by Jasper Rees
At the same time, after more than six months on the road, Acorn Antiques fetched up at its final destination in Cardiff. Victoria watched the show on the Friday night at the Wales Millennium Centre and was there for the warm-up before the Saturday matinee to speak to the company. They were expecting to be patted on the back for a triumphant tour, but she stayed true to the exacting standards she’d set at the dress rehearsal. ‘She laid into us big time,’ says Ria Jones. ‘She suddenly gave us a notes session from hell. We all walked away terrified and a bit upset. Afterwards she came to my dressing room and gave me the biggest hug. I wanted to say, “Why did you just do that?” It was maybe for us not to rest on our laurels for the last two shows. She didn’t want them to be all schmaltzy. It worked.’
For the matinee Victoria delighted the company and the audience by coming on as a barista in a cap. Then, for the very final performance, Ria Jones persuaded her to take a bow at the end wearing a T-shirt with the Welsh flag, sending the audience into a frenzied ecstasy. It was the last hurrah for the musical Victoria wrote to cheer herself up after the end of her marriage. ‘It was just the happiest thing I’ve ever done,’ she would reflect, ‘from writing the music, working with Trevor, rewriting it, directing it. The whole thing.’32
22
MID LIFE
‘I’m not any younger just because I’m squashed into a big beige condom.’
Untitled script, 2008
Straight after Acorn Antiques closed Victoria took the children to Montreal. She and Grace were canoeing over rapids when they capsized and were swept out of the boat, which floated off down river along with the bag containing her money, cards and phone. ‘Was a bit scary for a few minutes,’ she told Rosalind.1 It was their last family holiday before an inevitable rite of passage. Having won a choral scholarship to study French and Italian at Cambridge University, on returning home Grace left to spend the next year in Lille, where she had a job as an usher in the opera house.
If Victoria dreaded this moment, she didn’t let it show. ‘I think Mum was excited for me,’ says Grace. ‘She did really nice things. We packed all my stuff, and when I got to Lille I found she’d hidden all sorts of sweets and notes.’ She visited twice that autumn, first with Henry to see Grace sing in a concert on Armistice Day weekend. ‘She has a lovely voice,’ Victoria proudly informed David Firman – ‘very big – she tries valiantly to blend in when in a choir.’2 In December she took Cathy Edis and her daughter on a day trip to the Christmas market. As they wandered a woman spotted Victoria, ran over and flung her arms round her.
With her first child gone, that autumn Victoria revisited the world of her own childhood. Piers Wenger, now firmly established as a friend and confidant, had moved to the BBC, where he was producing an adaptation of Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild’s tale of three orphans attending an academy of dance and drama in London. As a favour to Piers, and as it was her next best children’s book after The Swish of the Curtain, she agreed to take the role of the matronly Nana. To get into character, she asked if she could be fitted with a sizeable bottom: ‘I wanted it to be vast, like a Titanic in tweed. You just know in the meeting when you make a suggestion and people don’t really answer you, you think, all right then, that’s not going to happen. It wasn’t my show so I couldn’t call the tune.’3 The experience of not being in charge on the shoot in locations around London was salutary. She had no fondness for spending long fallow hours in a Winnebago: ‘I really would prefer to be a bit busier. You could go off and do other things and then come back, but because you’ve got a grey wig and a fat arse you can’t go anywhere.’4 She made it her business to come in and support Sammy Murray, whom she recommended as choreographer, even when not needed on set herself, and particularly enjoyed the company of Eileen Atkins. ‘It was worth it just to meet her,’ she told Rosalind. ‘I think it will be okay if you like that sort of holiday telly (which I do normally but not when I’m in it).’5
There was another task to keep her mind occupied on set. In November BAFTA was to mark its sixtieth anniversary with a gala night filmed by ITV at the New London Theatre. As the entertainer with the biggest tally of award nominations – twelve in twenty-one years – Victoria was top of the list of invitees and was asked to close the evening with a stand-up set. ‘I felt there’s something missing in my life if I don’t do it ever,’ she explained. ‘I don’t want to do another big tour, and I don’t want to go out and talk for two hours, but I thought perhaps I could just do a little bit just to put my toe in the water.’6 It had been more than six years since she wrote the material for Victoria Wood At It Again, and the question of what area of experience she could spin into comedy needed addressing. Joking about divorce was not an option, so instead she worked up a set based on the seven signs of ageing. At the sound check she encountered a familiar face in Alasdair Macmillan, who had directed An Audience with Victoria Wood in 1988. Her one request to him was that, unlike everyone else throughout the evening, she enter from stage left – as she always had. ‘My only real worry was that I wouldn’t be able to remember it because I hadn’t been able to try it out anywhere. I thought, I’m not going to be nervous. I’ve been doing this for thirty years and it’s only a telly show.’7 Shallow breaths, and the cribsheet she produced from the pocket of her grey Betty Jackson suit, told another story. Her chosen theme enabled her to come at familiar territory – catalogues, body image, brand names – from a fresh angle. The first sign of age, she said, was when ‘you don’t really know who anybody is’ and thus confuse Kerry Katona with Kiri Te Kanawa. The fifth sign was when ‘all your respectable married friends go completely off the rails … Suddenly they’re losing four stone, zipping themselves into suede trousers and going, “This is my time, Derek.”’ In twenty minutes she offered a glimpse of the live show about the next stage in a woman’s life that she would never perform. She was resigned to the fact that, for broadcast, it would be cut to a mere eight minutes. Aside from the cribsheet, her other insurance was ‘to put a couple of old gags in so I can get off with a big laugh’. Both were about grooming and the proliferation of body hair: ‘Honestly, if you leave it, you look like you should be sitting cross-legged in a forest playing the pan pipes. And apparently these days it has to go into a shape. You can’t do what I do, which is just chop the odd chunk off with the nail scissors.’
‘I don’t mind people knowing that about me,’ she told Kirsty Young when she was interviewed that month for Desert Island Discs. ‘But I would hate anyone seeing my tea towels.’ Victoria’s second stint as a castaway was very different from her encounter with Michael Parkinson twenty years earlier. Much less shuttered, she dwelled more openly on the travails of her childhood and, when pressed, said she felt sorry for the neglected little girl she had once been. The recording got off to a haphazard start when, after a few minutes, a fire alarm sounded and Broadcasting House had to be evacuated. The throng of radio staffers didn’t bat an eyelid as Victoria stood on the pavement. ‘Then an open-top London bus goes past,’ says Kirsty Young, ‘and the commentator on the bus says, “On your left-hand side is the Langham Hotel, where blah blah blah blah during the war. And on your right” – and we can hear he’s about to say “is the BBC” and he turns and says, “is one of Britain’s greatest comedians.” And give her her due, she did look up, she gave a little smile and a wave.’
Back in the studio, the end of Victoria’s long marriage could not be ducked. ‘I felt like one of those cartoon people that steps over a cliff,’ she said. ‘Your legs are moving but there’s nothing underneath.’ As she talked about Geoffrey, says Kirsty Young, ‘she was staring absolutely across the table at me and her eyes were brimful of emotion without her crying. And in her eyes at one point I felt – and it was very, very poignant and very moving – a look of “please don’t ask me any more – this is as far as I can go”. Then when we got into the music, she didn’t say anything, she was just in her own thoughts. It was a very difficult moment for her and was clearly still raw for her.
’ Victoria articulated her melancholy by choosing music by Arvo Pärt and Randy Newman. In twenty years her musical palate had veered away from the pre-war tastes inherited from her father. Three of her picks – songs by Weather Report, Tom Waits and Mr Scruff – were made in concert with Henry, while she selected a John Rutter carol sung by the choir of Clare College Cambridge, which Grace was soon to join. Afterwards her anxiety focused on how much she had unexpectedly let slip about her childhood. ‘I wonder whether I said too much,’ she said to Piers Wenger.
In November Victoria flew back across the Atlantic with Piers to attend the International Emmy Awards in New York. There for several days, she enjoyed the rare sensation of anonymity: ‘I could just go barging about gawping at people. On the red carpet this woman called Cognac Wetherspoon or something like that with false eyelashes – she was very, very bizarre-looking – asked, “Why are you here?” I said, “I’ve been nominated for best actress.” She said, “Oh, that’s marvellous. What else do you do?” I said, “I’ve done documentaries; I’ve written a musical,” and she said, “That’s right, you have!”’8 The ceremony was ‘incredibly long and boring,’ says Piers. ‘We were falling asleep at the table with the jet lag.’ She was the only British nominee not to prosper – ‘but it was still great to be there and be nominated,’ she told Rosalind.9 Her greatest pleasure was watching Robert De Niro attempt to read a citation from the autocue: ‘A treat I will long remember. I thought, put your glasses on! It was excruciating. He was doing a word at a time. It was like a sight test.’10
Desert Island Discs was broadcast just before Christmas. ‘I had been a bit anxious about the transmission,’ she told Richard E. Grant. ‘In fact I drove to Southwark I felt so twitchy and had to get out of the house.’11 After Christmas, she, Grace and Henry travelled by train with the Glossop family to wander around a misty Venice.
Victoria was soon back in the radio recording studio thanks to David Threlfall, who had a commission from Radio 4 to write a short story as part of a Valentine’s week series: ‘Along the way I remembered what she’d said: if I can hear someone in my head, then write for them. “Victoria,” I said. “Got you a little present. If you don’t want to do it, say so.” She said, “No, I’ll do it.”’ After more than twenty drafts he’d produced something that sounded very like her. ‘Stupid Cupid’ was a galloping short story about Joyce, a housewife who takes explosive revenge on her husband James for the sin of being dull. There was less than an hour’s studio time booked in Shepherd’s Bush to record and edit the fourteen-minute story. Victoria had prepared thoroughly and, reading in the same brisk, vibrant style as her Jackanory recordings, made barely a fluff.
After 2007, 2008 was to be much quieter. ‘Slavery and the Empire nearly did me in, and Ballet Shoes finished me off,’ she told Lesley Fitton, ‘but next year I am just doing GCSEs (well Hen is but you know how it is) and writing.’12 With Grace away, Victoria and Henry were now thrown upon each other as the only permanent occupants of the house. She put a lot of energy into gearing him up for exams that, at the same stage in her life, she had mainly failed. A keen instrumentalist and a natural comedian, Henry felt aware that he had inherited another of his mother’s traits. ‘There’s a lot of similar internal wiring,’ he says. ‘I was smart but lazy, and it was a fundamental problem getting stuff done. I would say to her, “You always told me you were lazy at school and then found this work ethic later on, and I always knew that it would be the same.” There was a common understanding about a lot of stuff.’
For the first time in many years, Victoria had nothing planned and no conversations on the go with broadcasters about potential projects. Her ambition instead was to work in the one medium which, despite several attempts, she had not yet conquered. ‘I think I’ve got a story that is for cinema,’ she volunteered at the end of 2007. ‘I’m not overconfident about being able to write a film and getting it done at the end of it, but I can give it a go.’13 She referred to a new writing project on Desert Island Discs – ‘It’s just about life now really … of a middle-aged person,’ she said – but could be tempted to reveal no more. There was a reason for her coyness. Far less obliquely than in Housewife, 49, the untitled script she began writing in January 2008 was a portrait of a failed marriage. Her two protagonists have been married for years, and their children have left home, but rather than stencil the precise circumstances of her own break-up onto the script, she created a more dramatic scenario. In the first scene Sally is blindsided when she learns that her husband Tony is abandoning her for a much younger woman at work. His new girlfriend insists Tony clears the air by going with Sally to a couple’s counsellor, who in turn advises them to meet on neutral ground once a week. As Sally bravely navigates the indignities of midlife singledom, it’s put to her that she should try speed dating. ‘I’m too old!’ she says. ‘It would be more like carbon dating.’ Meanwhile, Tony comes to realise that, beyond sex, there’s not much fun to be had with a younger woman who understands none of his cultural reference points. In the redemptive final scene, the marriage, with its long history of shared jokes and memories, is resumed.
Victoria made an effort to distance herself from the story. Sally bakes cakes for a living, while it’s her faithless husband who is the celebrity – he presents a popular history series on TV. She has a joyless and hoity-toity neighbour whose children (Clemency, Lysander and Perdita) are not allowed sugar. Victoria set it in Harpenden, the commuter-belt village in Hertfordshire, which she knew from visits to Lesley Fitton. ‘Need to go to Harpers,’ she told her, ‘as I think film I am writing is set in some place like it, if not it … I need a place that’s commutable, has a mix of people not just posh.’14 There were new targets and old to aim at: the petty Home Counties mindset, vacuous spas, dogging. Tony’s girlfriend gets a job on a callous TV show called Fat Chavs in which overweight working-class people are trained up in boot camp to pass themselves off as toffs. But for all the camouflage, the story was deeply rooted in autobiography. In a flashback to 1961 a neglected young Sally watches television on her own in a silent house. The ghost of Bob Mason is evoked in another flashback: a teenage Sally poses in a photobooth with a poet boyfriend who goes off to art college where he is won over by a lithe new girlfriend – Victoria had attempted a play on this theme when pregnant with Grace. Sally’s surname is Bedford, like Pat’s in Pat and Margaret.
At the core of the comedy is the simmering rage of a woman left to navigate middle age on her own. ‘You tore our whole marriage to bits week by week – just to justify you following your cock!’ Sally shouts at Tony. But Victoria did attempt to be even-handed. At the end Sally apologises for her own failures:
You did do lots to try and help me feel better and I never said thank you … And I’m sorry I didn’t help you with your programme and didn’t have exciting pubic hair and forgot to have sex and all that. And you were great to be married to a lot of the time really, and you’re a great dad … sorry for all my bits.
Victoria moved on to a second draft but felt unable to develop it any further. ‘It just wasn’t any good,’ she said the following year. ‘It was about a marriage. I think I couldn’t really do it. I literally threw it away.’15 She didn’t, as a copy survived, but she dropped all thought of developing it further.
Meanwhile, another idea loitered: to tell the little-known story of the Guinea Pig Club. Its members consisted of RAF pilots who had been shot down in the Second World War, surviving with horrific burns that were treated by pioneering surgeon Archibald McIndoe. Early in 2008 Victoria and Piers Wenger visited the hospital in East Grinstead in Sussex, now a museum, where they had been treated. Afterwards she and Piers met some surviving Guinea Pigs in a pub. ‘They clearly adored her,’ says Piers. ‘They loved the fact that she was funny and clever and yet terribly down to earth.’ The secretary of the Guinea Pig Club sent DVDs to aid her further research, and Victoria asked Cathy Edis to find out more about the life of RAF pilots and more information about the Guinea Pigs. ‘O
ne day,’ wrote McIndoe when the hospital ward was closed down in 1948, ‘someone will tell the complete story of Ward II.’ It was not to be Victoria. The bawdiness of the Guinea Pigs’ banter soon persuaded her the story was safer in the hands of a male writer.
In March, just as Victoria nursed the desire to write a film, she was celebrated with a month-long season of her work at the BFI Southbank. All of her greatest hits, and the odd lesser-known curio, were shown on a big screen: Talent, Nearly a Happy Ending, Wood and Walters, Victoria Wood As Seen on TV, Over to Pam, Pat and Margaret, dinnerladies and Housewife, 49. Amid the screenings Victoria was interviewed in front of a packed auditorium. The same month Talent was revived in the small theatre over the road in Highgate. Formerly an old music hall, the Gatehouse Theatre had set up as a fringe venue in 1997 and Victoria had become its first patron. One revival begat another. Victoria had no musical recordings of Talent they could work from so contacted David Graham, the producer who had toured it ten years earlier. He agreed to share his recordings if she would grant his company the stage rights to dinnerladies. She accepted the bargain, and Graham set to composting the first series down into a single play and booking venues for a tour to begin the following year. She took on a supervisory role, with final approval of the script and publicity material.
In this slack period Victoria pondered creating a website, then thought better of it. ‘I don’t have anything to flog and I don’t particularly want a bigger fan base,’ she told Rosalind, to whom she also mentioned buying a rural bolthole for all the family to use. When her sister offered to hunt for cottages, Victoria laid out her parameters – she didn’t want anywhere in Sussex, being too close to an oast house Geoffrey had bought with his girlfriend. ‘I don’t find the seaside very appealing in this country,’ she added. ‘I’m more of a lakes and woods type person.’16
