15
The following year in the summer of 1978, after a stint at the Royal Court Theatre under the direction of Max Stafford-Clark in which I played a New York Jewish lesbian who was also a solo round-the-world yachtswoman in a completely unintelligible play by Snoo Wilson titled The Glad Hand, I took a job at the Bush Theatre, a tiny space above a pub of the same name on Shepherd’s Bush Green in West London. It was, and still is - despite almost having its grant taken away this year in a disgraceful and ludicrous proposal by the Arts Council of Great Britain - a major force in the championing of new talent, especially writers. The proposal was withdrawn after a welter of opposition from actors and writers who had launched successful careers from that tiny stage. Our production was to be an evening of playlets - we were instructed not to call them sketches - written by such luminaries as Snoo Wilson, Nigel Baldwin, Ken Campbell, Ron Hutchinson, Dusty Hughes, who also directed, and a young woman I’d never heard of before called Victoria Wood.
The evening was to be titled In at the Death and some would say that the audiences were, on most nights. Also in the cast were Godfrey Jackman, Clive Merrison, Alison Fiske and Phil Jackson, while Victoria, fresh out of BBC1’s topical That’s Life, was to provide musical interludes between each sketch - there, I’ve said it - one of which was the glorious ‘Guy the Gorilla’ (‘died of chocolate, not usually a killer’), as well as writing a sketch of her own.
The sketches were to be based on small snippets from newspapers connected in some way with death: not major articles, but those little pieces tucked away in the bottom corners of the inside pages, probably best found in local papers. Ken Campbell took his from the Malaysian New Strait Times; Nigel Baldwin took his inspiration from the Holyhead and Anglesey Chronicle; and Vic used the tabloids. Ron Hutchinson’s piece was set in Northern Ireland, based around a Ruby Murray lookalike contest. There was a brilliant sketch written by Dusty Hughes about ‘ghouls’, the people who turn up to gawp at road accidents, tube disasters and the like, but the hit of the evening was Victoria’s piece, which was entitled Sex and involved a young woman, worried that she was pregnant, played by me, finding out from this other character, played by Victoria, that she hadn’t even had sex. It brought the house down every night.
One line that I particularly remember as a rafter shaker was: ‘Well, where are you in the menstrual cycle?’
‘. . . Erm . . . Taurus.’
It was here at the Bush that our relationship was cemented, easily slipping into a friendship on the first day of rehearsals, when we discovered that we had Geoffrey Durham in common, he of the near facial hair-fire disaster, who had lived underneath me in Canning Street when I was at the Everyman. It turned out that he was Vic’s bloke and so here was our first bond. The second, which Victoria informed me of over liver, boil (sic) and onions at the Bush caf’ round the corner from the theatre, was that we had met before. It turns out that she had auditioned at Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre when I was a first-year there. I had been drafted in to usher the auditionees into the theatre to do their pieces and had spent the entire time trying to entertain them with stories of my nursing days, previously recorded herein, and generally showing off from my privileged position of already having a place. At first I couldn’t remember her being there and then the image of this shy little girl, wearing glasses and throwing up in a bucket, flashed before me.
There was actually a third thing that bonded us. One evening early on, after rehearsal, Vic and I were going somewhere or other in her newly acquired Mini van. Wherever it was, we somehow got lost in the back streets of Shepherd’s Bush, God forbid. After about ten minutes we ended up in either a cul-de-sac or a ‘no through road’, so a three-point turn was necessary in order to get out. Victoria swung the car round with great aplomb and being a non-driver at this stage of my life I was hugely impressed by her skill and confidence. Then she backed up and I think we must have been talking because she reversed just a little too far. We heard a bit of a crunch and she pulled tentatively forward to reveal that she had knocked down an entire garden wall. Our escape from that street, apart from the paroxysms of laughter, that is, with the screeching of tyres and the smell of burning rubber, was worthy of a 1970s action thriller.
It was an interesting time, although I fear that we gave poor old Dusty Hughes rather a hard time, or at least I think I did. I just felt that I knew best. I had come from the great Everyman, a working-class hero; I ploughed my own furrow; and some London-based, middle-class, university-educated bloke was not going to direct me. In those days I still laboured under the misapprehension that certain types of direction were tantamount to slurs on my acting ability and had what you might call a wee chip on my already rounding shoulder. One day, frustrated by the lack of progress in rehearsals, Victoria and I hatched a devilish plan whilst down in the pub toilets. We rushed back upstairs.
‘Dusty! What sort of car have you got?’
He told us.
‘Where is it parked?’
‘Why?’
‘We think it’s being broken into, it looked as if someone was trying to get into it!’
And off he shot. Then we put the kettle on and decided on what we thought was the best way to play the particular sketch we had been rehearsing with Dusty.
Dusty was a talented playwright, going on, two years later in 1980, to win the London Theatre Critics Award for Most Promising Playwright, and he took our undermining, prank-playing and joke-cracking at his expense in very good heart.
As ever, I was in my element fooling around, which took me right back into class-jester mode. One lunchtime whilst for some reason we were hanging out of the office window upstairs, we spied Harold Pinter standing at the bus stop in the street below.
‘Harold! Hello, there! You write plays, don’t you?’ I called.
‘Pardon?’
‘You’re a writer! We could do with one of those up here!’
Then a week after we opened we wrote ‘H. Pinter (two tickets)’ on the bookings list just for a laugh and scared the cast half to death, laughing our heads off backstage as we watched the other actors nervously upping their performances to impress the very absent Mr Pinter.
Backstage at the Bush consisted of an area approximately six feet by six feet and a set of stone steps leading down to the street. These were also used as the fire escape and, once the audience were in, the dressing room. The only toilet facility was downstairs in the pub itself and so this is where we rushed at the interval of an early preview, only to hear, whilst sitting on the lav, a middle-class voice intone loudly, ‘Oh dear, could do better. Shall we bother with the second half?’ After that, it was pint glasses and frequent cries of ‘Don’t drink that!’ as thirsty actors reached for what they thought was their pint of Carlsberg in the dark. It was extremely cramped with six actors all trying to get changed in this space, and Vic and I had many a private joke about the slack nature of a certain actor’s underpants.
It was also hazardous, not the slackness of the underpants, you understand, but the backstage space. One night we were all on stage, apart, that is, from Victoria who didn’t appear until the last few minutes leading up to the interval. During the course of these we heard a dreadful crash, accompanied by the soft thud of flesh on stone repeated several times, from backstage. When we finally exited we found Victoria covered in blood halfway down the stairs, where she had accidentally slipped and fallen whilst hovering over a beer glass and cut her hand. In doing so she had also knocked over a number of other glasses, splattering the costumes with their contents, and they didn’t all contain drinks. What the second-half audience thought of the badly stained costumes one can only guess at and as for the smell as they dried under the stage lights in that tiny space, perhaps they thought that they were experiencing early Odorama.
The show did well, being well received on the whole, and it was on the final Saturday that David Leland walked in and asked to speak to Victoria. It turned out that he was running a young writers’ festival at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, and he asked Victoria to write a play for it. She said she would write something for me. I thought this was very kind, but couldn’t ever imagine it happening, and went off to have a not particularly happy time at the Bristol Old Vic, where at my audition to play Phoebe in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Richard Cotterell, the director, said, ‘Come downstage, Julie, I want to see your f-f-f-f—’
‘Erm, is this what they call the casting couch?’
‘I want to see your f-f-f—’
‘Blimey, Richard, what sort of production is this?’
‘Your face!’
‘Oh . . . fair enough.’
I got the part but hated it, unable to get to its centre. Looking back, I think I was trying too hard and expecting too much from it. Perhaps I’d have done better if I had shown my f-f-f—
It was here at Bristol that I was told the tale of an actor being on that very stage, playing Macbeth during a matine’e. He had started the famous speech, ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow . . .’, when an aged voice from the stalls was heard to say, ‘Oh, that’ll be Wednesday.’
And it was here that I read Victoria’s wonderful new play Talent, which she had, indeed, written for me. My character was called Julie and my character’s boyfriend was called Dave Walters. The play centred around a talent contest in a seedy Northern nightclub. Julie was entering the contest and Maureen, her best friend, played by Victoria, had come along for support. It fitted me like a glove, the extreme opposite of the experience I was having with Phoebe. I knew this girl exactly, what she would wear, how she would speak, how she would smoke, cry, laugh, and when she would breathe. And I wasn’t free! It had to go ahead without me and I was mortified. The part was played by Hazel Clyne, but the show was seen by Peter Eckersley, a Granada Television producer, who picked it up to be adapted for television. This meant I had a chance to audition for the part.
It was a play with songs, two of which I was required to sing, one of my own choosing (Stevie Wonder’s ‘Isn’t She Lovely?’) plus one of the numbers from the show. The latter was a gorgeous, sardonically nostalgic song titled ‘I Want to Be Fourteen Again’. When it came to my turn to sing, Victoria played it in my key, a privilege I’m not entirely sure the rest of the auditionees enjoyed. In fact at the end of the audition, just as I was leaving the room, she said, under her breath, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to play it in a really high key for everyone else!’ I took it as a joke, but I’m not certain to this day whether it was.
Anyway, as history will confirm I got the part and there began a working friendship where Victoria gave me brilliant gift after brilliant gift. We followed Talent with a sequel the following year titled Nearly a Happy Ending. This featured the same two characters, Julie and Maureen, who had appeared in Talent and involved Maureen’s attempts at losing her virginity at some awful sales conference in a dreary hotel. Again it was both hilarious and touching, and an amazingly generous vehicle for me. It was followed fairly quickly by another one-off comedy drama titled Happy Since I Met You, in which Victoria didn’t star, and I played opposite Duncan Preston, my character being a drama teacher and his a struggling actor. It was a gorgeously bitter-sweet comedy.
Peter Eckersley then decided that Victoria and I should have our own series and so Wood and Walters was launched. Even though Victoria was doing all the writing, she insisted on the use of both our names in the title of the show. Sadly Peter Eckersley died suddenly in between the recording of the pilot and the making of the series, and we missed him hugely, not just as a producer but also as a man. It was never the same and we felt that the series, which was his baby, suffered enormously without him.
We recorded it up at the Granada Studios in Manchester every week on a Friday afternoon. The television studio audiences turned up with a ticket to see a show but had no idea which one it would be. As this took place in the middle of the day, it was mainly elderly people who were wheeled in and we would invariably go on set to be met by a bank of white heads, with comments that could only be attributed to the aged or the hard of hearing pinging out into the often deafening silence. ‘Who are these girls?’ and ‘What did she say?’ ‘What’s a boutique?’ ‘Is it a comedy?’ and once, ‘We’re missin’ Brideshead for this!’ This last became a private catchphrase for Victoria and me. At my BA FTA tribute in 2003 Victoria was sitting next to me and just before she got up to make her speech, she handed me a scrap of paper on which she had written: ‘We’re missin’ Brideshead for this!’
Getting through the show was often like wading through cold porridge and to whip the oldies into a frenzy of mirth a warm-up man was employed at the top of the show. Most of his jokes failed miserably, and Vic and I would wait backstage, hearts sinking as we listened to the wind blowing the tumbleweed across the vast empty space in between each gag. On one occasion when the audience was particularly ancient, with the sound of beeping hearing aids and the clack of false teeth filling the air, the warm-up man, after straining to get a laugh out of them and not succeeding, resorted, in a fit of frustration, to dropping his trousers and showing them his arse. You could have heard a pin drop.
In 1984, Victoria asked me to join her, Duncan Preston, Celia Imrie and a host of other good actors in her new series Victoria Wood as Seen on TV. This could not have been a more different experience to the one at Granada. It was expertly and slickly produced by Geoff Posner, and was recorded on a Saturday night as if it were a live show. There was a sketch set in a shoe shop where I played a rather batty sales assistant and Vic played a customer. She had said beforehand that she wasn’t sure whether it would work because it was so off the wall, and I wasn’t sure how I should play it, but because the whole evening had a live-theatre feel to it, it put a creative edge on everything. Just as the lights went up for the sketch to begin, I decided on the spur of the moment to stumble about in the shop window, creating havoc and knocking shoes everywhere, and we were off; it was like the old Everyman days. The sketch was brilliantly written and would have worked anyway, without my cavorting about, but what was so gratifying for me was finding the character there and then, during the show itself. The studio audience had a ball. In one sketch, involving a very old waitress taking ages to serve soup to a couple, I thought we might have to stop the sketch, as the laughter went on and on and on, with people doubled up, and I could see Celia and Duncan, who were also in it, twitching with suppressed laughter.
As far as sketch writing is concerned, Victoria is in a league of her own. Her sketches are intelligent, brilliantly observed and, without exception, immensely funny. The soup sketch came out of the two of us ordering soup from an ancient waitress in a restaurant on Morecambe sea front. This small incident was the launchpad for an iconic sketch which, knowing her speed at writing both sketches and songs, probably took her a matter of minutes. Often when we were rehearsing As Seen on TV, Geoff Posner, who also directed, would ask her to write some extra material. She would go off to the corner of the rehearsal room and ten minutes later would be back with something utterly hilarious.
It was in this series that my favourite character of all time was born: Mrs Overall. ‘Acorn Antiques’ was a sketch based on a badly made soap, inspired by the early Crossroads, in which, much to our amusement, Duncan Preston had played the part of a character called Ginger Parsons very early on in his career. It was set in an antiques shop situated in a fictional town called Manchesterford, run by the snobbish and imperious Miss Babs (no relation), played brilliantly by Celia Imrie. Mrs O was the cleaner and what a gem of a part she was. We always filmed that particular sketch the day before the show, without an audience and thus without the consequent nerves and pressure. It was heaven. I can remember the first time, as I waited to make my entrance, realising that I could see the monitor and therefore I could make sure that my tray, upon which I had tea and macaroons for Miss Babs, could poke out into shot before I was due on. The whole crew joined in, making their own similar cock-ups: the boom being in shot; Mr Clifford (played by Duncan who is six-foot five) jumping up suddenly and banging his head on it; shots being slightly out of focus and clumsily positioned. People would come from all over the BBC to watch when we were recording.
The very first time we were to record, all the elements of Mrs Overall came together at once. I was being made up, which consisted of a bit of base and a bit of lipstick making a tiny, pinched, dark-red cupid’s bow; I was also meant to be wearing a wig from the BBC wig department. Victoria and I had gone up there to sort through and see whether there was anything we wanted for the show. In the process we tried on everything in our path, including beards, once discovering that the small goatee I was trying to stick to my chin was what was known as a merkin.
‘A what?’ I asked innocently.
‘A pubic wig.’
‘Oh blimey! I wondered what the hole was for! Oh, eugh!’ Finally we came across a quite severe-looking grey bun and thought that this would do fine. So there I was, sitting in front of the make-up mirror with the wig on, a wig stand next to me and my hair flattened down in preparation, restrained by a hairnet that made my head look rather small and pealike. I looked at myself in the mirror and then looked at Victoria. We both laughed, having the same thought at the same time: ‘I don’t need a wig, do I?’ And so she was born. The public loved ‘Acorn Antiques’, a fan club was formed and twenty years later people are still coming up to me in the street and firing Mrs Overall quotes at me. ‘What was it, muesli?’ or ‘Oh, I am pleased’. So when in 2004 Vic decided to set it to music for a production to be directed by Trevor Nunn in the West End, ‘Oh, I was pleased.’
In 1994 we did our second television film together, Pat and Margaret. The last one had been Happy Since I Met You, back in 1980. In some ways the two characters, Pat and Margaret, mirrored those of Julie and Maureen, in that both Julie and Pat, whom I played, were strident, verbose and ambitious, while Maureen and Margaret, played by Victoria, were shy, genuine and unambitious. In Pat and Margaret, Pat was Margaret’s famous older sister, from whom she had been separated at a young age. In the intervening years Pat had become a famous actress and had made it in America in a successful, Dynasty-style television series, whereas Margaret worked in a motorway service station cafe’, shovelling out chips all day long. In the story, the two sisters, unbeknownst to one another, are brought together in a ‘surprise, surprise’-type show and from there the drama unfolds. As Pat, I believe I had some of the funniest speeches ever written. She was a bitch and a very angry bitch at that. If only I could be that funny when I was that angry. However, my favourite line wasn’t one of mine; it belonged to Pat and Margaret’s mother, played by Shirley Stelfox, who also played my friend in Personal Services and is now a current regular in the soap Emmerdale. She said, on being confronted by her two daughters about her shortcomings as a mother, ‘I didn’t know what love was until I bred my first Afghan.’
I have played so many parts written by Victoria and every one has been of the once-in-a-lifetime variety. After reading them for the first time, every one has made me laugh out loud and left me gagging to slip into their shoes and get tottering. And Petula, in the comedy series Dinnerladies, has got to be up there with the very best of the best. Dinnerladies was set in a works canteen. Victoria played Bren, one of the said ladies, and I played her somewhat eccentric mother. We had scene after scene together, where she gave me all the best lines and simply stood there more or less as a feed.
She has been unutterably generous in her writing, more often than not giving the best lines to me or whoever it might be that she is sharing the scene with, and I have frequently said that, had I her talent for writing, I wouldn’t be giving those punchlines to anyone else. But that’s Victoria.