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

by Jasper Rees

  By now emails were growing shorter and some weren’t ever sent. The gaps between her texts grew longer. Apart from Victoria herself, the last person to admit that she would not recover was Piers: ‘Maybe I just couldn’t really accept the truth because she couldn’t. Victoria said to me days before she died, “I might not get rid of it, but if I can just get on my feet and just get back to work …”’ The problem of who would care for her arose. She didn’t want a stranger in the house and was keen not to burden Grace and Henry, so Piers volunteered and moved in for two weeks. ‘Piers is being brilliant with the drugs and the feeding machine,’ she said soon after returning home, ‘and am ordering a small posh telly for the bedroom as my teeny one is 15 years old and they seem really cheap now …’44 It was on her new television, Piers lying next to her on her bed, that they spent his second week watching episodes of MasterChef in batches of three.

  At the end of the fortnight he handed over to Rosalind, who found her sister ‘in very good nick emotionally’. When she wasn’t listening to Radio 3, Victoria would ask for her bedroom window to be opened so she could hear the birdsong. Once, lying in bed, she set off on a comic routine about tidying her sock drawer: ‘It was as if I was the audience and I was cursing that I couldn’t record it. It was absolutely hilarious.’ This was the longest that the two sisters had spent together in decades, and Rosalind saw a chance for both of them to find closure about the long shadow cast by their childhood: ‘I said to Vic, “It would be nice to talk some time about how we were neglected as kids.” She said, “We must have a conversation about that some time. Maybe later.”’

  By now a pair of Twilight Nurses were visiting nightly to manage Victoria’s pain and help her sleep. She would welcome them with a spooky greeting: ‘Woooo, the Twilight Nurses!’ Palliative-care nurses arrived too. One in particular, whom she liked very much, tried to engage her in conversations about end of life. ‘She was quite freaked out by that,’ says Piers. ‘She said to me, “Why have I got a palliative-care nurse? Isn’t that for someone who’s terminal?” And I totally fudged it and said, “They’re sort of cancer nurses and deal with people who are suffering in the way that you are.”’

  On Thursday 14 April Victoria texted Daniel Rigby about him coming to stay the following week. On Friday evening she was too tired to manage more than one episode of MasterChef with Piers. On Monday, after Cathy Edis had finished work, Victoria texted her: ‘you know more than you think’. ‘I’m with you all the way,’ Cathy replied. In these last days Grace and Henry came in and out, knowing that their mother was eager for them to go about their regular lives for as long as possible. ‘Although she didn’t say this explicitly,’ says Grace, ‘she wanted me to keep working. It helped me to have a professional life and I think she wanted me to have one.’ But where before Victoria had been at least stable, her condition now took a sudden turn for the worse and it became clear that she did not have long to live. On the Tuesday Henry worked into the evening and when he got home went up to his mother’s bedroom where he found Grace and Rosalind and the Twilight Nurses already there. ‘She was doolally on the morphine. She said, “What have you been up to?” I said, “I’ve been working.” She said, “Do you like work?” And I said, “Yeah, I loved it,” and she smiled.’

  The advice of the palliative-care nurse was to check on Victoria every two hours through the night. But Rosalind and Grace decided to stay and sit quietly with her. At four in the morning Rosalind took two hours’ sleep then resumed her vigil at six as Grace went to bed. Rosalind, who welcomed her baby sister home to Tottington Road nearly sixty-three years earlier, spoke to Victoria in the hope that she could still hear. ‘Everybody loves you,’ she said, and she kept talking until, at a quarter to seven on the morning of Wednesday 20 April 2016, the greatest entertainer of the television age took her last breath.

  26

  UNFORGOTTEN DREAMS

  ‘Seventy-two baps, Connie. You slice, I’ll spread.’

  An Audience with Victoria Wood, 1988

  Victoria’s children woke up to the news that their mother had died. Their father, who walked up the hill from his home, and their aunt were there to comfort them. Piers Wenger and Cathy Edis were soon in the house too. The question of how to spread the word was discussed. Henry produced his mother’s laptop containing all her contacts. Piers went into producer mode and organised for everyone to take a list of names, go into a separate room and disseminate the sad tidings. Grace and Henry called neighbours and family friends. Geoffrey rang the friends he and Victoria had known from their years together. Piers spoke to professional friends and Cathy to work associates. At five minutes to three Geoffrey informed Victoria’s brother Chris. Then at three o’clock Neil Reading, who had handled Victoria’s press since the early 1990s, issued a short statement: ‘Victoria Wood has sadly passed away, after a short but brave battle with cancer. The multi-Bafta-award-winning writer, director, actor and comedian died peacefully at her north London home with family this morning.’

  The thunderclap triggered an avalanche of tributes from those who had known her and worked with her, comedians who had followed in the trail she had cut for them, from innumerable fans who had grown up on her and knew by heart her every deathless gag. The year had already claimed other cultural grandees, some of whom had crossed paths with Victoria – Alan Rickman, Terry Wogan, Ronnie Corbett. She was the youngest, whose death was widely felt to be the cruellest. There was a consensus among Victoria’s devotees that there would have been so much more to come. While her performing days were done, her first film for cinema may well have followed, and perhaps she would have gone on to adapt ‘Miss Read’ for television.

  She died on the first day of Taurus, the punchline for the joke that changed her life. The following day was the ninetieth birthday of Elizabeth II, whose coronation tour through Bury Victoria had attended as a tiny baby. One face and name dominated the front pages of the national newspapers.

  A fortnight later, on 4 May, the funeral took place at Golders Green crematorium. Seventy of Victoria’s family and friends were invited to say farewell in a private ceremony conducted by a humanist celebrant whom Victoria had seen and greatly liked at the wedding of Beth Willis and Jonny Campbell. In July there was a much bigger public memorial at St James’s Piccadilly, organised by Victoria’s lady bodyguards Lucy Ansbro and Adele Fowler in concert with Grace, Henry, Cathy and Nigel Lilley. Hundreds from all walks of Victoria’s life and career were invited. Ria Jones sang ‘Fourteen Again’ and Michael Ball performed ‘Go With It’, both accompanied by Nigel. Julie Walters recited ‘Giving Notes’ from Victoria Wood As Seen on TV. Grace sang an aria from a Bach cantata, selected because her mother loved Bach and because its message invoked a sense of peace and rest. All held it together – Victoria, who was against performers crying at such gatherings, would have approved. Grace and Henry invited friends from various phases of their mother’s life to pay tribute: Jane Wymark, Harriet Thorpe, Lesley Schatzberger and Daniel Rigby, who painted a picture of life under the same roof as an inexhaustible talent: ‘She was rehearsing “Barry and Freda” for a benefit gig. She was on a break and we’d had a cuppa in the kitchen and then time was up and she got back to it, updating lyrics and tweaking. From the office “Let’s Do It” stuttered through the air and I leant back against the warmth of the oven and thought, how lucky am I? How lucky I am. How lucky we were.’

  The memorial ended with the sound of her beloved brass. The Royal Academy of Music Brass, with whom she had performed in tribute to Jim Watson, now did the same for Victoria. Led by Nigel Lilley at the piano, they played a medley arranged by Victoria’s orchestrator Chris Walker. First came Leroy Anderson’s ‘Forgotten Dreams’, the lovely, haunting elegy she chose to close The Giddy Kipper. It was followed by ‘Happiness Street’, the effervescent anthem from That Day We Sang that was one of the very last songs Victoria ever composed. In two tunes the primary colours of her work – pathos and joy – were twinned one last time.

&
nbsp; She lives on in sundry ways. Victoria was delighted when two members of the Acorn Antiques: The Musical! company met, fell in love and started a family. A few years later, on their day trip to the very bottom of Africa, Shaun Dooley told her of his crippling indecisiveness. Back in Cape Town, out shopping for presents to distribute when The Borrowers wrapped, she bought him a coin that had yes on one side and no on the other. A couple of months later, when he and his wife were uncertain about having another child, he produced the coin. ‘Let Vic decide,’ he said. They nicknamed their unborn baby Woody.

  There would be other legacies. In her will Victoria left Swiss Cottage to be used by her family and friends, and a fund of £4 million to be distributed to charities nominated by the Victoria Wood Foundation. Bury Art Museum was granted access to Victoria’s archive to mount, in 2018, the most popular exhibition in its history. A statue to stand in the heart of her hometown was proposed and initially crowdfunded by her brother before the Foundation assumed control. The sculptor Graham Ibbotson, whose statue of Eric Morecambe adorns the sea front of the town after which the comic took his name, accepted the commission. It was unveiled on a sunny afternoon in May 2019. Before he yanked off the shroud, Victoria’s old warm-up man Ted Robbins told the crowd that, of all the people who were asked to do the honours, he must have been the only one who wasn’t working that day. She would have loved that gag. Her likeness, installed opposite the library from which she used to pinch books, suggests how hard it is to capture in bronze the bounce of her hair and the glow of her smile.

  Finally, and overwhelmingly, Victoria Wood lives on in the work which pulses through the British bloodstream. She more than any contemporary found a way to tell us about the slings and arrows and stumbles of all our lives, to incarnate them in Barry and Freda, Pat and Margaret, Margery and Joan, Kelly Marie Tunstall and Stacey Leanne Paige and Betty Comstock, all those Connies and Pams, dreaming Andrea and lovelorn Miss Berta, Kitty and Kimberley and her friend, Maureen and Julie, Mrs O and Bo, Tony and Bren and Tubby and Enid and all the other giddy kippers.

  Those who knew Victoria have their own intimate memories and private correspondence, now generously shared in this, the story of her life. Let’s end it with one such letter, written to Jane Wymark in the style of their beloved ‘Miss Read’ in the summer of 1995. It accompanied a book Victoria sent in the post, and at the memorial was read out by her friend:

  Dear ‘Miss Wymark’

  I was opening my mail this morning, worn capable hands caressing God’s good notepaper, thriftily rolling up pieces of string and brown paper against a day of need, when I saw this amongst the bounty.

  I immediately thought of you, all those miles away in the little village of Stoke Newington and how your faded but still beautiful eyes would light up at the sight of it, and how your toil-worn digits would eagerly unwrap the parcel …

  I suppressed the ignoble thought that this book might after all be as funny as a hand-reared squirrel’s bowel movement, with all the wit and charm of the discarded underpants of a trainee osteopath, but no matter: tis the idea behind the gift which counts.

  Now I am thankfully surveying my own little kingdom, and happy I am to do so. A rare hour of solitude awaits me, and how to fill it is the only blob on the escutcheon. I could stroll in the woods, taking in the view of the rookery, the new born lambs, the white sheets flapping on the line … or I could go and pick up 258 pieces of Duplo, 29 stuffed toys, 357 bits of Lego, and take the 36 plastic dinosaurs out of the paddling pool.

  You know what I have to do.

  With love, a gnarled hand waving from the vegetable garden, an invisibly darned apron, a floury bap and a large joint.

  ‘Miss Wood’

  SOURCES

  Sources have been dated as accurately as possible. Some of Victoria’s undated letters and cards can, from their contents, be pinned down to a month; where they cannot, only the year is given. Unless otherwise stated, all correspondence cited is written by or sent to Victoria Wood. Wherever interview transcripts are used as a source of quotation, the date of the interview is given, rather than the date of any subsequent publication or broadcast. All notes, manuscripts and notebooks are from the Victoria Wood archive.

  Introduction: Victoria Woods

  1 Dinnerladies tapes, 11 July 1998

  2 Interview with the author, 6 June 2001

  3 Clive James, Observer, 8 June 1980

  4 Antony Thorncroft, Financial Times, 22 October 1980

  5 Philip Purser, Sunday Telegraph, 24 January 1982

  6 ‘Victoria’s Plums’, interview with James Rampton, Radio Times, 18 October 2001

  7 Email to Richenda Carey, 16 September 2012

  8 Fax from Richenda Carey, 8 May 1998

  9 Letter to Tom Weldon, 13 November 1998

  10 Interview with the author, December 2007

  11 Postcard to Rosalind Wood, 10 July 1957

  12 Letter to Alan Samson, 7 April 2016

  13 Email to Daniel Rigby, February 2015

  Chapter 1: Faces

  1 Stanley Wood diary, 19 May 1953, quoted in Victoria Wood: Comedy Genius – Her Life and Work by Chris Foote Wood, 2016

  2 Interview with the author, 10 November 2006

  3 Ibid.

  4 Interview with the author, 6 June 2001

  5 The South Bank Show, ITV, 15 September 1996

  6 Scene – Personal View: Victoria Wood, BBC Two, 9 May 1985

  7 Parkinson, BBC One, 24 March 2000

  8 Stanley Wood’s diary, 15 April 1958, quoted in Victoria Wood: Comedy Genius – Her Life and Work by Chris Foote Wood, 2016

  Chapter 2: House on the Edge

  1 Parkinson, BBC One, 24 March 2000

  2 Interview with the author, 10 November 2006

  3 The South Bank Show, ITV, 15 September 1996

  4 Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 23 December 2007

  5 Victoria Wood At It Again, programme interview with Richard E. Grant, 2001

  6 Interview with the author, 10 November 2006

  7 Interview with the author, December 2007

  8 In Conversation with …, BBC Radio 4, 14 March 2002

  9 Interview with the author, December 2007

  10 Ibid.

  11 ‘If I’d been thin as a teenager and gone out with boys I wouldn’t have had anything to write about’, interview with Ray Connolly, The Times, 28 October 1989

  12 The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books, Cambridge University Press, 2001

  13 Interview with the author, December 2007

  14 The Swish of the Curtain, BBC Radio 4, 4 January 2007

  15 Fax to Richenda Carey, 16 May 2001

  16 Victoria Wood At It Again, programme interview with Richard E. Grant, 2001

  17 More Dawn French’s Girls Who Do: Comedy, BBC Four, 11 October 2006

  18 Parkinson, BBC One, 24 March 2000

  19 ‘Seriously funny’, interview with Allison Pearson, Daily Telegraph, 7 November 1998

  20 Interview with the author, 4 January 2005

  21 Great Railway Journeys, BBC Two, 4 September 1996

  22 Stanley Wood’s diary, 19 August 1961, quoted in Victoria Wood: Comedy Genius – Her Life and Work by Chris Foote Wood, 2016

  23 ‘If I’d been thin as a teenager and gone out with boys I wouldn’t have had anything to write about’, interview with Ray Connolly, The Times, 28 October 1989

  24 In Conversation with …, BBC Radio 4, 14 March 2002

  25 Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 23 December 2007

  26 Interview with the author, 10 November 2006

  27 Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 23 December 2007

  28 Stanley Wood’s diary, 18 December 1960, quoted in Victoria Wood: Comedy Genius – Her Life and Work by Chris Foote Wood, 2016

  29 ‘If I’d been thin as a teenager and gone out with boys I wouldn’t have had anything to write about’, interview with Ray Connolly, The Times, 28 October 1989

  30 Parkinson, BBC One, 24 March 2000


  31 Fairfield Country Primary School report, July 1959

  32 Fairfield Country Primary School report, July 1960

  33 Parkinson, BBC One, 24 March 2000

  34 Ibid.

  35 Victoria Wood At It Again, programme interview with Richard E. Grant, 2001

  36 Ibid.

  37 Junkin’s Jokers, BBC Radio 2, 12 June 1991

  38 Stanley Wood’s diary, 14 April 1962, quoted in Victoria Wood: Comedy Genius – Her Life and Work by Chris Foote Wood, 2016

  39 Fairfield Country Primary School report, December 1962

  40 Fairfield Country Primary School report, July 1963

  41 Fairfield Country Primary School report, July 1964

  Chapter 3: Buried

  1 ‘Mum passes A levels – now she seeks degree’, unidentified newspaper report, 1968

  2 ‘A-level Mum, 48, is off to university’, Bolton Evening News, 1968

  3 Best of British, BBC One, 1 November 1998

  4 Bury Grammar School report, December 1964

  5 Ibid.

  6 Parkinson, BBC One, 24 March 2000

  7 Bury Grammar School report, July 1965

  8 Bury Grammar School report, July 1966

  9 More Dawn French’s Girls Who Do: Comedy, BBC Four, 11 October 2006

  10 Parkinson, BBC One, 24 March 2000

  11 Letter to Stanley and Helen Wood, 24 July 1966

  12 Ibid.