Of all the unexpected celebrity deaths in 2016, none hit me as hard as that of comedian Victoria Wood, who died of cancer aged 62. The words and rhythms of her sketches and stand-up routines remain part of how I speak and even think, three decades on.
Of course I didn’t know her, but few people did; Wood was – to coin an oxymoron – famously private, which is why this authorised biography is such a tempting prospect.
It’s impeccably sourced: Jasper Rees has spoken to everyone who worked with Wood, got a text from her or stood alongside her at the school gates, so there is a corroborating quote for every point made, and often the book has the pleasing air of an oral biography.
But he also has nibbles and nuggets in Wood’s own words to share with us: Rees has access to the letters, emails and (it was the 1990s) faxes Wood sent to friends throughout her life, as well as an audio journal she recorded during the making of her sitcom Dinnerladies. So if you want to know anything Wood or those closest to her thought about anything that happened from her birth to death, you’ll probably find it here.
First we get the lowdown on her solitary childhood (her family “all lived in separate rooms”) and her distant mother, who was, says Wood’s sister Penelope, “a bit sociopathic”. Later Wood observed that “if someone says, ‘You sound awfully like Victoria Wood’, she might admit through gritted teeth that we’re related.”
Her father, cheerier, bought Wood a piano for her 15th birthday: it changed her life, but also limited her scope as she ploughed the furrow – on New Faces, That’s Life! and stage – of singer of funny songs. Only in 1977, after three years trying to make a living – the book is good on the grind of lucky breaks that never led to the big time – did she write her first comic monologue to put between songs. Her voice was fully formed even at the age of 24, as a patronising Women’s Institute president offering advice such as “Life has a lot to offer even if you’ve got no bowels”.
But the breakthrough came with the play Talent, filmed for TV in 1979, featuring her first muse, Julie Walters. That in turn led to the TV series Wood and Walters, which, in her own words, “wasn’t really very good” but provided a platform to build on.
Richest stretches
It was with her next TV project that Wood entered a decade of sustained brilliance, from 1985 to 1994: Victoria Wood As Seen on TV; the series of playlets titled Victoria Wood; the stand-up tour filmed as An Audience with Victoria Wood (think Kimberley, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, and “Welcome to the World of Sacherelle”); culminating with the film Pat and Margaret.
These are the richest stretches of the book, with insights into how Acorn Antiques flopped with the first studio audiences, the overnight composition of The Ballad of Barry and Freda (the barnstorming song from which the book takes its title), and the painful gestation of Pat and Margaret (to my mind her single greatest achievement).
Rees’ writing style is pretty plain (every sizzling casserole needs an oven glove), though does occasionally venture into Woodish ways: “Victoria had nothing much on for the rest of the year and decided to have an operation on a bunion.” And the detail-driven quality of Let’s Do It is also its weakness. Rees is sometimes drunk on his own command of the details, with too much information on minor late work and the early years. (Did we need to hear from Wood’s O-level music teacher?)
As an authorised biography, commissioned by Wood’s estate, it carries the associated drawbacks. There’s no acknowledgment that any work may not have been touched with genius (even the late, disappointing Christmas specials), and there are odd elisions, where we get forensic detail on what Wood was paid for everything before she was famous, but nothing on later earnings (though we learn that by 1990, she was “earning enough to buy a bungalow each week”). The breakdown in her marriage comes suddenly, with no prior suggestion that things weren’t perfect, and there’s hardly anything on her eating disorder. Less crucially: she was a “voracious”, “avid”, “absolutely obsessive” reader, but we get almost nothing on what books she liked until her final hospital days.
Unpleasant task
But it’s not a whitewash, with overwhelming evidence that working with Wood was an unpleasant task: Dawn French said, “When you tripped up, she would forgive you once. Once.” An actor in Housewife, 49 said, “I never knew when she approved. I only knew when she didn’t approve.”
Part of this was an element of her mother’s unsociability – filming her Great Railway Journeys episode, she told the producer, “I don’t want to meet any more people” – and part a perfectionism that made Dinnerladies a miserable experience for everyone, even the long-serving members of the Victoria Wood rep. “She was terribly strict, she had no bedside manner at all,” said Anne Reid, while Duncan Preston was “sick to death of it”.
The book does give us insight into Wood’s death; we learn that she had had cancer in 2011, which returned in late 2015 but – ominously – in a different part of her body. She never seemed to accept that she was dying, even when she was sent home from hospital for the last time. “Why have I got a palliative care nurse? Isn’t that for someone who’s terminal?”
Throughout the book, events are accompanied by Wood’s own commentary via her correspondence and diaries, and it’s a disorienting delight to hear her voice again, whether quipping or carping. That makes it hard to read the final pages, to experience the loss again. Best to end then, with the words of Mrs Overall from Acorn Antiques, when asked if another character had died.
“Put it this way, Miss Berta – I needn’t have bothered rinsing out that extra mug.”
