Letters that lay bare Victoria’s rift with BBC
...and how her £20k Dinner Ladies statue might look
SHE wrote and starred in some of the BBC’s most popular comedy shows over more than 30 years.
But Victoria Wood felt unloved by the Corporation and that her work often went unappreciated, according to letters published for the first time today.
On April 13, 1988, Wood – by then a household name thanks to her Bafta-winning As Seen On TV series – told BBC2 controller Alan Yentob that she felt no one at the BBC cared about her work.
‘Nobody has ever bothered about what other work I’m doing, or taken any notice of me while I was there or acknowledged any awards that may have come the way of the programme,’ she wrote.
At the time, Wood was being lured by ITV broadcaster LWT to film a one-off special based on her live tour. Yentob, desperate to scupper the move, promised Wood he would ensure the show was produced with ‘great care and commitment’ if she did it for the BBC instead.
Wood told him it was finally nice to know ‘someone cares’ but his appeal fell on deaf ears. She added: ‘I’ve met the LWT chaps from Audience With and as they all seem perfectly decent and professional, I can’t really think of a way of getting out of it.’
The programme, broadcast on December 10, 1988, was a ratings smash, winning two Bafta awards.
Despite this setback, Yentob continued to champion Wood and in 1994, as controller of BBC1, he commissioned the one-off comedy drama Pat And Margaret for the prestigious Screen One series, even though some colleagues thought Wood’s script was over-long and too similar to what she had done before.
Margaret Matheson, executive producer of Screen One, even suggested the 90-minute script should be cut by half an hour, while a colleague told Yentob: ‘It’s far too linear and predictable to warrant the running time... It’s a case of Victoria revisited... The joke rate is going to have to be higher.’
But Yentob informed Matheson and her boss George Faber that he had commissioned the film anyway because he didn’t want to ‘lose it or Victoria Wood’.
Yentob and Wood had the last laugh as the film was an acclaimed ratings success, pulling in more than ten million viewers.
The letters release into the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading comes just days after Wood’s brother Chris Foote-Wood announced plans to build a statute in memory of his sister in the Lancashire town of Bury where she grew up.
Mr Foote-Wood says he has been taken aback by the ‘outpouring of love’ following Wood’s death from cancer at 62 in April. His crowdfunding appeal, called Let’s Do It after the star’s most famous song, hopes to raise £20,000 for a statue of Wood in one of her most famous roles, possibly as Brenda from Dinner Ladies.
Fans can contribute via www.tinyurl.com/ letsdoitforvictoria