WOOD & WALTERS
How they made each other laugh... then the rest of us!
VICTORIA WOOD was once voted the celebrity most of us would like as our neighbour. Yet beneath the loveable performer was a cripplingly shy woman – a legacy of her troubled childhood – who struggled to form relationships. She once joked of her school days that she could only get friends who had “plasters over their glasses”.
But in adult life, one friend meant the world to her: actress Julie Walters became not only a close pal, but a muse. And their talents meshed to help propel them both to the top of their game. In the final extract from Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood, by Jasper Rees, he describes the start of a relationship which led to a series of hit collaborations that made them one of comedy’s great double acts.
TEENAGE Victoria’s first meeting with fledgling actress Julie Walters certainly made an impression. Applying for a drama course at Manchester Polytechnic, Victoria suffered a debilitating attack of nerves: “We’d do a bit of an audition, and then I’d have to go away and throw up and then I’d come back again...”
Her recovery coincided with the presence of an English and drama student who was showing everyone around and reminiscing about her time as a nurse wheeling a commode around the ward.
She was a small young woman with “lots and lots of shoulder- length brown hair but very, very thick, with a great big fringe and lots of eye make- up, very small eyes and lots of blue liner underneath. And just keeping the whole room completely entertained walking around the room. I didn’t know her name, but I used to wonder.”
This was Victoria Wood’s first encounter with Julie Walters. Julie remembers Victoria “was very frightened and shy, and she had glasses and was shrinking from everyone else in the room”.
The image of Victoria lodged in her memory thanks partly to the bin she was clutching in case of further sickness.
Victoria’s application was unsuccessful. Their next meeting – almost a decade later – was at The Bush, a tiny boxlike theatre above a pub in west London, which was planning a topical revue for the summer of 1978, In At t The Death. A relatively unknown Victoria was persuaded to join.
NERVOUS, she almost decided against it, but her view changed when she heard one of the actresses telling stories about nursing. Her name was Julie Walters. Julie recalls: “Vic said, ‘ We’ve met before’, and I said, ‘ No we haven’t. What do you mean? When?’
“She said, ‘ I auditioned.’ Then I remembered in my first year I was used as an usher, which I loved. An image of this little girl flashed up. ‘ Oh my God, I do remember you being sick in a bucket’.”
Julie’s presence made it easier for Victoria to join the company: “I thought, oh well, maybe if she’s going to be in this it actually could be quite fun to be in.”
They were soon peeling off from the cast to lunch on liver boil and peas at the Café Rest in Goldhawk Road. On one occasion, they got stuck down a cul- desac in Victoria’s Minivan, necessitating a three- point turn in which she dented a garden wall. “Don’t listen to me,” her new friend advised her. “I don’t know what I’m saying half the time time.” ” Instead-Victoria Instead Victoria listened as she had never listened to anyone before.
“We made one another laugh straight away,” says Julie. “It was cruel, taking the p*** out of other people. Awful we were, but it made us really laugh. God help someone if they were snobbish or silly.
“There was a chap in the cast. He had very stretchy Y- fronts. Probably needed a bit of a rinse. And we used to be in fits about this.”
One day they were looking down from the theatre th t into int Sheph Shepherd’s d’ Bush G Green and nd spotted s Harold Pinter on the pavement below. Through the bay window Julie hollered, “Hey, Harold, you write plays, don’t you?”
“He looked rather bemused,” says Julie. “Slightly cross at being shouted at.”
It was for that show Victoria first wrote material for herself and Julie to perform.
The sketch she tentatively presented was titled “Sex” and was set in a Northern library. Julie was to play a naive librarian dumped by a man called Brett after a onenight stand. Victoria was a housewife who is scathing about sex and, in particular, the absurdity of male genitalia: “I mean the basic equipment’s so ridiculous – how’s he
‘ We made each other laugh straight off. Awful we were. God help someone snobbish or silly’
expected to take you to the brink of ecstasy with w something that looks like a school dinner ne without the custard?” Victoria came to consider the sketch, and specifically sp this set- up and pay- off, as a lifechanging c revelation: “It was after four years of o trying to be funny and being nearly funny, fu which is awful, I was funny. And then I knew how you wrote a joke.” Integral to this was an instinctive knowledge ed that she should not hoard the best lines when, w in Julie, she had found someone she could co be funny with.
“When we stood on stage doing that sketch – and we both loved doing it – it gave me such su a boost,” she recalled. “You think, ah, now no I know – now I know what I’m doing.” Julie agreed. “That really bonded us,” she said. sa “I remember thinking the heavens had sent se her to me, that she knew me.” Victoria was so inspired by the friendship, she immediately wrote Talent, her first hit stage play, about an aspiring singer – to be played by Julie. In 1979 she was invited to adapt it for TV. The two friends made quite an impact at the studio. One day the boom operator, wearing his cans, overheard them on their radio mics in i the th Ladies L di chatting h tti about b t th the clitoris and men with big long poles.
“They were pretending they didn’t know the sound boys were listening in on it,” says Baz Taylor, the director. “It went round like wildfire that these girls were real rebels. They took Granada by storm. Nobody had seen anything like them before.” Work had to stop at 10 o’clock, owing to union rules, and they would start drinking. One night they both ended up falling asleep in Victoria’s hotel room when a fire alarm sounded.
“It went on for ages,” said Victoria, “and we were dashing about putting on bras and contact lenses and didn’t have time to get our shoes on.
“We were right at the top of the hotel and ran down, a bit dazed, and out into the street, to find it was broad daylight and they were testing the fire bells.”
Julie was in her pyjamas: “Oh my God, we used to get p*** ed. We woke up on the floor [ of the Midland bar] one time, just asleep, and someone hoovering around us.”
● Extracted by Emily Retter from Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood by Jasper Rees ( Trapeze, £ 20). For free UK delivery, call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or order via www. expressbookshop.co. uk Also available in ebook and audiobook. Text copyright © Jasper Rees 2020.
‘ After four years of trying to be funny I really was funny. And then I knew how you wrote a joke’