'Was born, lived, told a few jokes, knackered a few bras in the

Life, as Victoria Wood remarked, is not fair: ‘Some of us drink champagne in the fast lane, and some of us eat our sandwiches by the loose chippings on the A597.’ Comic genius, poet of ordinary British life, songwriter, sitcom and sketch-show writer, stand-up comedian and all-round national treasure, Wood excelled in far more ways than anyone could consider fair. If talent were champagne, she’d be a crateful of magnums.

But as a new film reveals, a decade after her death from cancer aged just 62, her upbringing was so cold, and her early career so fraught with rejection, that she struggled with a lack of self-confidence throughout her life.

Bouts of depression left her unable to function. She was tormented by feelings of inadequacy, convinced that she was fat, ugly and frumpy, always afraid that her gifts were waning and that she’d end up presenting TV travelogues and living on the embers of her past success.

I was a fan of her unique comedy from the mid-1970s when, after reaching the final of talent contest New Faces, she landed a spot on BBC1’s consumer show That’s Life!

Each week, she performed a topical song, usually written the day before broadcast, about a news item chosen almost at random by presenter Esther Rantzen.

I marvelled at her wordplay, and the ease with which she married journalism and comedy. Watching archive footage now, what’s even more remarkable is her sheer bravery – she looks nervous, but she never misses a word or flubs a line. That’s Life! had an audience of close to 20 million viewers, and Wood was just 23.

Victoria Wood Wood excelled in far more ways than anyone could consider fair. If talent were champagne, she’d be a crateful of magnums, writes Christopher Stevens

Wood with her husband Geoffrey Durham in 1992. Durham was her rock for 22 years, and her best critic, as well as her typist. But the marriage broke down – partly, she admitted to friends, because she was ‘difficult to live with’

What followed appeared joyful and almost effortless. Her first sketchshow, Wood And Walters, paired her with close friend Julie Walters, then on the cusp of Hollywood stardom – though it was Wood who wrote every word of the scripts.

A one-woman series, Victoria Wood On TV, followed, with its weekly soap send-up, Acorn Antiques… loved by so many fans that it eventually became a West End show. And of course there was the deliciously funny Ballad Of Barry And Freda, a paean to frustrated lust, with its cod-erotic lines such as, ‘Come and melt the buttons on my flame-proof nightie,’ and, ‘Beat me on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly’.

Wood set records with her one-woman stage show, including a 15-night sell-out run at the Royal Albert Hall, the venue’s record for the most shows in a run by any female performer or comedian. She wrote and starred in a brilliant sitcom, Dinnerladies, and went on to write, direct and star in films such as Housewife, 49, for which she won two Baftas – as writer/creator and best actress.

Her Christmas sketch shows were an annual TV highlight, and everything she wrote or appeared in was unmissable. Victoria Wood was, quite simply, without equal.

She was fiercely private and disliked giving interviews, so I never had the chance to meet her. Still, I felt I knew her – until her death in April 2016, at the end of a gruelling illness that she hid from the Press. A series of television tributes by friends and famous colleagues, and an admiring biography by Jasper Rees, painted a desperately sad picture of a woman very different from the ebullient, fearless performer in her garish jackets and ties, with a broad smile and big heart.

Away from her audience, she could be racked with anxiety, and never forgot or forgave a criticism. When her local newsagent in Morecambe offered his views on a new TV show, telling her it was ‘not very good last night, Victoria. We expect more from you than that,’ she was so embarrassed that, rather than face him again, she moved house.

Wood and Durham married in 1980 in a ceremony so quiet that no family and only two friends were invited as witnesses. They had Heinz spaghetti on toast for the wedding breakfast

Wood performing in 1988. She was tormented by feelings of inadequacy, convinced that she was fat, ugly and frumpy, always afraid that her gifts were waning and that she’d end up presenting TV travelogues and living on the embers of her past success

Though she was without peer as an observer of other people, meeting strangers unsettled her. In 1996, aged 43, she made a one-off documentary for the BBC about Northern railways. On the first day’s filming, a fan recognised her and, rather the worse for wear, asked her to hold his drink while he hunted for some money to give to Comic Relief.

Wood was horrified. ‘I don’t want to meet any more people,’ she told the director. ‘I don’t really like talking to people.’

Victoria Wood’s hidden heartbreak as she battled marital strife with husband Geoffrey Durham

This introverted side to her character comes to the fore in Becoming Victoria Wood, which opened in cinemas on Friday and airs on TV on the U&Gold channel next month. Charting her long slog to success, the 90-minute film also reveals far more about her difficult childhood. Her authorised biography covers her school years in just 40 pages, but it’s clear that she was haunted by the loneliness of her adolescence.

The youngest of four, she was not so much the baby of the family as an afterthought. Her father Stanley was an insurance underwriter, and the family was comparatively well off, with a large bungalow on top of a hill in Bury, Lancashire. She told chat show host Michael Parkinson: ‘It was like a prefab on steroids that my mother had partitioned at random with pieces of plywood.’

‘My mother always famously claimed to have no sense of humour,’ she said, ‘which I think was true. I think she was depressed for a lot of the time when I was a child. She didn’t really want to talk.’

Stanley Wood was a part-time writer, who published several novels under the pseudonym Ross Graham. One, Mrs Clutterbuck Over Europe, was the tale of a Northern housewife who rolls up her sleeves to give Hitler a clip round the ear. His extra earnings meant the family could afford a car and a caravan. The family drove across Europe one summer, reaching Vienna. Victoria was also able to have a television in her own bedroom – a rarity for children in those days – and a piano. Her father encouraged her to play by writing the names of the notes on the keys in pencil, and leaving her to puzzle the rest out.

Wood with Durham with their two children when the comic received her OBE in 1997

A young Wood. The youngest of four, Wood was not so much the baby of the family as an afterthought

‘I had a very serious streak of ambition,’ she said, ‘and when I sat on my own in this strange house at the piano, I would twist round as if to an audience.’

Friends at Bury Grammar School never met her parents. Talking about her for the first time on camera, one says: ‘When we would take her home, after she’d been at my house to have tea and play duets, she would want to be dropped off at the bottom of the hill. She walked back up to her house by herself.’

Another explains: ‘I remember going to Vic’s house. It was quite windswept and bleak. I think I was the only person from school who did go there.

Statue of Victoria Wood is toppled over by a taxi outside the library where she used to steal books

‘There would be no parents or anybody cooking you tea. I got the feeling that she just went to her room when she got home and hibernated in there.’

In her loneliness, Wood said, she ‘used to eat from the minute I got out of school really to when I went to bed’. That sense of abandonment was captured, 20 years later, in a wonderful sketch about a schoolgirl called Chrissie (played by Wood) who announces that she’s going to swim the Channel. Her parents, Cliff and Joan, are barely interested – they tell reporters that, rather than accompanying her in a backup boat, they thought they might take the opportunity to go to London and watch a show.

When Chrissie fails to return, the parents are still unbothered. ‘Oh, I’m sure she’ll turn up eventually,’ Cliff says vaguely.

Always embarrassed about being seen to make a fuss, Wood would try to downplay her unhappiness. ‘I don’t want to make it sound like I had an absolutely terrible childhood,’ she said. And then, talking about herself in the third person, as though it was easier to feel sympathy for anyone but herself, she added: ‘I think she was neglected, really, looking back at her.’

Wood and Durham during a comedy sketch in 1982. After her marriage broke up, Wood never had another serious romantic relationship

But if those years of emotional undernourishment are painful to discover, what came next was excruciating. A series of lucky breaks initially failed to translate into lasting success.

Her appearance on New Faces was marred when the presenter got her name wrong, calling her ‘Joanna’ – not once, but twice. One judge offered some private advice afterwards: ‘Showbusiness has moved on and you’re doing a sort of act that no one wants any more.’

EXCLUSIVE
ITVX content warning on Victoria Wood’s ‘Let’s Do It’ because lyrics ‘may offend modern audiences’

Even the stint on That’s Life!, which I always imagined had made her a household name, was followed by a long spell of unemployment and a period of depression during which she would sleep for 14 hours a day.

She toured the working men’s clubs and comedy venues, playing to tiny audiences of just a dozen or so, and suffered endless heckling that was often plain drunken abuse. The venues were so intimidating that, even when she tried to introduce jokes into her act, she didn’t dare get up from the piano.

But perseverance, very slowly, began to pay off. She always remembered the first joke she wrote that was guaranteed to get a laugh. Playing a naive schoolgirl who is terrified she might be pregnant, though she’s never

had sex, she goes to the town library for advice. The librarian asks, ‘Where are you in your menstrual cycle?’

‘Taurus,’ she replies.

Wood was without peer as an observer of other people, meeting strangers unsettled her

Wood with fellow comedian Julie Walters who introduced her to Durham who was her neighbour

The librarian, of course, was played by her friend Julie Walters, already an established actress and veteran of the highbrow Royal Court Theatre. They first worked together in a revue of sketches and songs written by Wood, called In At The Death, staged in a tiny room above a pub in Shepherd’s Bush Green.

Victoria Wood ‘hid cancer battle for four years and was determined nobody would find out’

Walters’ next job was playing Shakespeare at the Old Vic. Wood went on the dole again, writing a play called Talent, about a brash, confident girl called Julie and her shy, ‘dumpy’ friend, Maureen.

Two years later, Talent was commissioned by ITV and Wood’s career inched further forward. Critics loved her saucy postcard humour, and lines like, ‘I always thought coq au vin was love in a lorry’ – a world away from the masculine, Left-wing ‘alternative comedy’ that was in vogue at the time.

Walters also introduced Wood to her neighbour, a young conjuror who lived in the bedsit downstairs. His name was Geoffrey Durham, whom Wood married in 1980, in a ceremony so quiet that no family and only two friends were invited as witnesses. They had Heinz spaghetti on toast for the wedding breakfast.

Durham was her rock for 22 years, and her best critic, as well as her typist. But the marriage broke down – partly, she admitted to friends, because she was ‘difficult to live with’. She could be difficult to work with, too. On Dinnerladies, which ran for 16 episodes from 1998 to 2000, she was ruthless with the cast, imposing numerous changes between dress rehearsal and filming. Actress Anne Reid said: ‘She was terribly strict. She had no bedside manner at all. She couldn’t bear it if it wasn’t perfect.’

After her marriage broke up, she never had another serious romantic relationship.

Wood’s Christmas sketch shows were an annual TV highlight, and everything she wrote or appeared in was unmissable. Victoria Wood was, quite simply, without equal

‘Maybe I should start having an affair,’ she would tell audiences, ‘because somebody will want to write a biography of me one day, and there’ll be nothing to put in it.

‘Perhaps I’ll just settle for a very, very thin biography. Was born, lived, told a few jokes, knackered a few bras in the tumble drier, died.’

Victoria Wood, all-round comic genius, deserves so much more than that. A couple of months after her death, Manchester’s Victoria Station was renamed Victoria Wood station for an hour. Fans turned up in pinnies and headscarves with their hair in curlers.

It would be a fitting tribute to make that name permanent.

Becoming Victoria Wood is in cinemas, and will air in February on U&Gold