VICTORIA WOOD
WOOD ON TOP
VICTORIA WOOD is one of the biggest names in British showbusiness, a phenomenally popular all-round entertainer. But, as a start-struck MEGAN RADCLYFFE discovered, she is also refreshingly ordinary
I had arranged to meet Victoria Wood at the Heights Restaurant and Bar, 14 floors above the streets around Broadcasting House. The view from the hotel was absolutely magnificent. The sun was setting, glorious peach, amber and pink streaks against a grey sky. My eye was caught by the menu. The tea was £1.75 per pot and an unspecified number of salmon fish cakes cost nearly eight pounds!
Victoria finished up her interview with a fuzzy-haired woman in enormous glasses. The journalist backed away from the table, almost bowing as she headed for the lift. I ambled slowly across the floor like Igor, slavering, "Pleased to meet you" and extending a hand that shook like a malfunctioning vibrator. She looked so small, swamped by a hi-back tartan arm chair, but she was my hero. My nerves were not quelled: a nasty bout of bronchitis didn't help either.
Out of the 900 or so videos I own, Victoria's name appears on a fair number of spines. It's odd to meet someone whose routines you've repeated at the drop of a pint for the last ten years and find that she is so damned normal. Victoria Wood doesn't reel out line after line of wit-drenched humour, and she seems tremendously unaffected by her fame. Still, my nerves were not quelled.
I mean, Victoria Wood is Big. Her one-woman show toured for six months of 1994 and sold out for fifteen consecutive nights at the Royal Albert Hall, something of a record. Now she has a video of that show to promote - and a book. The script of her first full-lenth TV film, Pat and Margaret, the tale of two mis-matched sisters (one a waitress, the other a soap star) who are disastrously re-united on a TV chat-show, has just been published. But, I gathered while she persuaded me to order orange juice, Victoria had only acquiesced to four interviews. I wondered why she choose this esteemed but comfy organ. Didn't she think it was still the kiss of death for a BBC Light Entertainer to speak to a gay publication?
"Oh no! I wouldn't think of it as a kiss of death at all, no!" she said, knocking my assumption for six. "I just do them if I fancy them. I think it's... I think it's..." She paused, thinking. "I think it'd be terrible to say no to a gay magazine just because it was a gay magazine. I wouldn't do that. I think if it was a lousy magazine... I don't know if it is a lousy magazine because I don't read it."
"Not being gay yourself," I chipped in.
"Not being..." she laughed. "No, I'm not gay, no!"
"I'm sure your husband would have something to say about that..."
"Geoffrey [the Great Stupendo, a magician] is gay," she said with a wicked laugh, "but it never appealed to me, the lifestyle. Yes, yes, people have told me that I have a lot of gay fans. It's a hard thing to judge for yourself, because I don't see my own audience - they're always in the dark - but I've always thought that I probably did have." A chap in a white coat delivered Victoria's Earl Grey and my orange juice. "Better get some vitamins down you," she advised.
So, let's start at the very beginning. Victoria Wood was born in Prestwich, Lancashire, in May 1953. She went straight from school to Birmingham University to study drama.
"When I got to University I thought, I'm not going fit in. I'm too big, and I've got a Northern accent, and it isn't going to work. Fortunately, before I had to leave, I got these jobs on television singing funny songs at the piano and I thought, 'Oh well I can do that then, that's what I'll do!' I did That's Life [a consumer come humour show] and I did Start The Week [a regional magazine programme] which was very depressing, but it never seemed to get anywhere. Very gradually over the years, I started to talk more between the songs, and I started to stand up instead of sitting at the piano, and I did eventually have a stand-up act, but it took a long, long time.
"I didn't have much of a grounding. I had a very dodgy start and I was always very well aware that I didn't have any experience. I did a couple of folk clubs and died on my arse. I died the death nearly everywhere I went, but I was quite good on television because you only have to do a couple of minutes. So I had a very weird few years where people knew who I was but whenever people did book me for a show, I was awful and I used to get really depressed about it, because I couldn't seem to get myself stuck into the right sort of work."
It's been twenty years since Victoria started playing the circuit of supper clubs, and seventeen since she scooped the top prize on New Faces [a long-running talent show]. She is most widely known for Victoria Wood - As Seen On TV, and has inadvertently built up a small repertory company including Julie Walters, Duncan Preston and Celia Imrie.
"Is it just that you can't get rid of them?" I asked.
"I can't get rid..." she chuckled. "They need the work! They look at me with their little beagle eyes and I feel sorry for them! I didn't do it deliberately on Pat and Margaret. I'd written a part for Celia Imrie, I written a part for Julie. I hadn't written for Duncan, but he got one of the main parts. Only when I was watching the credits I said, 'Bloody hell! I've just reconstructed Acorn Antiques on screen! That was the first time I'd worked with Thora Hird, never worked with her before."
And of course, I reminded her (jogged by the mention of Dame Thora) there's also that comparison with renowned playwright Alan Bennett as well.
"Yee-s," she acknowledged slowly. "It doesn't mean a lot to me. I think it's rather short-sighted of people to just compare us because we're both Northern writers and working in vaguely the same arena. I don't think I'm similiar to him particularly, I think he's much more of an intellectual writer, much more intellectually gifted - I would say - than I am. People think I should be terrifically flattered to be compared with him, and I like him a lot, but I think I can stand on my own two feet. That language, from being from the North, is all in my head. I don't need to be there. I think it would be terrible to just drive up the M6 and stand in a chip shop queue and see if anyone says anything funny. I wouldn't do that."
I assumed she would also dismiss the comparison between her life and the pseudo-Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit upbringing.
"What? What, ol' Jeanette Winterson? Well she's from a town near me I think, from a similiar part of the world."
"And there the similarity ends?"
"I should think so. I don't really know her but I've seen her once in Heal's."
"What?" I enquire, nervous enough to dismiss a rank pun. "Three inch, six inch?"
"No, sorry," she laughed. "Heal's the store! The similiarity with Jeanette ends there, standing behind her at the cash desk!"
"Maybe people have visions of lil' Vickie Wood running up and down cobbled streets..." I suggested.
"I know that little girl they used in that film looked like me, that's how I used to look, but I didn't have orange hair. No, I don't see much similiarity as well. I wasn't brought up by a religious maniac." And, of course, it is difficult to imagine people spending an evening swapping lines fom a Bennett playor a Winterson novel, whereas Wood's words seem to stick in your mind.
I mention the accusation, call it what you will, that Northern humour is subconsciously or even consciously camp.
"Maybe somebody outside would think that, but I could not write something to be consciously camp," she explained patiently. "The whole point of camp is that it's got to be somebody else saying 'My God! That's camp!' It can't be deliberate, otherwise it just doesn't work at all. I can only write what I want to write, and there is a sort of camp element to the way people speak, the way that people construct their sentences. Where I'm from, there's a difference in the way they speak, and it can have a camp interpretation."
"What about the obviously camp?" I say. "The two gay characters in the soap on the All Day Breakfast [Wood's 1993 Christmas special, a take-off of daytime TV] for example? I read somewhere that you said the reason you wrote gay characters into that was because every soap had gay men in it."
"Yes, yes."
"Well now there's no gay men - they're all lesbians, so... ?"
"I haven't caught up with that!" she said, with a short laugh. "Next thing I do, I'll have to put a few lesbians in!* Yes, that was a send up of soap, it certainly wasn't supposed to be a send up of gay people though of course I got a few letters from people saying 'How could you portray gay people like that?'"
Speaking of gay gatherings, I remembered a rumour about Victoria's appearance at the Stonewall Equality Show in October.
"What's that?"
"Stonewall," I said, trying to push the recall button. "They had a benefit at the Royal Albert Hall..."
Victoria was by now quite puzzled. "What?"
"It was rumoured you called security on some hecklers."
"I didn't go, I wasn't there! I've never been to the Albert Hall except to play it! Must have been Dawn French... Next question! And I'm not having an affair with Prince Charles."
"So, er... Do you get many days off?" I wailed, now completely flustered.
"I do at the moment, I'm not working very hard at the moment because I was so busy, I toured, I did Pat and Margaret and the Christmas special all in one big block, and I got really tired, and now I'm having a break up until Christmas, just doing the odd show here and there, not going to the Albert Hall and having people removed. Just having a quiet life."
"What do you do on your days off?"
"Drive my children to piano lessons."
Stymied in that line of questioning (Victoria rarely talks about her family) I try again, on safer, more familiar ground. "So what's this thing between you and the Mottershead family?" I enquire.
Victoria starts chortling, and doesn't stop. "There was this boy in my class at junior school called Billy Mottershead, and I just thought it was a lovely name. It's as if I've unconsciously put Mottershead in everything I've ever written, because I love the sound of it! It's always a mistake because whenever I put it in, people write to me and say 'My name's Jim Mottershead and are we related?' With Pat and Margaret I just wanted to write something about families, and I was also interested in this idea of what it's like to be famous and what it's like not to be and what happens when they get together, and the idea of people being in love with their own fame, which is quite common. You meet all these people and they actually believe their publicity and they believe that they are a star and they should be treated in a particular way, that they are not human."
Does this mean that some of the observational humour in Pat and Margaret was simply revenge?
"Yes, yes. I think it was. There was quite a bit of me that wanted to write a very horrible character, because I'd never, never found that very easy to do, to say 'I want this!'" she barked, snapping her fingers, "'and I want it now and I want you to do this,'" she continued, waving her arm around. "'and I want you to get out of the bloody room!' I've never been able to do that, so that was very nice for me to do." She paused. "And also somebody being terribly patronising. I felt I was very, very patronised for lots of my early career, for being fat, for being a woman, for having the Lancashire accent, and it made me a bit chippy, I had a little chip on my shoulder about it, so that was quite therapeutic to write about people being awful to Margaret because they think she's thick because she talks like that."
Victoria had to effect a speedy re-write because Celia Imrie fell pregnant.
"Yes! She did! She was seven months pregnant, so it was going to show, and the part was originally a woman who'd just had a baby, so I just re-wrote it all so she was just about to have a baby and she was loopy because of that. It worked nicely really."
"Have you seen her in Frankenstein film [Kenneth Branagh's re-make] yet?"
"No, I haven't. I've seen here in Broadcasting House, down there," she pointed out of the window, "at lunchtime, with the baby!"
"So has there even been a plan to unleash 'The Greatest Hits of Victoria Wood 'on the CD-buying public?" I ask, changing tack once more: it seems close friends were off bounds, as well as her family.
"I wouldn't mind, you know. I've never really gone hell for leather trying to get a recording contract. Whenever I've met anyone in the record business, I've just been unable to carry on a conversation with them 'cos of their really weeny, weeny little brains, and I can't go down this road, dealing with these people. I haven't got any CD's at the moment," she informed me. "George Benson, that's all I've got, one CD. And I've got Postman Pat which I play in my car all the time with the children. It's a very good CD. Christmas Pudding - that's a very fine track. Miss Hubbard's Bicycle is another. I always thought Postman Pat was gay."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I just thought he was and then sombody said to me, 'Oh I've got bad news for you - he's married! He's got a son called Julian!' Well, I was very upset. I just had this picture of him in my mind and I'll never be able to look at him in the same way again. It's bad news, but it has to be told. Might as well get it out in the open!"
And finally, the question I've been aching to ask. "Don't you get fed up when you walk into a restaurant and someone asks, 'Is it on the trolley?' - ever?"
"No, I like that, I think that's nice. People always ask me to write 'Is it on the trolley?' on videos when I'm doing signings. People pick up on other lines and sometimes I don't even recognise them but it obviously means a lot to them. There was one where I used to say 'Red Cabbage - how much?'" she stage whispered, holding an invisible vegetable above her head. "I like that, 'cos I get a lot of pleasure out of other people's work and their sketches so I just like it if people come up and they've obviously enjoyed my things as well."
I'm one of those people. And although I felt that she was non-plussed by her stature, I still felt she had erected a few barriers between herself and the journalistic fraternity. I was there firstly and lastly as a star-struck fan too, and came away (clutching her autograph), still a tad surprised that she was so bloody ordinary.
©Megan Radclyffe 1995 Publ. Millivres January 1995
* And she did!
This is the original article in its entirely. It was subsequently edited for length.
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