The Haunting of Alma

Helen, in a rare maternal intervention, had Victoria on diet pills at 12. She neglected her sensitive youngest child, who later fictionalised her mother: ‘I’m something of a celebrity since I walked the Pennine Way in slingbacks in an attempt to publicise mental health.’

Victoria studied drama at the Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop and Birmingham University. She had early success with comic songs – she performed on That’s Life – and the play Talent.

But it was stand-up that obsessed her, because it was the ultimate antidote to Helen and Stanley – everyone was listening. It wasn’t easy, though: she hated her body and the world seemed to agree. An early manager would say, ‘I’ll speak for Fatty.’ She mined her selfhatred for material. That is normal, but the quality of it wasn’t.

Her workaholism – and her husband – sustained her. When she was asked which character she was in Pat and Margaret, her most autobiographical work – two sisters searching for their mother – she said, ‘It was both me. It was that battle between the one who can never get on, the impotent person, and the one who is so determined to get on there’s no room for anything else’.

Between the two of them, she exhausted herself. Rees has written a tragedy. Despite her striving, selfknowledge came too late, and Wood knew it: ‘You shove it all away, move on, grow up, cut your hair, and it’s all there waiting, isn’t it, waiting to be dealt with. I got very depressed, and I decided it was his [Durham’s] fault.’

They went for family therapy: ‘We’ve got to stop this,’ she told Durham after one session. ‘She thinks I’m the woman off the telly.’ Durham left her – though really she sent him away.

Though the final years were professionally rewarding – her performance as Eric Morecombe’s mother in Eric and Ernie is an understated masterpiece – I was left with a portrait of a woman who could not, despite her gifts, escape the root of them.

I see her fully, though, through Rees’s pen, and I salute her: she was clever and angry; haunted and talented; kinder than she pretended.

She was wrong about her looks, too, I thought dismally, staring at an early sketch – because she was pretty.

It seems odd that I would finish a book about a singular female comedian feeling quite so desolate. But if comedians were understood by the world, they wouldn’t need our laughter.