by Jasper Rees
She celebrated her fifty-fifth birthday in May by rendezvousing with Grace in Paris and hosting a small party at home in the garden – guests huddled under blankets and round braziers. In June the Queen’s Birthday Honours list brought a CBE. ‘For serv Entertainment,’ read the citation. A year earlier Betty Jackson had been made a CBE and when Victoria wrote to her she took to addressing the envelope ‘Commander Betty Jackson’. Now she was able to sign herself, ‘from one commander to another, love Vic.’
After popping up as a guest on The Apprentice: You’re Fired!, Victoria had nothing much else on for the rest of the year and decided to have an operation on a bunion. ‘You have to have your foot up for two weeks,’ she told Rosalind, ‘and then hopping about four weeks but I think it’s worth it, as I want to be filming next year.’17 Penelope came south to look after her and Henry while she recuperated by watching the Olympic Games from Beijing. She sprang up sooner than she was meant to when she learned that Sammy Murray, and one of the twin boys to whom she had just given birth, had been severely ill – though still in plaster, she drove to visit them in Stoke Mandeville hospital. For a while Victoria wore a built-up shoe, and for the rest of the year was not allowed to wear anything but Uggs and Birkenstocks. The only exception was her day out at the palace in October, accompanied by Grace, Henry and Catherine Ashmore, who snapped her with a row of Beefeaters. The queen of England asked the queen of entertainment if she’d been doing the job for a long time: ‘I said, “Yes, a very long time!”’18
By now Grace was in her first year at Cambridge. After waiting a few weeks before visiting – ‘or she will feel I’m breathing down her neck’ – Victoria began driving up to attend evensong and concerts.19 She thus found herself a tourist in a culture which, what with its conveyor belt of Oxbridge comedians, she had always held at arm’s length. ‘She was in the nicest possible way bemused by it,’ says Grace. ‘She had the sense of how the hell did I produce a kid who can do this?’
The year had already yielded one semi-autobiographical film script. In the autumn Victoria hoped for more success with a second. Once more her protagonist was an isolated woman in her fifties. Eunice lives on a remote farm in the Lake District with an unloving father who fills the house with clutter. ‘They’ve got no phone and no television and no connection with the outside world,’ Victoria explained, ‘and it’s about what happens to her from the day he dies and how she has to reconnect back with the world.’20 She researched the psychology of compulsive hoarders, while drawing too on memories of Birtle Edge House and her mother, who had devoted her life to shedding family while accumulating junk. ‘It’s a much exaggerated version of how we lived, I suppose,’ she said. ‘It’s about television as well. If you live with no telly, you’re quite disconnected from ordinary conversation. The first thing this woman does when her father dies is she buys a big telly. And then she starts to try and make her house look like houses look on the telly. But she doesn’t know how to communicate with people, so she gets all the exterior things right and it’s about how you’ve got to sort yourself out.’21
She called it The Giddy Kipper. The title came from a speech by an irate teacher who, in a flashback to the early 1960s, throws out young Eunice for telling jokes in class: ‘Do you know who’s going to heaven – the clean little girls – the ones who do as they’re told – not the grubby ones, not the giddy kippers – god doesn’t like giddy kippers – giddy kippers go to hell.’
Most autobiographically of all, Eunice feels nothing at the death of a parent. ‘My dad’s dead,’ she tells the surgery matter-of-factly. ‘Well, you know he was dying? And she said just like call [the doctor] if there was any change. There wasn’t any change, so I didn’t call her. But he’s dead now, which is a change, so I’m calling.’ Later the undertakers come to take the body. ‘Not getting the broken-hearted trophy, is she?’ one of them mutters. At her father’s funeral, attended solely by Eunice, she picks a medley of party tunes by Winifred Atwell.
When the first draft was finished in November, Victoria gave it to Piers Wenger in the hope that he would want to produce it. ‘We had better then talk about how to get the money,’ she wrote to Lucy Ansbro. ‘Do we lob Phil [McIntyre] at people or do I have to do it myself?’22 She produced a plot summary for the sales pitch concluding, at Piers’s suggestion, with a statement of her intentions. These were ‘to play Eunice and to direct the film … I’m shining a light on the ordinary people we don’t always see on screen, and telling the story of one person’s difficult, awkward, but ultimately uplifting journey towards happiness.’23 By the following summer no money had been raised and her desire to break into cinema was no further on.
Uniquely for Victoria, 2008 was an unproductive year. Then in December the seeds were sown for three projects that would occupy her for the next three years. The one that would have the very longest gestation came, unusually, from elsewhere. The film production company Left Bank Pictures had optioned an article in the New Yorker about the notorious English pianist Joyce Hatto, who had died in 2006 having enjoyed a remarkable late-flourishing renown. A series of over a hundred recordings released in her seventies had generated acclaim from chat-room fans and flabbergasted critics. Soon after her death it was established by digital detection that almost all recordings issued in her name in fact featured the work of other pianists. Andy Harries of Left Bank, casting around for someone to write the script, showed the article to Piers Wenger, who, thinking a story of musical oddballs set in the commuter belt would appeal to Victoria, recommended her. When they met, Harries found her ‘quite wary of men, and I had been warned that she could be prickly. Because I had been at Granada in my youth, I had seen her very earliest performances. It helped break the ice a bit.’ The project did indeed enthuse Victoria, so he put a researcher onto the task of fleshing out the human story of Hatto and her husband William Barrington-Coupe. The latter, still alive, was chiefly – and perhaps solely – responsible for the breathtaking deception perpetrated upon the classical-music industry. Left Bank’s researcher Kerry Gill-Pryde was soon joined by Cathy Edis, who spent the next few months sleuthing on Victoria’s behalf.
In the same week as she met Andy Harries Victoria had lunch with Janice Hadlow, the new controller of BBC Two, to pitch a long-cherished idea to tell the story of when Eric Morecambe met Ernie Wise. She had read several biographies of the pair and was particularly taken with a story in which, on a train during the Blitz, Eric’s mother told the two hyperactive young boys to channel their energy by writing some material together. The more Victoria thought about it in the coming months the more she understood that, like her Guinea Pig Club idea, the script would better flourish in the hands of a male writer. Piers Wenger suggested they sound out Peter Bowker, best known for his seedy, rollicking 2004 drama Blackpool, which she admired. They met at her private-members club in Shaftesbury Avenue.
‘I might be doing myself out of a job here,’ Bowker said to her, ‘but why aren’t you writing this? The obvious line in British comedy travels through Morecambe and Wise to you.’ ‘I don’t think I can write men,’ she told him. ‘And I wanted somebody who clearly gets that northern material.’ He was from Stockport, the other side of Manchester from Bury, and quickly found a way past her defensive force field. When they moved on to the Ivy restaurant, Victoria confided that one of her pet hates was being Masonically nodded at by celebrities she had never met. A very famous actor promptly nodded at her. She turned and said, ‘See what I mean?’
Peter Bowker soon joined Victoria and Piers on a pilgrimage to seek the blessing of Eric Morecambe’s widow and son. Over tea and biscuits Victoria’s shyness threatened to undermine the encounter. ‘She was a bit off,’ says Gary Morecambe. ‘Almost cold. Piers Wenger said, “Gary, you must understand she’s so nervous to be here talking to you!” I couldn’t believe it: my mother and I were both in awe of her.’ When Victoria said she ought to be off, Joan Morecambe said, ‘Why, have you got another meeting to get to?’ ‘Well, no,’ sa
id Victoria. ‘I just didn’t want to take up any more of your time’ ‘My mother laughed,’ says Gary, ‘and told her to have another cup of tea. Vic visibly relaxed and that was it – from then on we were on the same page.’ A comparable visit to Ernie Wise’s widow Doreen was a little more fraught. ‘She was quite cagey and defensive and a bit prickly,’ says Bowker.
At the same time the BBC’s controller of comedy commissioning was interested in putting together an archival package of Victoria’s sketches. This got her thinking about ‘a sort of Trimmings 2 where the old stuff would be woven in with a lot of new,’ she told Lucy Ansbro. ‘Next year will be 25 years since I recorded As Seen on TV so that could furnish a good enough reason? … Am quite keen to do something and if we can grab Walters for a few filming days – and Celia – don’t know who else yet.’24 By the start of 2009 she had refined her thinking: ‘I have a list of old stuff which I love, but there is something self congratulatory about weaving it in amongst new stuff … would it be better to do a whacking great compilation of archive stuff – with bits from celeb fans who could pick their faves etc and just be very unapologetic about it and it would be a celebration. AND THEN DO AS WELL. A brand new special that has a different look.’25 She imagined a mini-documentary following Bo Beaumont ‘as she attempts to revive her career – going on Strictly etc etc’, as well as a where-are-they-now follow-up on Jim Broadbent’s character from ‘A Fairly Ordinary Man’.26 Her change of stance partly arose from talking to Piers, who advised that mixing old sketches and new would set the latter at a disadvantage. She added that the archive package should be shown months earlier: ‘What we want to avoid is VW overload.’27
In February 2009 dinnerladies went into rehearsal and Victoria’s role became more than supervisory as she was asked to solve problems in knitting up the script. ‘I’d come back from rehearsal at nine at night,’ says David Graham, ‘and send her an email saying I couldn’t think of an ending for a particular scene and I needed twenty lines. Six thirty the next morning I got the scene.’ Victoria found the process a little more frustrating that she let on. ‘Aaargh have spent all day trying to make mini amendments to make the ending work a bit better without being there at rehearsals,’ she told Lucy Ansbro. ‘I don’t think I can do much that is effective.’28 The next month the show opened in Eastbourne and Victoria caught it in Cardiff. Thus she met up again with Andrew Dunn and Shobna Gulati, who had returned as Tony and Anita: ‘I plied them with champers and let them have a moan and wrote to the producer suggesting he lets them have a bit more of a free rein.’29 Over the next two and a half years there were four tours, the second two with a new script based on the second series in which Victoria was less involved.
There was more nostalgia that spring when she returned to the Theatre Royal Haymarket, home of Acorn Antiques: The Musical!, to record her debut in I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, ‘which is supposed to be improvised but of course is all worked out v carefully in advance,’ she told Sammy Murray – ‘rehearsed most of the day with that but it was quite nice to be on stage again.’30 Victoria kept her comedy hat on as she returned to her desk to write a sketch show for the first time in nine years. Drawing inspiration from the prevailing spate of Sunday-night costume dramas that fed an appetite for cosy rural escapism, Victoria decided to take Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford and mulch them into ‘Lark Pies to Cranchesterford’. The plot featured the squalidly poor Halibut and Catheter Finch of Donkeyfield, whose pretty daughter Araminty goes to work in the Cranchesterford Post and Potato Office run by Miss Finch. At the top of the social ladder is Lord Cranborne, to whom Miss Finch would gladly give herself if only she could rip off her undergarments in less than twenty minutes. Victoria was to play Miss Finch and narrate the story in the voice of the older Araminty. ‘I’m not parodying any of the characters,’ she insisted when seeking permission to film on the Lark Rise set in Wiltshire. ‘It’s more like Acorn Antiques with bonnets than a parody.’31
Victoria’s fortnight ingesting the action from Beijing was put to good use as she imagined Olympic competition for middle-aged contestants – the men’s pedalo race, ladies’ outdoor reversing, a pentathlon with shopping trolleys – although the real joy for her was in aping the language of the pundits in the studio. She scripted rather more for her Midlife Olympics than was eventually included and, as usual, wrote plenty of extra material. A selection of filler sketches expressed her impatience with modern trends: an ad for a language-learning tool for up-to-date banal banter; a fatuous sermon by a gay vicar. Others were shot but eventually sacrificed: ‘Coffee Palaver’ about ethical coffee chains; ‘Swatch Team’ about a detective squad policing the streets for mismatched colours and fabrics. In ‘Fragile Tissue’ an American woman walking along a beach confides to the camera that ‘after menopause a woman’s intimate tissue can lose its elasticity’; the scene then cuts to two teenage boys dumbstruck with horror as they watch this on TV, for which Henry and a friend of his were enlisted.
The working title was Victoria Wood’s Credit Crunch Christmas. Her hope was that Piers Wenger might produce it, but he was unavailable, so Phil McIntyre’s office introduced her to John Rushton, who had produced The Royle Family for their client Caroline Aherne. His unflappable good cheer would be needed, as Victoria’s relationship with the BBC grew choppier than ever. She was already aware that a culture of top-down interference now predominated. On Desert Island Discs she had disparaged the labyrinthine structures of modern comedy commissioning – ‘You have to battle with about twenty-two ladies in nice suits telling you what they think comedy is about.’32 Her fears were confirmed when she presented what she had written to the BBC. The encounter left her ‘reeling’, she told Sammy Murray. ‘It was a meeting with the “creatives” but was run by the head of finance who would not budge.’33 Cuts were suggested. ‘They in their own fashion wanted to have some editorial input,’ says John Rushton. ‘Vic found that slightly difficult. An email saying “we do want this and we don’t want that” she found brusque and abrupt.’ It was unfair, she told Jane Wymark, that The Royle Family’s most recent Christmas special had cost £1 million despite having one set, a small cast and no CGI: ‘We want to do all singing, all dancing, period, set pieces the whole caboodle, we want 1.4 and they won’t give us anything like that. Back to the chopping board.’34
A production office was rented in Islington. Victoria interviewed four directors before plumping for Tony Dow, who had directed Nighty Night and two dozen episodes of Only Fools and Horses. She found him ‘a normal middle aged very experienced director, very positive and I’m hoping with not too much ego to chuck around’.35 As they started casting ‘Lark Pies’ Victoria made it clear to him that, despite initially thinking of Celia Imrie and Jim Broadbent, ‘she was very keen not to use her usual suspects. She wanted to get away from that and be doing something slightly different.’ Instead she crammed the screen with half a dozen actors from Housewife, 49. For the role of the smouldering Lord Cranborne, she went back to Richard Lintern, who had played a young rock star in Staying In in 1989. Her friend Harriet Thorpe returned for the first time since Wetty Hainthrop Investigates. Reece Shearsmith was cast as the fatuous vicar.
The idea to flood the special with dance grew out of Victoria’s friendship with Stephen Mear: ‘She said, “Do you fancy doing a dance duet with me? Let’s do Nick and Margaret on The Apprentice.” I said, “Will it be funny?” She looked at me like, seriously? I knew how she moved so I knew how far to push it.’ He choreographed a routine in which Alan Sugar’s two sidekicks ease up out of their seats and throw themselves into a perky dance that is blissfully at odds with their hatchet-faced roles on the show. Once more, as when learning to tap, Victoria had to overcome her self-consciousness and watch herself train in the mirror. ‘Everyone at Pineapple is weeny,’ she told Rosalind, ‘and the corridors are very narrow – about the same width as me, so all these tiny bony ballet girls shrink back when they see me coming.’36 It was Victoria’s idea to have Stephen M
ear rip her skirt off mid-dance to reveal another identical skirt.
There was a second and more spectacular piece of choreography that grew out of Victoria’s dream to revisit ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’. ‘I thought, don’t piss about with a new song,’ went her rationale, ‘when you could do the song that everybody knows and likes. Just whizz it up with a big band and twenty dancers. I probably won’t do any more specials. Finish with that.’37 The song was to be subjected to a grand conceptual reboot. On the piano would be a little snow globe, inside which Barry in a beige zip-up cardie and Freda in her dressing gown sit on the sofa watching television. As the song heats up, they would leap up and lead a joyous tap routine with a multiplying chorus line of Barry and Freda lookalikes. ‘I want the girls to take off their dressing gowns to reveal lovely Christmassy cossies under,’ she told Sammy Murray.38 Nigel Lilley worked out a musical bridge in which Victoria’s singing would make way for the dancing, while Stephen Mear suggested shooting from an overhead camera in the style of Busby Berkeley. The dancers, many of them Acorn Antiques veterans, rehearsed in the Dominion Theatre and moved to a studio for a complicated green-screen shoot in which Victoria recorded the song at a piano.
As for the song itself, she updated the lyrics with new references to Fearne Cotton, Philip Schofield and Russell Brand, and provided Barry with a fresh set of excuses for avoiding sex. Gone are all the domestic chores that want doing; his body is now no longer up to the task:
Can’t do it, can’t do it
I must refuse to get unzipped
I’m tearful, I’m fearful, worried that I’m ill-equipped
Don’t bully, I can’t fully
Guarantee to cope without a rope and pulley.
When Freda proposes sex as a seasonal celebration, she mentions two of Victoria’s favourite comestibles:
