Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood,
Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood
By Jasper Rees
Trapeze £20
Victoria Wood could have had a small life sitting in front of the telly, but she had a big one on it instead.
Four years after her death at the age of 62, this superb biography ensures we can’t forget how revolutionary she was. Wood was the first woman to take a stand-up show to the West End; her ex-husband, Geoffrey Durham, the magician the Great Soprendo, says, ‘Men stood up. Women stayed sitting.’
She wrote plays, comic songs and sketch comedy; she acted better than she knew; she sold out the Royal Albert Hall for 15 consecutive nights. Alan Bennett, she noted, couldn’t do that. Every female comic follows the paths she made.
You’ll appreciate her more when you learn – and Rees takes infinite but never melodramatic care to tell you – what it cost her. She lived a life of great anguish and greater control: there is a reason those jokes are perfect. Her pains were infinite. Pity Celia Imrie and Julie Walters – luminously talented women, yet content to work in her shadow – if they got a line wrong.
As Dawn French told the author, ‘She wasn’t humourless. Whenever you tripped up, she would forgive you once. Once.’
‘If Julie [Walters] or I went wrong in front of the audience,’ Celia Imrie told Rees, ‘Vic would turn to the audience and say, “Tracey Ullman wasn’t free.” It made us feel like shit.’
She was unhappy, and Rees traces her emotional life with a sensitivity that is more powerful for its delicacy. The portrait comes slowly into view between exhaustive – but not exhausting – descriptions of every piece of art she made.
Wood was the youngest of four children to Helen and Stanley. She grew up in a strange, monumental bungalow on a hill outside Bury because, she said, ‘My mother couldn’t be doing with neighbours and gossip and suburban life.’
Instead, Helen hoarded – she once bought all the costumes from a production of The Merry Widow – and read. Nobody came to the bungalow.