‘Was born, lived, told a few jokes, knackered a few bras in the tumble drier, died.’
Victoria Wood’s authorised biography, serialised in The Telegraph today
In the closing credits of Acorn Antiques, wobbling diagonally across the screen, it says the part of Berta is played by “Victoria Woods”. Has there ever been a truer typo? More than anyone on your television, Victoria Wood seemed to be plural. In her passport she listed her profession as “entertainer”. She was, more accurately, an entertainment industry in the body of one woman: four stage musicals, four West End residencies, five major national tours, incorporating 40 sold-out nights at the Royal Albert Hall, three sketch series, four Christmas specials, eight television dramas, 13 documentaries, eight hours of sitcom, half a dozen half-hour plays, more than 150 songs, countless awards, and innumerable gags. She wrote, acted, composed, sang, directed, produced, presented, joked. She played the piano, the trumpet and the ukulele. Once upon a time she even did magic tricks.
Until Victoria, no comedian had attempted to tell a British audience how women really think and feel. She was the first to talk frankly about the disappointment they were liable to encounter in the bedroom, and the complex relationship they might have with their own bodies. In the early 1980s, as she began in stand-up, she was free to monopolise a field of human experience that was out of bounds to men. “They’re terrible things, bras,” she said in her first solo tour. “I read this thing once in a magazine and it was a test to see whether you needed to wear one or not. And the test was if you could hold a pencil underneath. It was very depressing for me. I could hold a small branch of WH Smith under one of mine.”
This was new. It had always been men who joked about breasts, but Victoria repossessed them. Over the years, onstage on her own, she would describe the journey of the female body as she had progressively experienced it – puberty and periods, conception, pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding to menopause and, finally, hysterectomy.
The other subject she majored in was television. She spent a lifetime watching it, then, with a savage love, surgically deconstructing it.
And then there was northernness. “We’d like to apologise to viewers in the north,” said her snooty southern continuity announcer. “It must be awful for them.” The sensibility she inherited was Lancastrian, which conferred linguistic riches but also relentless stoicism. “They have a really good way of expressing themselves,” she explained. “It’s very unemotional. You’d never say, ‘Oh darling, you were marvellous.’ People in Lancashire would say, ‘Oh that’s not bad,’ or ‘I didn’t mind it.’ ” Her innate aversion to gush was such that co-workers were often deprived of the praise some of them craved.
These were her themes. Her turns of phrase were uniquely her own. She wallpapered her world with a vocabulary that made her laugh – macaroon and minestrone, balaclava and raffia, grouting and guttering and vinyl flooring. She adored and frequently used the surname Mottershead, deemed the letter K the alphabet’s funniest – hence Kidderminster, Kiri Te Kanawa, Kirkcudbright, Knutsford. Every word she selected had a weight and a value and a role, even when sometimes her dialogue amounted to a set of Dalíesque nonsequiturs: “My daughter born Christmas Eve, so we called her Brenda.”
“The lady’s credits gang up on you in a way that was once reserved for Orson Welles,” wrote Clive James in 1980, when she’d barely begun. Victoria would make audiences laugh till it hurt and could choke them up with sorrow.
The widest pendulum swings between joy and pathos were to be found in her songs. They could be merry and oh-so-clever with rat-a-tat triple rhymes to rival the wit of Cole Porter and Noël Coward. Alternatively, they’d rip hearts in two.
Thus Victoria Woods. But there were two Victoria Woods in another sense. When they met her, people were looking for their friend Victoria, the one who always seemed to be bouncing for joy on the piano stool of life. One after another they were surprised to find her shy and guarded, not laughing and larking and yanking her sleeves up to unleash yet more jokes. That Victoria Wood, who bounded on stage to greet an audience with a glittering smile and a cheery hello, was an optical illusion, conjured up with the assistance of an actual conjuror who happened to be her husband Geoffrey Durham, better known to the public as the Great Soprendo. It was this mirage whom readers of the Independent voted the Briton they’d most like to have as a neighbour, over and above the Queen Mum.
“People think I’m nice,” she once told the Radio Times. People were right. Many friends and colleagues testify to Victoria’s kindness, her generosity, her loyalty. She was a good and wise person to know in a crisis.
But an ambitious woman coming to light entertainment in the all-male 1970s required something else. Victoria knew with absolute conviction how she wished things to be done, and she would say so. She wanted her lines to be spoken as written, with the stress correctly placed to land the gag. Some of the cast of dinnerladies, recalling the strain of learning and relearning her dialogue, still appear to suffer from a sort of post-traumatic sitcom disorder.
Later, when Victoria began to direct her own work for the stage, she deployed none of the coaxing diplomacy that traditionally goes with the role. It was a culture shock for her casts. But all concur that, in the matter of selling her comedy to an audience, she was always, always right. On rare occasions when she found herself not in charge, she could grow frustrated. She was nearly 60 when, in Calcutta to front a documentary about tea, she vented to a friend back home: “Am writing this in hotel loo escaping from production meeting where I am repressing the cry ‘you are all f---wits please just do as I say…’ ”
She prowled guiltlessly, even ruthlessly among her friends. Celia Imrie accepted that the price of being in Victoria’s gang was to have her life and even her appearance mined for comedy. Julie Walters was warier. “It would be hard to be weak with her,” she says. “Very hard. Early on it was a very immature jokey relationship, so there was no place for that. But generally to be weak with her was not a good idea. Because she would possibly use it.”
Mostly, though, Victoria scavenged for material in the rich seam of her own memories.
She started a diary in her late twenties and stuck to it for more than three decades. As for the idea of a biography, such a book was first proposed in 1986 by her publisher, soon after he’d brought out her first collection of sketches. Victoria herself mentioned it in the form of a joke on tour in 1993. “Maybe I should start having an affair,” she would say onstage, “because somebody will want to write a biography of me one day and there’ll be nothing to put in it … Perhaps I’ll just settle for a very, very thin biography. Was born, lived, told a few jokes, knackered a few bras in the tumble drier, died.”
The arrival of an unauthorised biography in 2002 – she asked everyone she could think of not to talk to its author – focused her mind once again. But somehow, while publishers kept tempting her with everincreasing offers, she always had something else that wanted doing more. Instead, she told her story by other means, filtering her childhood, her marriage and the loneliness that came after her divorce into songs, sketches and dramas.
I first met Victoria in 1999 when she was making the second series of dinnerladies. For the next decade we had many conversations in which she would talk of her current work but also offer detailed answers about her childhood and her earlier years. What was striking in someone so very famous, aside from her seriousness, was her honesty. Usually there’s a formality to such encounters – a consciousness that on some level an interview is a transaction. With Victoria, I could detect no such distancing membrane.
In 2001, I asked her if she might one day write an autobiography. “I could write a memoir,” she said. “I’ve been offered a ton of money. I’m sort of interested. I just hate going into a bookshop and seeing all those books by people who can’t write with their big fat photograph on the cover, people who’ve done nothing and can’t string a sentence together, and I just think it devalues people who can put a sentence together and can write a book. I would like to write one about my first few years in show business.”
While that memoir was never written, our hours and hours of interviews have allowed me to place Victoria’s voice at the heart of her own story. I have also been able to draw on her archive of correspondence, notebooks, scrapbooks, scripts, tapes, cuttings and photograph albums, as well as letters, faxes and emails which have been generously shared by many. Victoria, it goes without saying, was an inimitable letter writer. She could be dazzlingly witty and then frankly confessional or, in the best of times and the worst, both at once.
I had one precious experience of watching Victoria at close quarters as she worked an audience. A season of her work was being shown at the BFI Southbank in 2008, and I was to interview her in a packed cinema. Before we went on, she was quiet and selfcontained. As we walked through the pass door onto the stage she seemed to blossom into her other self.
Once the ecstatic applause had died down, I introduced her with a long respectful account of a distinguished career containing countless reinventions. The longer I went on, the more I could see cogs whirring mischievously. Eventually I finished. She looked at me with those twinkling blue eyes, measured out an immaculately timed pause and said, “Please could you repeat the question?”
The Victoria Wood who bounded on stage with a smile was an optical illusion
Victoria knew with absolute conviction how she wished things to be done