The truth about Victoria Wood
I think you'll find there's spam on that.
Being a fan of Victoria Wood isn’t exactly a niche interest, I know, but I have adored her work since I was much too young to understand any of it. My first exposure would probably have been a then brand-new Channel 4 repeating her first sketch show, with Julie Walters, imaginatively titled Wood and Walters, originally screened on ITV.
I’ve always been drawn to funny women rather than male comedians. When I was small, comics on TV had teeth like popcorn-encrusted harmonicas, and cheap suits, and heavily hairsprayed combovers. They tended to be bigoted, obsessed with the Second World War, and, worst of all, devastatingly unfunny.
The ‘alternative comedy’ scene arrived just in time, right as I was becoming interested in my ability to make people laugh as a device for both attracting attention and deflecting it, and I devoured shows like Saturday Live and Comic Strip Presents… (my Irish nana was fairly laissez-faire about bedtime at the weekend and I knew how to behave and not get excitable). Victoria Wood was, in a way, the bridge spanning the two universes. Fairly traditional in approach, but with modern values; skewering old tropes, but delivering the fatal blow through a tea cosy.
Her work was all about women, and I preferred being around women. As a gay child, I knew where I was with them; they spoke without filter, wore emotions proudly, and had the best gossip. Men, I needed the Enigma machine for; I didn't get them at all. Still don’t.
As Seen On TV is the gold-standard for sketch shows for me and I feel it’s fair to say her sketch comedy peaked there, although she was still miles ahead o anyone else for a very long time when it came to mixing the relatable and ridiculous. Her taste for satire, despite leaning into parody in later years, was vinegar sharp; her understanding of everyday people was impressive, despite her own unusual upbringing and early career being light years away.
Writers are often asked about their influences and while Victoria’s work referenced many other, earlier comedians, she also had an imagination. (It’s often forgotten that sometimes we just make things up, make assumptions, and twist a very ordinary thing until it’s something else entirely, something fantastical, horrendous, and very far from home.)
When Victoria Wood died in 2016, it was pointed out to me that she didn't always punch up – she grew up in an unconventional but firmly middle-class household, and while she very often critiqued her betters, her renditions of working class quirks could be interpreted as unkind. But I always thought she was mocking the chattering classes’ view of society’s underlings and, I have to say, as monstrous as some of them were, many were recognisable. We knew people like that.
I felt the ribbing of working classes was more affectionate than she was given credit for, and snobbery is not exclusive to the middles and the uppers – if you have never seen two mothers going at it in a row that started over a dig about the cleanliness of some net curtains, you haven’t lived. Rightly or wrongly, everybody looks down on someone.
She had an ability to find everyday things funny – photo booths, market researchers, makeup counters. Even better if it was slightly outdated or previously aspirational. Mauve pedestal mats, side-winding body belt, trusses, wet look wigs, waving a whitlow. I could go on and on. Instead, I’d like to show you seven of my favourite Victoria Wood sketches, in no particular order except the first one, which is my absolute number one.
SELF-SERVICE
One of Victoria’s finest genres: two women d’un certain âge – but usually any age that required support stockings and haemorrhoid cream – having lunch. Sex-starved divorcees, cantankerous pensioners, social climbers, blow-ins to the countryside, clueless health workers – give her a lunch date and she could work magic. (See also the infamous variations Two Soups and The Trolley.)
Self-service is the king of them all, so good that it’s been wrenched off YouTube to avoid cannibalising DVD sales or iPlayer views or whatever. Two nameless women navigate the assault course of a self service cafeteria, likely on the fifth floor of a ramshackle department store. Places like these were everywhere in the 1970s and 1980s, and the offering much less palatable than the tzatziki wraps or artisan pies available to John Lewis’s discerning instore café’s patrons. Every single line out of Julie Walters’s mouth is funny, even though the words themselves are utterly ordinary.
– “I never touch prawns. Did you know they hang around sewage outlet pipes, treading water with their mouths open?”
– “Aren’t prawns are an aphrodisiac?”
– “I wouldn’t put it past them.”
My boyfriend and I say random lines from this sketch to each other at an alarming rate. “Can I thrust by, I’m a diabetic?” I mean, it’s just words. But with Wood’s pen and Walters’s performance, it becomes music.
MARY BRAZZLE
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in TV production and what happens ‘behind the scenes’, although a couple of years working in television in the mid-00s very nearly cured me of that fascination. A fixture of television studios from a young age, Victoria was adept at portraying the petty backstage dramas and TV’s sea of self-centred drongos – see The Making of Acorn Antiques, Over To Pam and Pat and Margaret for even longer masterclasses.
She astutely presented the awful truth about appearing on TV, especially as a civilian: people making television just want to make the thing, fill the airtime, and go home; they’re not particularly interested in how you feel about something, or whether you look good. They have a job to do and if you’re happy, then great, but if you’re not, never mind. (There are notable exceptions, obviously.)
Anyway, by about nine years old I had a pretty good working knowledge of the workings of a TV studio and the associated vernacular and that’s possibly part of the reason I love this sketch so much – poor Mary trying to remember her lines while the production team pick at her every move.
“Shall we get goooing, as they say in Yorkshire.” I say it all the time and nobody ever gets the joke.
TODAY IN HOSPITAL
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Of the many spoof slice of life documentaries that featured in Victoria’s work – years before The Office and People Like Us – Today in Hospital is probably my favourite, if only for the drunk doctor gag and the nurses harassing a private patient, still woozy from anaesthetic, for his credit card number.
KITTY
There are five Kitty monologues out there, with a rumoured unseen sixth one tucked away. One thing you could say about Victoria Wood: she was generous with her material, almost never keeping the best lines for herself. And here, she hands over some of her best zingers to the capable, spotless hands of future dame Patricia Routledge, later to find fame as Hyacinth Bucket in the funny for a series or two Keeping Up Appearances.
Who Kitty is and what she’s doing there makes little sense now, but in days of yore television was full of total strangers snatching five minutes of airtime in a cosily furnished corner of a studio to wax lyrical and tell you what was what, usually with a religious bent.
I have fond memories of school holidays and leaping to change channel at the sound of the opening bars to the theme of the execrable ‘thought for the day’ show Five to Eleven. This Morning and its imitators effectively nixed this kind of programming and nowadays, TikTok and Insta reels have the ‘opinionated dunderhead talking at you, not to you’ market covered.
Kitty is a nightmare who thinks she’s a daydream, the kind of person your grandmother would throw herself into a giant pyramid of baked bean tins to avoid in the big Sainsbury’s. A big name in her local amateur dramatics society, Kitty has oodles of advice whether people want it or not, and she wouldn’t just patronise you, she’d explain to you what the word ‘patronise’ meant while she was doing it.
Any Kitty would be a classic but the best is probably this one, where Kitty stands in for the TV agony aunt, who is stricken by anxiety, if only for the ‘Ma Griffe’ line and the complaint that the poor woman has ‘a voice loud enough to blow the froth off a Horlicks two tables away’, which has been my Twitter bio for years.
SHOE SHOP
Victoria specialised in presenting Walters as the outlandish grotesque to Wood’s hapless victim of terrible customer service. Hairdressers, boutiques, shoe shops, dental surgeries, piano lessons – no corner of capitalism was safe. Shoe Shop is probably my most watched and quoted – ‘flatter now!’ – and my definite favourite of this genre. (Victoria occasionally took on the role of the grotesque – best example probably being Supermarket.)
WHITHER THE ARTS
Arts programming in the 1980s was often hugely pretentious, but at least it was actually on, rather than shooed away to specialist channels or hiding out in more cerebral pockets of YouTube. That’s not to say this parody is merely of its time – it’s still a biting, knowing satire of the theatre world that, along with To Be an Actress, could only have come from someone who’d witnessed firsthand a variation of the humiliations that befall the characters within. Grandstanding directors, neurotic actors, and naked ambition, it’s all here.
Favourite part is the rejigged musical number which features the eternally hilarious rhyming of ‘tits’ with ‘Ritz’. Also, it’s NINE minutes long. Can you imagine any sketch show giving up a third of its running time to one single sketch, which includes two songs? The faith producers had in Victoria Wood was insane. But worth it.
SACHERELLE
The 1980s were very bleak and despite what period dramas and talking head documentaries might tell you, severely lacking in pizazz. The best you could hope for, beyond hoping Michael Aspel might get a good guest on, or watching Barry Norman on Film 84 mention the Oscars in passing, was watch An Audience With… where the casts of various TV shows and haunters of frayed red carpets outside the Palladium would gather to watch a ‘turn’ do a comedy or cabaret set. Their role, to laugh, maybe ask a question and provide more colourful cutaways than you usually got – instead of gnarled members of the public in Deirdre Barlow glasses and the kind of skin only eating fourteen pork pies a week could give you, you’d be treated to Wincey Willis, Kevin off Coronation Street, and Liza Goddard.
Victoria’s set starts with a long story about being followed home from the supermarket – including an excellent joke about her neighbours and an iconic reference to beleaguered fast food outlet Spud U Like. The jewel in this crown, however, is the Sacherelle makeup counter (which I always assumed was an intentional mispronunciation of cosmetic company Cacharel, showing that I knew far too much about nothing at the age of ten).
What’s your favourite? Comment below!
ONE-LINER
To mark the forthcoming paperback release of my fourth novel LEADING MAN in April, every week until publication and beyond, I’m posting ONE line from the book here, snatched from every 25 pages or so.
Tam was not shy, he was wearing mermaid leggings the night we met him; his favourite toys as a child were a feather boa and a megaphone.
Buy the hardback, or preorder the paperback. Thank you. Preordering can make a huge difference to a book’s success, so please do if you can.
As I work in a university library I struggle not to blurt out "I work for the university - in the library. I wear a pleated skirt and some days we have those little biscuits with icing on and in that sense it's rather rewarding" when I meet new people.
A lovely description of how Victoria Wood, with one leg in the past of post-war-out-of-music-hall-varieties and the other about to step, however gingerly, into the new alternative comedy world, bridged so many cultural and generational obstacles.
And all while we were laughing.
Beautiful piece, Justin. You’ve done your, and our, heroine justice.