600 PAGES? VICTORIA WOULD HAVE CUT IT!

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

Jasper Rees Trapeze €22 ★★★ ★★

No one pinpointed the essence of Middle England both as lovingly and as sharply as Victoria Wood. In witty couplets she skewered the secret lives of the dowdy middle-aged – think of her Ballad Of Barry And Freda, the song about a couple getting frisky during an episode of Gardeners’ Question Time, with its lyrics ‘Not bleakly, not meekly – beat me on the bottom with the Woman’s Weekly’.

Full of insecurities – about her northern English roots and her weight – she subsumed her angst into her myriad jokes and sketches, TV shows and plays. ‘We’d like to apologise to viewers in the north, it must be awful for them,’ her snooty southern continuity announcer said. ‘There is no use denying,’ she sang, ‘that inside every jolly fat girl is another one crying.’ And she found particular words and expressions intrinsically funny: ‘macaroon and minestrone, balaclava and raffia, grouting and guttering and vinyl flooring’.

When Jasper Rees’s authorised biography recalls these many blissful comedy moments, it’s a joyous read. Yet unfortunately, too often they’re suffocated by painstakingly earnest details about what can seem like every single moment of Wood’s life, from her childhood in a remote Lancastrian house disconnected from mains utilities with neglectful parents, to her death, aged only 62, in North London.

Some super-fans may revel in

Rees’s nearly 600-page tome but many will struggle with the chronicling of every inconsequential family holiday, poorly attended gig and celebrity encounter. It’s a shame these minutiae often bury insights into the prickliness behind Wood’s light-hearted public facade. Her friend Dawn French described her as ‘loving’ but ‘quite demanding’ during filming of Dinnerladies. There’s also little insight into some of the darkest moments in Wood’s life, mainly because she rarely discussed her demons. Her divorce from magician Geoffrey Durham after 22 years was ‘painful and horrible’, and we don’t even know what type of cancer she died from.

Shy and insecure to the end, Wood would have no doubt been both flattered and embarrassed by the efforts Rees has put into documenting her life. At the same time she’d have spotted the irony in the passage about her partnership with Granada’s Roy Eckersley, who taught her the invaluable lesson that less was always more. ‘By the time we finished [a script] it was half an hour shorter and a lot funnier,’ Wood recalled.

If only Rees had taken that advice.