Victoria Wood Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Index

  Sources and Acknowledgements

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Victoria Wood was one of Britain’s finest ever performers, and her wit and scalpel-sharp humour endeared her to millions of people for over four decades.

  From the filming of dinnerladies to each of Victoria’s stage shows across thirty years, Neil Brandwood watched, interviewed and meticulously researched Victoria and her contemporaries. In this book, he documents her rise to stardom, from her early years in Lancashire to the success of the sell-out shows at the Royal Albert Hall, and honestly portrays her final years, offering a sympathetic and insightful account of a true British treasure.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Neil Brandwood works as a journalist for the Bury Times Group.

  Dedicated to Joyce Audus

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Other biographies of Victoria might now be written but mine was the only one Victoria had the opportunity to read for herself. It is possible she may not have particularly welcomed the original edition when it appeared in 2002, but she made no objection to it in the fourteen years that followed its publication.

  I have been a huge Victoria Wood fan since I first saw As Seen On TV. As a journalist, I had the opportunity to interview Victoria a number of times and it was these interviews, along with the fact that we shared a home town, which inspired me to write the biography.

  During my research I spoke with several people whose memories of Victoria did not tally with her established public persona. This helped to give an honest picture of her. Victoria’s imperfections were part of her attraction; her faults and mistakes helped make her more human and therefore more relatable.

  To portray her as a cuddly, working-class Lancastrian who chuckled her way through life dispensing one-liners and down-to-earth Northern common sense as she went, would be to misrepresent her.

  Neil Brandwood,

  West Sussex,

  May 2016

  ‘I have enough ambitions to live five lives.’

  Victoria Wood

  PROLOGUE

  THE CHUBBY LITTLE girl is full of anticipation as she climbs into her father’s car for the one-and-a-half mile drive down the rutted track for the rendezvous at the bottom of Castle Hill Road. Passing Gypsy Brook and Hercules Farm on the right and Harwood Fields and the disused quarry on the left, she can barely contain her excitement at the thought of what is to come.

  Back at the house her birthday buffet is laid out for the party. Games have been prepared and the candles stand on her cake ready to be lit, blown and wished upon.

  It is not simply her birthday that makes it such a special occasion; for the first time her classmates will be coming to her home. Its remoteness usually discourages visitors.

  Just before reaching the church the girl’s father turns right at Gallows Hill. The car continues on its journey to Jericho, a name inspired by the ‘Cities of Judgement’ sermon given by the Methodist evangelist John Wesley on one of his visits.

  When they reach the designated pick-up point the little girl’s joy evaporates. Only one classmate stands there – Graham Howarth. She is crestfallen; the other children must have better things to do with their Saturday.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ says Graham, as he gets into the car.

  The girl smiles bravely, but the agony and humiliation are prolonged by her well-meaning father who decides to drive to the home of Dennis Ford, one of the absent party guests. Mrs Ford says he is out playing somewhere.

  The car begins the slow climb back through the bleak landscape to Birtle Edge House.

  More than 30 years later the little girl – now a woman – makes her way up the same road. This time she is in the driving seat and knows that millions of people will share her journey.

  She steers the Land Rover Discovery past a recently planted wood next to the church, little guessing the congregation had considered naming it in her honour.

  She is accompanied by a film crew. They are shooting a documentary on her – Britain’s best-loved comedienne. She has sold out more shows at the Royal Albert Hall than any other solo performer, an experience she described as ‘instant gratification, like having two-and-a-half thousand friends round, and you’re the funniest one in the room’. She has been voted the person most people would like as their next-door neighbour, and it was rumoured that the most famous woman in the world, Diana, Princess of Wales, wanted her as a friend.

  For the past 12 years her birthday has been listed in The Times.

  1

  ‘I believe we all have a certain time in our lives that we’re good at. I wasn’t good at being a child.’

  Victoria Wood

  WHEN HELEN WOOD gave birth to her fourth and final child in 1953 the relief she felt at the baby’s safe delivery may well have been tinged with disappointment. It was another girl.

  Helen and Stanley Wood’s first child, a boy whom they named Christopher, had been born almost a generation earlier, in 1940. Penelope arrived on 2 August 1945, and Rosalind followed almost five years to the day later, on 4 August 1950.

  The two slim, dainty and dark-haired Wood girls had already forged a strong bond and developed a closeness that left the newcomer to the family in an unenviable position. Three was a crowd; another sister was not required and lacked the novelty that a baby brother would have brought.

  The birth of Victoria Wood on 19 May was dutifully announced in the Bury Times four days later, more as a matter of routine than of pride. It was the done thing, and Victoria’s siblings had previously been introduced to the world in the same terse few lines. The fact that Helen had yet another baby was certainly no cause for celebration, and Victoria grew up suspecting her mother wanted a career instead of her.

  Victoria was the only baby born in the upstairs delivery room of Holyrood Maternity Home that day. The building stood on Bury Old Road in Prestwich, a small town five miles north of Manchester, whose most notable claim was that it had one of the largest mental asylums in Europe. The Woods’ other children had been born in less comfortable circumstances, but Stanley’s dedication to the world of insurance meant he could afford the £10 a week for Helen’s stay in the private home during her final pregnancy.

  Mother and baby returned home 10 days after the birth on the day that Britain’s new queen was crowned. The coincidence influenced Helen and Stanley’s choice of a regal name for their daughter, and it was a decision that newspaper and magazine subeditors have delighted in ever since. The reign of ‘Comedy Queen Victoria’, who was often described as ‘amused’ or ‘victorious’, served as alternative headline fodder whenever the ‘Wood’ wordplay dried up.

  The name was highly appropriate. Marie Lloyd, the risqué star of music hall who was known for her saucy songs and is regarded as the very first British comedienne, was actually called Matilda Alice Victoria Wood. Years later, Stanley’s daughter would joke in her own stage show: ‘They call me Vic because I’m b
lue and I bring tears to your eyes.’ It was a line worthy of her namesake and predecessor.

  Marie Lloyd would no doubt have had fun with the name Ramsbottom. It is a word that has an irresistibly humorous ring to it and it is easy to understand why Victoria, never one to waste a comic opportunity, sometimes gave the impression that she lived in this picturesque village within the borough of Bury in Lancashire. In actual fact the first and only home Victoria knew in Bury was more than four miles away at number 98 Tottington Road. Stanley had bought the house on 22 January 1952 for £1,600. The end of a block of four spacious terraced houses set back from the road, it had the advantage of being just 10 minutes’ walk from Bury town centre while being elevated above its industrial and commercial heart.

  Victoria stressed she was ‘definitely middle class’. It was a social stratum she knew intimately, having imbibed suburban mores from birth. Be it in song, sketch or stage show, the world of the middle classes dominated Victoria’s work. She delighted in and derided the culture of hostess trolleys, champagne-coloured bathroom suites and shopping trips to Benetton, and her audiences lapped up the affectionate mockery.

  In 1953 Stanley’s financial circumstances reflected the growing prosperity of the country as a whole. As well as the comfortable house on Tottington Road he was able to afford his first car, an Austin Ruby. It has to be said, however, that the car was more a work necessity than a family luxury: Manufacturers Life of Canada had offices in Manchester but Stanley, who worked as an insurance underwriter, spent most of his time visiting clients at their homes and businesses.

  Victoria escaped being working class by just seven years. When her parents first arrived in Bury in 1946 with Chris and Penny, life did not look promising. Having previously lodged with relatives in Manchester they decided to strike out on their own, and rented two rooms in a shared house on Walshaw Road.

  ‘Without wishing to sound like a Hovis advert, it was very hard,’ recalled Chris Foote-Wood. ‘We didn’t suffer in any way. We were always dry, warm and fed, but it was very spartan.’

  The weekly treat came on Saturdays, when a box of sweets would be taken down from on top of a cupboard and they would each select one. Sometimes Stanley would buy a Mars bar during their Sunday walks and divide it into four on their return home.

  Helen found it easier to cope with the conditions than her husband as she had experienced the hardship of growing up in Bradford, a poor area of Manchester. Her family, the Mapes, lived in a small terrace on Gibbon Street, which was where Helen, or Ellen Colleen as she was christened, was born on 14 October 1919. Her boiler fireman father, John, fought in France in the First World War but returned to Britain after being gassed. According to Chris Foote-Wood, he was incapacitated, but not enough to stop him having a large family.

  Both John and Ada Mape were of Irish descent, and Chris believed the Irish influence contributed to his sister’s talent.

  ‘I’m convinced in my own mind that the Irish blood is a factor in Victoria’s success. There’s the dourness and stability of my father’s Lancashire side of the family and the entertainment from the Irish side.’

  It was to Victoria’s credit that she never used the struggles of her relatives to add background colour to her public persona. Lesser entertainers and professional Northerners might have been tempted to treat their interviewers to moist-eyed reminiscences about their exaggerated humble origins, but the fiercely private Victoria had no truck with that. Quite the opposite in fact.

  In the song ‘Northerners’ she sent up the clichés of Northern hardship by adopting the role of an unsuccessful singer who cannily swaps her skintight suits for shawls and boots and becomes a wealthy star by pretending to be Northern. Accompanied by washboard, she traded on every stereotypical image of grimness imaginable, from backstreet abortion and the outside privy, to headscarves and mushy peas.

  Victoria stripped away the sentimentality even further in the sketch ‘Service Wash’ in which she played a Northern pensioner reminiscing fondly about the good old days when rugs were made by stitching mice on to sacking and you could hardly hear yourself coughing up blood for the sound of clogs.

  When Observer journalist Richard Brooks made the mistake of asking whether Victoria had ever holidayed in the working-class Mecca of Blackpool as a child, her indignation of being seen as a lowly Lancashire lass revealed itself. Stung by the assumption of stereotype, she rounded on him. ‘What do you take me for?’ she barked. ‘We used to go to Vienna.’ The journalist expressed disbelief but it was true: Stanley drove the family across Europe with a Sprite Musketeer four-berth caravan in tow.

  ‘He just had this idea that I was from the north and would come in with clogs and a shawl and a tin bath,’ Victoria later complained of Brooks.

  Even before she was born, the Woods were already upwardly mobile. In August 1947 they swapped their overcrowded lodgings on Walshaw Road for a comfortable semi of their own in Ramsey Grove. The purchase was made possible by Stanley supplementing his income with a variety of odd jobs. ‘I don’t want to go into detail, but he was very enterprising,’ said his son. Helen too, was doing her bit by taking part-time work as a telephonist and market researcher.

  A modest boost to the Wood family income came in their first year at the new house, when Stanley’s 168-page naval thriller, Death on a Smokeboat, written under the nom de plume of Ross Graham, was published by Hurst and Blackett.

  The novel was just one of the many works he would publish over the years. Although Stanley left school early for a job in a flour mill, an incomplete education did not seem to have disadvantaged him in matters literary. Indeed, the ever-resourceful Stanley would later use his experiences at the mill as the basis for a play. He had sold his first play at the age of 16 and was a keen theatregoer from a young age. This was largely due to the many trips he made with his mother, Eleanor, to Manchester’s Palace Theatre, Hippodrome, Theatre Royal and Miss Horniman’s Gaiety Theatre.

  His father, John, had won the Croix de Guerre in the First World War, but at the outbreak of the Second, Stanley, initially at least, reached for his pen rather than a gun. In Mrs Clutterbuck Over Europe he described how an indomitable, no-nonsense, Northern matron put Hitler in his place.

  Published by Samuel French in 1939, the broad-humoured comic verse was written in Lancashire dialect. It told the tale of the comically overweight Mary Anne Eliza Jane Clutterbuck and her attempts to obtain a gas mask that would fit over her five chins. Her search took her from her home town of Tubtwistle to Whitehall and then to Hitler’s private den. As she steamrolled through bureaucracy she was constantly insulted about her weight (at one point she is advised to apply for a specially produced animal gas mask for herself, marking the envelope OUTSIZE PONY) and frustrated (there is a note on 10 Downing Street saying SPRING CLEANING. BACK NEXT WEEK). Eventually she confronted Hitler behind closed doors. After the meeting she tottered out, secure in the knowledge that her street would never be bombed, but remained tight-lipped about what took place. The only way to get something done quickly and well, she concluded, was to do it ‘thesel’.

  The writing would continue throughout most of Stanley’s life. Besides the satirical lyrics he would set to popular tunes of the day for the company’s annual do, he also wrote everything from radio comedy scripts for Wilfred Pickles to plays, novels and a radio programme about the sinking of the Mary Rose. Radio was one of his favourite media but, for some inexplicable reason, he rationed broadcasts.

  ‘The radio was quite restricted in our household, surprisingly,’ remembered Chris Foote-Wood. ‘I don’t know why. It was a case of under the bedclothes.’ He said there was always a market for Stanley’s work and regretted that his father could not bring himself to abandon insurance to become a full-time writer. ‘I’m sure he could have been a great success but he was a family man mainly. He always thought his first duty was to hold down a regular job and look after his family. It was the psychology of the time.’

  Stanley’s selfless side
also emerged in his public-spiritedness. ‘He was a big organiser, a Mr Fix-It. He had fingers in every pie,’ said Foote-Wood. ‘He used to organise all sorts of events, shows and charity dos. For several years after the war he booked the Derby Hotel for a week before Christmas for a toy fair. He had contacts, God knows how. He got toy manufacturers to come along and sell their toys. It was an amazing thing.’

  Besides his theatrical, literary and community interests, Stanley was also an enthusiastic musician and played the piano semi-professionally in a dance band in Manchester.

  Like Stanley, Ellen, who preferred to be known as ‘Helen’, had seen her education end prematurely when she left school at 14 without any qualifications. The two of them had a mutual interest in Liberal politics, but it was at a Young Communist rally in Manchester where they first met.

  Stanley was born on 1 July 1912, at 38 Lightoaks Road, a pleasant terraced house with a neat front garden on a tree-lined street in Pendleton, Salford. His father was a post office clerk and his mother also worked for the post office for a period. When Stanley was 15 they moved to a larger house at 21 Belgrave Road in nearby Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

  There was no doubt that Helen Mape was definitely marrying ‘up’ when she wed Stanley on 11 July 1940 at Manchester Register Office, even though her father had by then become a mill foreman and the family were living at the more upmarket 358 Lower Broughton Road in Salford. On paper nothing could have seemed more respectable. Stanley was an insurance claims inspector and his bride was working as a clerk for a raincoat manufacturing firm. It bore all the hallmarks of an unremarkable wedding, except that Helen was already four months pregnant.

  One can only guess the effect the discovery had on the young couple. The law and the health risks meant abortion was not an option, even if it had been desired. At 27 Stanley, who was still living with his parents, may have been ready for marriage, but Helen, whose ambitious streak would become apparent in time, did not necessarily share his enthusiasm.