a crown and ermine. Onstage that hierarchy was reversed. She shared her anxiety to Duncan Preston: ‘Vic said to me, “Blimey, people are going away if they hear that Julie’s not doing it. They’re asking for their money back.” I said, “Well, she is the heart of the show really.” She was never a patch on Julie, and she did know it.’ After one performance she asked Sammy Murray, to whom she had grown close and who visited her dressing room following every performance, if there were empty seats: ‘I said, “Yes, Vic, there were.” She had a bit of a meltdown. She said, “I didn’t need to know that.” I said, “Vic, you asked me the question. Even if I lie, you’ll be looking at the box-office figures.” The next morning at half past seven she rang and said, “Sammy, I could see all the people weren’t there. I’m really upset and I took it all out on you. I felt really shitty.”’ Victoria gave twenty-nine performances as Mrs Overall and received a steady flow of friends in her dressing room afterwards. Geoffrey Strachan, her old publisher, lavished praise. ‘What a shame you don’t do the reviews for the Guardian!’ she replied. ‘It’s lovely to play – which I hadn’t expected!’49

  Every single one of the £65 tickets was sold. No one spotted the irony when Mrs O pointed to the stalls and told them to ‘behave in the cheap seats’. While Celia’s Miss Babs was a sizzling portrayal of midlife sexuality, Julie pulled focus every second she was on the stage and attracted the lion’s share of the one-liners:

  You had a difficult birth – you had your nose wedged right up against my pubic bone.

  I was giving the postman a mouthful of something tasty by the scullery door and he filled me in very thoroughly.

  There was a rubber shortage. We tried painting condoms on with gravy browning but the thing is they wasn’t a hundred per cent effective.

  ‘They are the funniest lines I think I’ve ever had the privilege to say,’ says Julie. ‘Some nights it was utterly uproarious. I felt I had free rein and I could see the joy Vic took in anything new I got in, and that made me feel really happy.’ Her big moment was ‘Macaroons’, in which Mrs Overall argues that men should drop their various vices and instead consume more biscuits. Her tip for Ozzy Osbourne, always uproariously received, was to ‘have a custard fucking cream and shut the fuck up!’

  For fans who couldn’t see the show Victoria hoped to capture it on DVD. ‘That became an absolute frigging nightmare,’ says her agent Lucy Ansbro. ‘One actor got greedy, and he was winding everybody else up about it. Vic became the negotiator for everybody. She was saying, “Come on, we can’t afford it at that level. You’ve got to do it on this basis if you want to film it.”’ A deal was eventually struck. Ben Warwick watched the dress rehearsal, filmed an early performance on a wide angle then plotted a camera script with over 3,000 different shots filmed by seven cameras. The crew came back for another performance to capture Victoria’s Mrs Overall, which was one of the DVD’s extras.

  Victoria gave her last performance the day before her fifty-second birthday. There had been talk of continuing after Julie and Celia’s contracts came to an end, but she soon saw this would be folly. ‘I thought it would suffer very badly if we recast it while we were in the West End.’50 As the production approached a natural terminus, there was a sense that Victoria’s company was also coming to the end of the line: ‘I was very appreciative of the fact that Celia and Duncan and Julie were prepared to tip up eight times a week on the stage to bring this to fruition. It felt like a great glorious conclusion to something. I don’t know if they felt the same way.’51 Julie agrees that ‘there was a feeling of that somewhere – I didn’t feel sad because I’d come to the end of a great massive run and it was good to be finishing’. ‘There was an unspoken agreement that this was sort of it,’ says Duncan, who made the best of slim pickings in the role of Mr Clifford. As for Celia, ‘I’m glad I did it,’ she says. ‘I’m extremely proud to have got the Olivier award. But after that time Vic and I never worked together again.’

  21

  HISTORIAN, 53

  ‘I was always roaring with laughter when I wasn’t sobbing on camera.’

  Interview, 2007

  There were to be more endings. In the summer of 2005 Dan Crawford, the artistic director of the King’s Head Theatre with whom Victoria had such a long association, was terminally ill in hospital. On the day she hoped to say goodbye, the 7/7 bombings happened. He died two days later, and at his funeral in Islington she admonished Janie Dee for crying as she sang ‘Spread a Little Happiness’. Mole Barn went on the market and the sale was completed in September. Victoria bought a flat for her sister Penelope in Hebden Bridge, but her own residential link with the north was once again severed. While she witnessed her other sister Rosalind remarry at a registry office, that summer Victoria and Geoffrey sought advice from a solicitor about how to get a DIY divorce which would attract no attention from the press.

  These sunderings had one happier by-product: Victoria felt free to succumb to her work ethic without guilt.
‘I am just flexing my muscles a bit,’ was how she would put it, ‘and doing what I want, rather than trying not to rock the marital boat.’1 She started to push herself harder than at any time since creating dinnerladies, and in drastically new directions. For the next two years, her schedule would be densely latticed with overlapping projects. None would involve live performance. Although the question of whether she might tour again refused to go away, Victoria was clear in her mind that she could not. ‘I did not have an amiable separation from my husband,’ she explained to a television producer. ‘It was all very painful and horrible, and that’s one reason why I’m not doing stand-up, because I don’t want to talk about it onstage, and I don’t know how to do any stuff about myself without talking about it.’2 Yet she was aware that her personal circumstances could not be entirely suppressed. ‘It’s unimaginable that something big like that would happen to you and it wouldn’t in the end be assimilated into your work,’ she said. ‘It will come in in some guise.’3 So it proved.

  Victoria was always receiving approaches from hopeful broadcasters. One that pricked her interest had come at the end of 2003 from Michele Buck, the controller of drama at LWT, who pitched a drama for Victoria to write and star in. It would feature a quiet but clever office cleaner working the night shift at a police station where, in partnership with a sweet young cop, she would solve crimes. Victoria was unseduced but did not discourage further overtures. There were all new young people at LWT since she had fallen out with the drama department over Pat and Margaret a decade earlier. In particular, the young head of development Piers Wenger was, in his own description, ‘a real hardcore fan in my teens’ who had seen Victoria perform live several times. In March 2004 he and the head of drama Damien Timmer, who also knew her sketches inside out, sent out another pair of offers. One was a guest role in the new Miss Marple, the other an invitation to adapt and complete Jane Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons. Victoria, allergic to going back over old ground, had already parodied cosy crime with Wetty Hainthrop Investigates, and Regency costume drama in ‘Plots and Proposals’. Yet LWT’s persistence was rewarded. ‘We got a very short letter back which was handwritten,’ says Piers Wenger. ‘It said, “I am busy writing my musical at the moment but I have got an idea which I might be more able to talk about in six months or a year’s time.” There was an incredibly long wait and it was very tantalising.’

  As for Victoria, it made for a pleasant change to be courted by younger people – Piers Wenger was twenty years her junior. ‘They were sort of pestering me for ages and ages,’ she said, ‘and they were so nice and such big fans.’4 Eventually she and the LWT three met at J. Sheekey, the swish West End fish restaurant. The lunch was interrupted when the sociable novelist Kathy Lette approached the table. ‘Vic just fixed her with one of her Paddington Bear stares,’ says Piers, ‘and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t think we have met.” She was completely deadpan. In a very quiet way she dealt with this interruption.’ Piers, finally meeting his idol, was granted a glimpse of her steeliness. She confirmed she had an idea in mind. ‘I’m interested in writing about a marriage,’ she said. As she left she announced that she was off to buy a clock at Selfridges. ‘It felt like a coded way of saying that we might get to know her,’ says Damien Timmer. ‘We really wanted to be in her gang.’

  The diary of Nella Last, which had been in Victoria’s possession for more than twenty years, was written for Mass-Observation, a research project set up in 1937 to ‘record the voice of the people’. Of the 500 volunteers, Mrs Last, a housewife from Barrow-in-Furness, became the most prolific contributor – by the end of the war she had submitted two million words, detailing the life of a middle-aged woman trapped in a stifling marriage. Her husband William Last was a master carpenter with an antisocial streak who discouraged visitors and refused to let her leave the house without him. Instead she poured her love into her two sons Arthur and Clifford, until the Second World War forced her to let go of them. At the same time, war liberated her to escape the house and join the Women’s Voluntary Service, where she was much valued. She also opened a shop for the Red Cross which raised money to send parcels to prisoners of war. Most of all, she found a release in her Mass-Observation diary entries, which reveal the aptitude of a born writer.

  Mrs Last died in 1968. The War Diaries of Nella Last was published in 1981, to the consternation of Barrow residents about whom she had been bracingly frank. Victoria came across them a year later, when Funny Turns was on in the West End during the Falklands War: ‘I went out on the piss one night with Keith Waterhouse. We walked up the Strand towards the offices of the Daily Mirror, and he took a book off the shelf and gave it to me. It was Nella Last’s diaries.’5

  Much as her mother had accumulated books about Queen Victoria, Victoria became an obsessive collector of Second World War literature. Two of her siblings had been born during the war, and her stand-up was suffused with imagery of the conflict. (‘It was quite an old plane – I was sitting next to the rear gunner.’ ‘You only get one egg a month, like the war.’ ‘They probably don’t know the war is over in Morecambe.’) Several All the Trimmings sketches, including some unused ones, were set on the home front. At first the diary fed her thirst for wartime detail – coal fires, rationing, the bombing. But Mrs Last, frustrated by limited life chances available to intelligent women of her generation, felt familiar. ‘Nella was really a bit like my mother,’ Victoria said. ‘She was an intellectual from a working-class background. My mother couldn’t be doing with neighbours and gossip and suburban life.’6

  Helen Wood’s talent as a lively writer was on Victoria’s mind. Her brother Chris had edited their mother’s unfinished childhood memoir for publication and, towards the end of the Acorn Antiques run in the West End, Victoria was asked if she would write a foreword and let her name be on the cover. She was reluctant to be a promotional pawn. ‘I just think it’s so NAF,’ she grumbled to Rosalind, ‘to have a book about a Manchester childhood and have to say on the cover “Oh by the way, one of her daughters ended up on the telly …”’7 But she was persuaded to relent, and the following year Nellie’s Book: The Early Life of Victoria Wood’s Mother came out with a short introduction in which Victoria described Helen as a woman born in the wrong era.

  As Victoria reached the age at which Nella started writing, the diary began to speak to her more personally. Nella grappled with depression – she had suffered a nervous breakdown before the war and feared a recurrence. Victoria recognised her coping mechanism – the drive to be bustlingly busy – as similar to her own: ‘When you have depressive tendencies, adrenalin works really well. She seemed to get a whole boost of energy from dashing about and doing lots of things. People were always telling her how marvellous she was which must have given her a great boost.’8 In Nella Last, a northern woman from an ordinary background who used her unique voice to describe the world around her with a lively clarity, Victoria had found a kind of twin. As a statement of her intention to adapt them, she sent copies of the diaries to Damien Timmer and Piers Wenger, who gave her a box of macaroons for Christmas. But it was only once Acorn Antiques ended, more than eighteen months after LWT first made contact, that Victoria was free to start talking to them about Nella Last. ‘She was very tentative,’ says Damien Timmer, ‘partly because she didn’t know if she wanted to do it with us and partly because she was trying to make sense of it in her mind, feeling her way into something that was a departure for her.’

  As her relationship with ITV resumed, Victoria accepted an invitation to take part in What Did ITV Do For Me?, a series marking fifty years of independent television – she was the only woman among six profiles celebrating the likes of Roger Moore and Bruce Forsyth. Victoria was by now extremely practised at finding a fresh route through much-told tales of school, university and her early steps as a performer, and took the opportunity to pay tribute once again to Peter Eckersley. ‘Without ITV I’d have to strip away half my career,’ she concluded.9 When it was broadcast in S
eptember she received a corrective email from Rosalind: ‘Mother did watch you in New Faces. I saw it with her and she was very proud of you!’10

  The chance for a more profound retrospective arose from a less expected quarter when Dawn French asked Victoria for an interview as part of a series about female comedians she was planning for BBC Four. To her surprise, Victoria said yes, and in doing so helped to greenlight the entire project. The interview, in November, took place at a house near Victoria’s home.

  ‘What I totally expected from Vic,’ says Dawn, ‘was that our friendship would be respected as outside the door and what was inside the room was the professional Vic, guarded and self-editing at all times. I did not expect what then happened, which was that Vic answered pretty much every question utterly openly.’ Friendship, and professional parity, enabled Victoria to be more honest and natural than she had ever been on television. The conversation covered ground she’d been over many times before: her relationship with her audience; her place in the comedy firmament. But also on display was her emotional intelligence, yielding hard-won insights into herself that were truly familiar only to Victoria’s most trusted friends. She surprised Dawn by suggesting her withdrawal from the stage might not be permanent after all: ‘If I want to do it, then I think it will be the right thing to do, and bollocks to anybody who thinks I’m too old to do it.’ Her interviewer was alarmed enough by her frankness to offer her a final say on what went in: ‘I thought she’d been far too open for her own good, and I didn’t want to risk our friendship for that. I said, “If you don’t like anything, just let me know and it’ll be gone.” She didn’t ask to see it.’