Abigoliah: Hello there. This is All British Comedy Explained, the podcast where I finally learn about all the British comedy shows I’ve been missing out on all these years. I’m a stand-up comedian and American, Abigoliah Schamaun, and my guide through the comedy labyrinth is my good friend and writer, Tom Salinsky.
Tom: Hello there.
Abigoliah: Hello. Tell me what we will be watching today.
Tom: All right, so let me just do a quick recap. The Goon Show in the 1950s inspired Peter Cook, who invented satire in 1961, and Monty Python, who invented being silly in 1969. And then Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson invented hitting each other in 1982. What do all these pioneers have in common?
Abigoliah: They’re all men.
Tom: They’re all dudes. Yeah, right. And as we said at the end of our last episode, this is kind of what comedy was. Even anti-racist, anti-sexist alternative comedy was kind of a boys’ club, with French and Saunders bringing up the rear. So really, the first person who broke through in this new landscape was Victoria Wood. And the most complete incarnation of her style of comedy is her television series Victoria Wood As Seen On TV. This started in 1985. That’s the year of “We Are the World”, the charity single.
Abigoliah: Also, that is the year I was born.
Tom: So this is the first thing we’re watching which is within your lifetime.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Just about. Well, no.
Abigoliah: No. Yeah, yeah.
Tom: It’s ’82… ’84.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah. I just missed The Young Ones.
Tom: It’s also the year that Reagan and Gorbachev met for the first time. Courteney Cox became the first person to say “period” on American network television in a Tampax commercial.
Abigoliah: Good for her.
Tom: Yes. And it’s the year of Back to the Future, which made Michael J. Fox a star. Okay, so this was a great year.
Abigoliah: Big fan of ’85.
Tom: So now let me take you back a little bit further. Let me take you back to the late 1960s. So if you are a precociously funny teenage girl growing up in the north of England in the late 1960s, who are your role models?
Abigoliah: Growing up in the 1960s?
Tom: You might be watching early Monty Python episodes on TV, but all the people being funny are men.
Abigoliah: In the ’60s. Yeah. You have Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, The Goon Show.
Tom: In that pre-Python show At Last the 1948 Show, there is one female actor among the cast of five – four men who do all the writing, and the lovely Aimi MacDonald, as she styled herself. And the only joke about the lovely Aimi MacDonald is that she’s lovely and she’s dim.
Abigoliah: So that was her only comedy role model at the time.
Tom: I mean, not her only role model, but things like that. Women in these comedy shows played the pretty-girl parts and were only very occasionally allowed to be funny. Not never – I’m sure people are thinking of counterexamples now and shouting at their pod devices – but rarely. So about the only role model she would have had was somebody called Joyce Grenfell. Now, I’m nearly 100% certain that name means nothing to you.
Abigoliah: Absolutely not.
Tom: Until I started doing the research for this episode, I had no idea that Victoria Wood had ever been aware of Joyce Grenfell, though I knew that was possible. Unlike Phyllis Diller or Carol Burnett or people like that, which I think she would have had no way of seeing, Joyce Grenfell was a female comedy writer-performer, and her stock-in-trade was that she would do these monologues where she was talking to an imaginary group which we couldn’t see or hear. And her signature bit was that she was the kind of very proper teacher trying to keep control of the class. And her catchphrase, if you like, or her most famous line, was just, “George, dear, don’t do that.” And of course, we don’t know what it is that George is doing, but it’s left to our imaginations.
Tom: She played a wide range of characters of different classes, and she appears in some British comedy films of the time. And Victoria Wood saw her live in Buxton when she was nine years old.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: And she said afterwards that was a turning point. “I didn’t know you could be on stage just by yourself,” and that’s what set me off. So Victoria Wood is studying theatre at university.
Abigoliah: So before you do that, I’m just going to tell you – I once was at a comedy festival and I shared a cab ride with a British comedian-actress who shall remain nameless because I didn’t ask her if I could tell this story. But she had done, in the ’80s, sketch shows and been on TV, and of course she’s a national treasure. So naturally I didn’t know who the hell she was. But she mentioned that at one point she thought about going and doing an Edinburgh Fringe show herself. Having done sketch shows with other comedians of her time, she wanted to go up, and one of her male colleagues was like, “Oh, you? Why would anyone want to listen to you for an hour?” And she never did it. And I just want to say, the fact that Victoria Wood, at a young age, saw a woman and went, “I can do this.” We go to the ’80s where I’m talking about a comedian who was then told, “Why would anyone listen?” and she didn’t find an inspiration. This is why representation matters. This is why.
Tom: One hundred percent.
Abigoliah: This is why. Off mic, I’ll tell you who it was.
Tom: Do you know why Whoopi Goldberg is on Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Abigoliah: Because she’s awesome.
Tom: No. She lobbied for the part.
Abigoliah: Did she really?
Tom: Because she told a story to the producers that when she was little, she saw Nichelle Nichols as Uhura on the bridge of the Enterprise and went running into the kitchen to talk to her mum, saying, “Mum, there’s a Black lady on TV and she’s not a maid.”
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: Representation really matters.
Abigoliah: Yeah, representation really matters.
Tom: So, I mean, Victoria Wood doesn’t have access to this. So she’s studying theatre at university, and while she’s basically a teenager, she appears on a television talent show called New Faces, where she plays the piano and sings a comedy song about being serially engaged. Off the back of this, she’s asked to perform similar items on the BBC show That’s Life.
Abigoliah: When you say serially engaged, does that mean she gets engaged over and over and over again?
Tom: Okay, cool. Have you ever seen That’s Life?
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: It would have finished long before you came to this country. But it was a kind of magazine programme hosted by a woman called Esther Rantzen. And it was a slightly weird combination of people sending in photographs of rude-looking vegetables and then incredibly important campaigns about things like sexual violence.
Abigoliah: Sounds like an Instagram feed.
Tom: Something like that. And then she met a woman called Julie Walters. Does that name ring any bells?
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: She’s quite a big film star.
Abigoliah: Would I know her if I saw her?
Tom: Well – so you talked about watching the stage version of–
Abigoliah: Oh, Shirley Valentine. That’s her.
Tom: No, but the same writer, Willy Russell, wrote Educating Rita, which was filmed with Michael Caine and Julie Walters.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Anyway, they both appeared in the same revue show in 1978, and then Victoria Wood wrote a play with Julie Walters in mind, and a television executive for ITV called Peter Eckersley began to champion her. And he commissioned a TV version of this play and two more follow-ups, and then suggested that Wood and Walters do a sketch show together, which was called Wood and Walters.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But Eckersley died in between the pilot and the series.
Abigoliah: Oh, okay.
Tom: And Victoria Wood felt that without his guidance, the series was suffering. So Wood and Walters has been completely forgotten about now. I managed to get – how many? – six episodes.
Abigoliah: They got six out.
Tom: I’ve got it on DVD, and you can see the talent. You can see that the voice is there, but it’s not fully formed. And it looks like a variety show. It looks like a cheap variety show. Okay, so she’s, like, wandering in and out of this little band, doing stuff to camera very awkwardly. They’re kind of doing two-person stand-up to introduce the show at the beginning, because it’s called Wood and Walters, so they kind of need to be presented as a team, even though they’re doing all the writing. So they’re not really a team in that sense. So it’s all a bit awkward.
So she goes off and does more live stuff, and she comes back to TV a few years later with a bit more experience, a bit more clout, and a bit more control. So for her BBC series Victoria Wood As Seen On TV, she chose the director, she chose the cast, and in so doing she established a company of actors that she worked with for the rest of her career.
Abigoliah: So Victoria Wood As Seen On TV – is it a sitcom or a sketch show?
Tom: A sketch show.
Abigoliah: A lot of sketch shows – this landmarks season is a lot of sketch shows.
Tom: We’ll come to sitcoms down the line.
Abigoliah: And then one thing I do know – one thing I do know – is that after this, Victoria Wood did make another show called dinnerladies.
Tom: That’s right.
Abigoliah: And I know that because people have yelled at me on our social media about dinnerladies. So, okay, so she took total control of this. This is her vision. I love this. I love this girl bossing it here. And where did it – where did it air? BBC?
Tom: BBC Two.
Abigoliah: BBC Two. Okay.
Tom: So when you watch a sketch show – you watch something like Not the Nine O’Clock News or a writer-performer show like Monty Python’s Flying Circus – there’s a long list of writers. On Flying Circus, everybody wrote and performed. On a sketch show like Not the Nine O’Clock News, people would send sketches in, because a sketch is a short little bit of material. And so when you’re just beginning to find your comedy voice, a sketch is a much easier thing to write than a sitcom.
So at the end of an episode of a sketch show, often you see this long, long list of writers – or like a couple of star names and then “with additional material by” another 20 people. Victoria Wood wrote all 12 episodes and the Christmas special of Victoria Wood As Seen On TV on her own.
Abigoliah: Did she also have a breakdown like Spike Milligan?
Tom: No, she didn’t.
Abigoliah: No, she didn’t. ’Cause women can do everything better. Yes, we can. Mental health is a real problem, and we are not making fun of it here on All British Comedy, Explained. So here’s my question. As we’ve been talking about Victoria Wood As Seen On TV, as it’s been coming down the pipeline – I knew we were going to watch it, I knew we were going to watch it – I assumed it came out in the ’70s. By the way, you discussed it. You said it came out in ’85.
Tom: Recorded in ’84. Went out early ’85.
Abigoliah: And when we’ve talked about the alt comedy scene in London, Ab Fab and Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French are always attached to that group. But if this came out in ’85, where was Victoria Wood in connection with Ab Fab?
Tom: And they’re all later.
Abigoliah: And The Young Ones.
Tom: They’re all later.
Abigoliah: Wait – no, but The Young Ones came out in ’81, ’82.
Tom: But like I said, my take on this – and people may write in and contradict me – my take on this is that, yes, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders are there, and a couple of other women, but they’re all routinely sidelined. It’s really not until Absolutely Fabulous–
Abigoliah: Which came out in the ’90s.
Tom: Late ’80s, I think. I’d have to look that up. I think the first series was something like ’89.
Abigoliah: Where’s Victoria living in the country? Like if all of–
Tom: These are in the north. She’s in Manchester and Birmingham.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So she’s not part of that same scene.
Abigoliah: Okay. That’s – I guess that’s what I’m asking. Not on TV, but like in the scene, where they’re offering – she’s in a completely different part of the country, which makes a difference.
Tom: So she’s not part of that movement that’s happening in London. She doesn’t get to go to the Comic Strip or the Comedy Store. There’s a whole other circuit of the northern working men’s clubs, which we’ll probably come to at some point, but she wouldn’t have been very comfortable there either, I don’t think. That’s why her route in is kind of through drama. It’s through writing comedy plays, and it’s through appearing as a guest performer – just singing one song – on other people’s shows like That’s Life.
In fact, there’s a series I’ve referred to a couple of times called Saturday Live, which was the British – not quite the British version of Saturday Night Live, but definitely influenced by it. And that was early to mid ’80s and made stars of Ben Elton and Harry Enfield and Fry and Laurie. And just out of interest, I went and looked through some of those listings – who was on each show.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And there are some women who get early exposure on those shows – Jo Brand, for example, I think does her first telly on Saturday Live. But there are at least a couple of shows where literally every single performer, including the music acts, are all men, and we just didn’t notice. That was just, “Oh, sure, that’s what that looks like.”
But occasionally there’d be somebody like Pamela Stephenson, who was the fourth member of Not the Nine O’Clock News hosting, and so therefore she’d be in a lot of material. But if there was no female host and there was no female music act, there might be a female stand-up – but probably only one. And when there isn’t a guest female stand-up, there might be no women on stage at all for an entire two-hour show. And that was just not noticed. That was just, “Sure, that’s what life is like.”
Abigoliah: And Victoria Wood is up in a different part of the country, so she’s not a part of this alt new generation of comedians. As you mentioned before in the last episode, she was peerless, as you said.
Tom: Yes, exactly. You know, she doesn’t have any role models.
Abigoliah: This is gonna make me cry. But did you ever meet Janey Godley?
Tom: No, no, but I know who you mean.
Abigoliah: Janey Godley just died very recently. She was an amazing stand-up from Glasgow. Her daughter is also now a very, very talented comedian. Janey – I met at Edinburgh before I moved to the UK – but when I was coming over, everyone was like, “This woman knows what’s up.” Nothing but nice to me. Went to a show, offered – was like, “Want to go get a tea?” One of those, like, “Oh my God, this person’s talking to me.”
And when she passed, she never did Live at the Apollo. She had success, but she never became a household name here in the UK. And when she passed, I think it was Susie McCabe described her as: she was the first one, she was the only one, she was peerless. And I’m very emotional this week. But, like, when you describe Victoria Wood, it’s like she’s off – because Janey was in Glasgow, it was a different scene than what was happening down south. She’s in Manchester. I think this is very interesting.
Tom: But the other thing I think is worth pointing out is I don’t think Victoria Wood necessarily saw herself as doing it “for the women”, or was aware, obviously, that – like the first thing you see, we’ll see when we watch one of these episodes – is her standing behind a microphone. You could not turn on your television in the UK and see a woman standing behind a microphone. You just couldn’t. She was the only one.
But I don’t think she experienced herself as breaking the mould or doing something important. She just had this comic voice. She just had these ideas that made her laugh, and she wanted to share them. And this was her way of doing that.
And the shows were enormously popular. By the end of the show’s run, it was the most watched programme on BBC Two, and both series and the special won BAFTAs.
Abigoliah: That’s amazing. Can I give you a hot take? Hot take. As far as Victoria Wood getting her own series and not considering doing it for the women’s cause – I think most women in comedy step on stage and we are not considering the fact that we’re doing it for, or that we’re breaking ground, or that we’re the only one there, or that we’re fighting the good fight. We’re just doing it because we want to be funny. With the exception of one person, I really don’t think any woman starts on a project going, “I am doing this to better women’s chances in entertainment,” the only exception being The Guilty Feminist podcast.
Tom: Arguably, yes.
Abigoliah: Yeah. But I think it’s interesting because, okay, she broke these barriers and she created this hit show and she didn’t have any role models and she was completely peerless. And I think that’s a lot to put on someone. Like, she probably was just like, “I just want to make a show like other people make a show,” and then people start asking you about it, and then you have to have an opinion. And, like – not that you – as a woman in comedy, sometimes I like talking about it with you, I like talking about it with people, but sometimes I’m like, I don’t want to be a freaking spokesperson or role model. I just want to tell a joke about going on a roller coaster. Like, that’s what I wanted to do tonight.
The only time in my own career I think about women in comedy and my work within it is when I do badly on stage, because if you go out and do stand-up and you have a bad show, people will go, “I don’t like that comedian.” If I go out and have a bad show, people go, “I don’t think women are funny.” That’s the only time I feel the responsibility – when I have a bad one.
Tom: But everyone liked Victoria Wood. Yeah, she was, so–
Abigoliah: She didn’t have to think about it at all. Get that money. Get those BAFTAs, girl. That’s what I’m saying.
Tom: And partly because I think she didn’t have any role models. The show’s a little bit unusual compared to other shows at the time. It’s a real mix. There’s bits of stand-up, there are sketches, there are songs. Each episode includes one mockumentary – one documentary-style film shot on location.
The element that became most famous–
Abigoliah: By the way, you’re saying this was a bit different. What you’ve just described to me is literally Saturday Night Live.
Tom: I mean, I guess.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Like, that is the structure of–
Tom: A variety show. But by this time, things like Not the Nine O’Clock News had come along, and that was starting to seem a bit old-fashioned. But there’s something so fresh about the way Victoria Wood does it that it doesn’t feel like that. And the blend is different as well.
Abigoliah: You keep referencing Not the Nine O’Clock News like I know what it is, and I have purposely not watched it because I know it’s coming up. But yeah.
Tom: Not the Nine O’Clock News was one of those ones which arguably is a game-changer. Yeah. But I was tossing up between Not the Nine O’Clock News and The Young Ones as which is more representative of alternative comedy. And Not the Nine O’Clock News is earlier, but I think The Young Ones is more influential. So I went with The Young Ones. But we will do Not the Nine O’Clock News at some point.
The most celebrated element of As Seen on TV was Acorn Antiques, which was a send-up of the incredibly cheap soap opera Crossroads. You ever heard of Crossroads?
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: It’s off the air now, but it was famous for being shoddily put together, with boom microphones in shot and so on. And so she wrote the scripts for the first six episodes, and then the whole crew got in on the act of, “Oh, we can do this as an extra gag. We can do this as an extra gag.” And then when it came to the second series and she wanted to do more Acorn Antiques, suddenly she was under enormous pressure to put in those jokes in the script that everyone else had put in when they did the first series.
But that’s one of the most famous elements of the whole thing. You don’t have to have seen Crossroads to get the joke.
Abigoliah: Okay. Cool.
Tom: But a lot of things that might seem arbitrary – like the way the credits move in and out from the side of the screen – is a direct reference to Crossroads. And she also knew when to yield the spotlight. She’s a brilliant performer, but she’d found an incredible partner in Julie Walters.
Abigoliah: Sorry – you know why she knows when to yield the spotlight? You want to know why? Why do you think that is, Tom Salinsky? ’Cause she’s a woman. ’Cause she’s a woman.
Tom: So there’s a couple of bits in Wood and Walters where she gives monologues to other people, including – I had no idea this was the case, by the way, until I viewed these episodes literally last week – she wrote a monologue for Rik Mayall to do in something like 1982 or ’83, maybe even before The Young Ones, where he’s playing this clearly very lecherous “new man” who understands what it’s like to be a woman. It’s very funny.
But now I really had to struggle. I could have done another “not only, but also”-style best-of, but I didn’t see the need. So I’ve had to make a tough choice.
Abigoliah: You know why?
Abigoliah: ’Cause she’s a woman. ’Cause she’s a woman. We don’t have to pick and choose. It’s all fucking gold, because it had to be to be this good. It had to be to be a landmark.
Tom: She created a character called Kitty, who would chat to the audience about various petty grievances – a part she clearly could have played herself, but instead she gave it to Patricia Routledge.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Patricia Routledge had been acting since 1952 at the time that Victoria Wood cast her. She’d recently been featured in one of Alan Bennett’s solo plays in the Talking Heads series, and then immediately afterwards she was cast in the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, which ran for five years and made her a star in her early 60s.
So Keeping Up Appearances again is probably one of those shows that people have been throwing at us in the comments – “Why aren’t you watching Keeping Up Appearances?” We will watch Keeping Up Appearances. It’s terrific.
And then – but there were like two or three sketches I really wanted to include. I definitely wanted to include the song that’s in the series two episode. And then I was going back and forth, and I haven’t been able to find room for Kitty. But if you type “Victoria Wood Kitty” into YouTube, I think there’s like four of those monologues that all come right up.
So that’s the plan.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Are you excited?
Abigoliah: I am. I am really excited about this. I’m looking forward. Yeah, let’s do it. I want to see what happens.
Tom: Right. That seemed to go down well.
Abigoliah: She can do everything.
Tom: She’s incredible.
Abigoliah: She can sing. She can do stand-up. She can act. She can write sketches. She’s – she’s a triple threat.
Tom: A quadruple threat. She’s amazing.
Abigoliah: She’s got it all. She’s got it all.
Tom: And just to get this out of the way, I don’t know quite what happened – some sort of fat-finger frenzy. Having fully intended to show you series two, episode one, and having announced beforehand that’s what we were going to do, I somehow managed to show you series two, episode six. And now, that does have the benefit that one of my favourite sketches of all time is at the end of that, and that was my third choice of episode to show you. So it kind of worked out, but it meant you nearly didn’t see “The Ballad of Barry and Freda”, so we went back and watched that as well.
Abigoliah: Yes. And that’s the name of the song?
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Okay. Because I was just going to call it “Let’s Do It”.
Tom: Everyone calls it “Let’s Do It”.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Well, you know, we accidentally watched the wrong episode, but I personally think that’s fine, because this is definitely something I want to go back and watch more of. How do I see it? Is it streaming anywhere?
Tom: I haven’t checked. It’s possibly on iPlayer. I will have a look and I’ll put that in the show notes. Otherwise, I would have thought the DVD would be relatively inexpensive. And there is much more Victoria Wood material out there, but that’s a terrific place to start.
Abigoliah: I loved it. I thought her – first of all, her clothes. Her opening monologue or stand-up – I was like, that first jacket that she was in, series one, episode five, I want that exact jacket. And I thought her stand-up was great.
Tom: Let’s just talk about that for a minute, because actually there are other things that are noteworthy about that stand-up as well as it being a woman one, which is that it’s very recognisable to us now as what you might call observational comedy, but that in itself was quite new and quite rare.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: So I mentioned the northern working men’s clubs, and when we talked about The Young Ones, I said that one of the things they were kicking against were the comedians on TV who wore frilly shirts and told mother-in-law jokes. And that was the majority of comedy. And so then people like Alexei Sayle and Rik Mayall come along, who are kind of deconstructing stand-up, or really kind of doing a sketch behind a couple of microphones, and they aren’t really doing stand-up at all.
But this storytelling thing – there were a couple of people doing it. Jasper Carrott, also from the northern working men’s club circuit, was doing what we’d recognise as observational comedy and had been since the mid ’70s. And Dave Allen, who is an Irish comedian who did his early television work in Australia, was definitely doing observational stand-up and tackling subjects like sex and religion, which were not normally talked about. And we definitely want to show you some Dave Allen at some point.
Interestingly – I don’t know what this says – but both Jasper Carrott and Dave Allen habitually did their stand-up sitting on bar stools.
Abigoliah: I mean, that’s a New York comedy trope right there.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: When I first moved here, what I found really disconcerting about being on stage in the UK is that they don’t give you a stool.
Tom: Oh, right.
Abigoliah: And it’s not necessarily that I want to sit down, but it’s a place to put your drink and specifically put your notes. New material nights – when I first came over here, people were always writing their notes on their hand. I’m like, why would you do that? And then I realised you have nowhere to put your freaking notebook.
Specifically that first monologue in series one, episode five – a lot of that still works today. Like, it holds up. It felt really fresh even to me now. Like, I see what you mean when you’re like, it was fresh. It was very accessible.
I loved the line – especially because it could have gone dirty and it didn’t – like the thin walls in the hotel. “I could hear the nose hairs of the guy next to me rustling” is much more clever than the first idea, which would be “you could hear people banging next door”. Or when the waiter brings her food in tight trousers – again, what’s the quickest joke? You could see the outline of his cock. But the fact that it’s like, “I could read the washing instructions…”
Tom: On his underwear.
Abigoliah: On his underwear. It’s that example of a writer going the step past the first idea, the easiest idea. And that kind of locked me into how clever she was.
I didn’t know Celia Imrie was going to be in it.
Tom: Oh yes. Yeah, yeah.
Abigoliah: That was exciting, because I’ve only seen her as – as I said as we were watching – I’ve only seen her as, like, an older woman. You know, I’ve seen her in The Diplomat and I’ve seen her in Traitors.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: And so that was really exciting. I just assumed she was one of those serious acting types. I didn’t know she got her start in comedy.
Tom: Certainly the first time I remember seeing Celia Imrie is as part of this Victoria Wood repertory company, and she’s in dinnerladies as well, and she was in other Victoria Wood projects after this.
Abigoliah: Okay, so did Victoria Wood – kind of once she picked her crew, that was the crew that kind of followed her through?
Tom: There are other people who kind of come in and out. So Anne Reid, who you didn’t see, but you would have done if I’d shown you the right episode, is another older actress she worked with several times. And then in the first episode we watched with the divorce, that couple are Denis Lawson and Maureen Lipman, who were both pretty good gets. Maureen Lipman was all over British television in the ’70s and ’80s.
Abigoliah: She looked familiar to me, and she also sounded like – see, I meant to look up the guy before we started, but we just picked up the mics again. She doesn’t have a brother or something?
Tom: Not that I know of.
Abigoliah: What else has she been in? Because there was something–
Tom: She was actually most famous in this country for a long time for a series of adverts for British Telecom.
Abigoliah: Okay. I would not have seen those.
Tom: She played an overbearing Jewish grandmother. And eventually – like Victoria Wood said in her stand-up – “the only thing people like these days are adverts”. People tune in to see whether the boy from the commercials has got his O-levels. And there was a very famous BT ad with Maureen Lipman’s character consoling her grandson, who’s failed all his exams. She says he didn’t pass anything, and he says, “I think it’s geography.” And she says, “You got an ology? You get an ology, you’re a scientist.”
Abigoliah: I like that.
Tom: When she was eventually asked what the name of the character was, she said, “Oh, it’s obvious. Beattie.”
Abigoliah: I like that.
Tom: So she had her own sitcom, Agony, in the early ’80s as well. So yeah, she’s a very well-respected actress. And then Denis Lawson was not only in the original Star Wars, he’s actually Ewan McGregor’s uncle.
Abigoliah: That’s Ewan McGregor’s uncle? Because I’ve heard that connection. Who was he in the original Star Wars?
Tom: He’s just one of the pilots that does the attack on the Death Star. Wedge, I think his name is.
Abigoliah: Oh, that’s really cool.
Tom: So lots of people wanted to work with her, even as early as this. And she could get people. And with Maureen Lipman again, she’s also from Leeds or Bradford or somewhere like that, so she kind of felt like part of the family.
Abigoliah: What I was trying to say during the “Just an Ordinary School” sketch – when they were like, “Do you know any working-class people?” and they’re like, “Oh, no.” Do you remember when Rishi Sunak was prime minister for – it was about five minutes – and this video surfaced of him, I guess at Eton, being like – oh, I need to look – remind me afterwards, I’ll look this up.
Tom: I’ll drop it in.
Abigoliah: But it was something like someone being like, “Do you know any working-class people?” and he’s like, “Well, of course I know all sorts of – well, not working-class.” It was, like, verbatim that sort of situation, that when we were watching it I was like, “Oh my God, this actually happened in real life.”
I will say, the ending to that sketch – when she accepts the award and gives a heartfelt speech – I thought there was going to be a big laugh at the end, and either I missed it or it just ended.
Tom: Yeah, that’s not got a punchline, that sketch, which is a shame. But like I said, she’s writing all of this on her own.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: I think one of the things she learned doing Wood and Walters is you need to write more sketches than you have room for. With Wood and Walters, she had six half-hours and she wrote six half-hours. And the result is that the quality of sketches in Wood and Walters is pretty variable. Now, in any sketch show, there are going to be hits and misses – that’s just inevitable. There are going to be highs and lows. But she wrote 25% more material than she needed for the As Seen on TV shows, because she’d learned you can’t always predict what’s going to work and what isn’t. You have to keep having choices. You have to give yourself a superfluity of material so you can throw stuff away.
Abigoliah: How much time did she have between episodes to write? Because, like, the mind – to be able to write stand-up and sketches–
Tom: And songs.
Abigoliah: And songs – in my head, that’s much harder than writing just 30 minutes of stand-up or just 30 minutes of sketches or just 30 minutes–
Tom: I mean, I think the advantage is if you’ve written enough stand-up for the day, you can now switch to writing a song instead.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And keep yourself alert that way. These would have been done as a block. She would have had material for six shows before they started rehearsing and filming.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And then she was off on tour, and then they came back and did another series of six.
Abigoliah: And when she’d go on tour, would she do a little bit of everything like we just saw, or was she doing straight stand-up on tour?
Tom: Stand-up. But there was also some character stuff, but it was all monologues. So one of the things that struck me – one of the reasons I wanted to show you series one, episode five in particular – apart from the fact that I think it’s incredibly funny – is that Hamlet sketch.
Abigoliah: I highlighted that. I really enjoyed that.
Tom: But the structure of that is exactly the same as Joyce Grenfell, because she’s talking to a group of people we can’t see or hear. So it’s a very theatrical convention, and I don’t think you would put that on television in that form today.
Abigoliah: Well, you know, now that you say that out loud – I didn’t want to say this, because it sounds like an insult – that sketch looked to me like sketches I would see in New York at UCB, at the People’s Improv Theater, when sketch groups were forming. And then, like, you know, you do a big group sketch and one person would step forward and do a monologue sketch like that. Or someone would do a one-person sketch show, and there’d always be a sketch like that.
But I haven’t seen one of those in years, because you’re right – it’s a live performance thing, where you step forward as a character and deliver to a fake audience, essentially. It was really refreshing. I didn’t want to say it reminded me of, like, all the new sketch, because it makes it sound like it wasn’t good or that it was amateur. And I didn’t see it as amateur. It was just – it was a style of comedy I haven’t seen in a really long time.
Tom: And there’s so much more apparent desire on the part of television audiences – I don’t know if it’s real or if it’s imagined by directors and producers – to make television episodes look like real life, to feel real. And there are things you can do when you don’t have real people there that you can’t do. Julie Walters is in absolute control of the timing, and nothing will prevent her from getting the timing exactly the way that she wants it.
If you’ve got a whole bunch of other actors to worry about, and you’re trying to mix their sound levels with her sound levels and cut back to them every so often and so on, you get a different result. But I don’t think you get a better one. You get a more realistic one, but I don’t think you get a funnier one.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And every line in that sketch is an absolute diamond. Every single one. I don’t care if it is Hamlet. It’s got to be fun, fun, fun. It’s devastating.
Abigoliah: “Just be a little happier.” I think right after the hokey cokey – it’s like, I need to see this version of Hamlet. I think it’s great.
Tom: And then I accidentally showed you “Two Soups”, which I just remember the first time watching that with my family – all of us sitting around the TV, none of us having any idea this was about to come on.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And we were just helpless with laughter at the end of it. And you said, “I don’t know how they’re getting through it.” And of course, in rehearsals, they never could. Celia Imrie said she was biting the inside of her cheek to stop from laughing when they were doing it in front of the audience.
Abigoliah: Celia Imrie played a lot of the straight characters in this. Yeah. She was, like, a fancy over-the-top lady in Acorn Antiques, but in the sketch with the ringing – you know, going to the market and stuff like that – and specifically that one, it was just – who was the guy in the sketch? The soup sketch?
Tom: Duncan Preston is his name. He’s the token boy in her repertory company.
Abigoliah: Duncan Preston – may I – I was drawn to less, because he’s a man. And I just like – don’t get me wrong, I think men are great. I just don’t find men as funny as women.
Tom: Yeah, they just don’t have that instinct.
Abigoliah: Yeah, they just don’t. But he did turn his head more – I don’t know if you noticed this – away from the camera. Whereas Celia – like, I just don’t know how she held it in. I don’t know at all.
Tom: It’s incredible. Julie Walters is so funny.
Abigoliah: I’m kind of glad that we watched it like that, because you mentioned the soup sketch and you were like, “It was one of your favourites,” but you didn’t build it up. You weren’t like, “Wait till you see this.” So I was just as surprised by it. I really liked it. And just the timing of it, and just that ridiculous walk she did – it was so good.
Tom: And one of the ones I’d forgotten about was the fake end-of-series song at the end of episode five, when there’s a whole other episode to go. And I’d forgotten that even existed until I was reviewing shows to decide what to show you. And I love the way – in improvisation, we sometimes talk about going up the absurdity curve. What you want is the takeoff to be relatively slow so the audience doesn’t get ahead of you, and you’re gradually building the absurdity. You’re patient with it.
But then once the audience gets the game, you want to go off the scale as fast as you can. And she just calibrates that so beautifully, until you have the marching band and the people doing the baton twirling – “Oh, it’s not the end of the series.”
Abigoliah: “Not the end of the series.” “I’m not going back and doing this again.” It was just so good.
And then also, I really liked the songs. I mean, I guess that’s not surprising, because I always like music. But obviously the “Let’s Do It” song is hilarious. But I’m also glad we saw the “Count the Blessings” song, because in my head I was–
Tom: It’s a sweet song.
Abigoliah: I want to learn that to teach it to my niece, because it’s funny, but it’s also quite a sweet song.
Tom: “Let’s Do It”, she describes in her songbook as “A joy to write, a sod to learn, and now I can’t ever finish a show without it.”
Abigoliah: Is she tired of it?
Tom: Well, as we’ll come to, she’s no longer with us.
Abigoliah: I knew that you were going to say that.
Tom: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t think she tired of it. And in her biography, they describe doing that for the television audience the first time, and just at the end, the roof coming off the place.
Abigoliah: It’s a bop.
Tom: It’s incredible. And I think it was her husband, Geoffrey Durham, who encouraged her to – instead of them strictly alternating “I can’t do it”, “Let’s do it”, “I can’t do it” – to end with three “Let’s do it”s in a row, so it has that more joyful feeling.
Abigoliah: That’s very smart. So obviously she writes music.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: She didn’t compose at all, though.
Tom: Oh, she–
Abigoliah: She had to orchestrate it.
Tom: She had a – David Firman was the arranger. I think it was his idea to have the tubular bells coming in at the end.
Abigoliah: It was beautiful. Yeah. Because, I mean, it was just so strong. And the fact that it was written all by one person. You said it won BAFTAs. Do you know how many BAFTAs it won? Just out of sheer curiosity.
Tom: Off the top of my head, no. But I will check that and put it in here.
Editing Tom: The first series won Best Light Entertainment Programme, and Victoria Wood herself won Best Light Entertainment Performance. Both the second series and the Christmas special won Best Light Entertainment Programme. Thirteen episodes, four BAFTAs. She would go on to win Best Actress and Best Single Drama in 2007 for her television film Housewife, 49.
Tom: But yeah, it was hugely popular, and she was basically – by the time the second series ended – she was already seen as a national treasure and could do pretty much whatever she liked. Before I tell you about the rest of her career, yeah – do you have any ideas about what you might see in other episodes, or what she might have gone on to do?
Abigoliah: I’m gonna be honest. I feel like it’s harder to do a sketch than it is to do sitcoms and stuff. I’m really drawing a blank. I mean, the obvious thing would be to pick the Acorn Antiques–
Tom: Acorn Antiques.
Abigoliah: –and go somewhere with that.
Tom: But in the end, the special – which was the last As Seen on TV – there’s a behind-the-scenes of Acorn Antiques, which is incredibly funny. And you see the actress – so Julie Walters now playing the actress playing Mrs Overall – saying, “I think Boadicea and I are very similar. We’re both very gutsy ladies.” And all the pretensions of being an actor – it’s very, very funny.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: So maybe that would be the next thing to watch if you can find it streaming somewhere.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I’m going to go ahead and say this was so fun and so creative, I can’t even try to come up with a premise. I’ll say that.
Tom: Well, after she did these 13 shows, she could do whatever she liked. The world was at her feet. She was beginning to lose interest in sketches, and so her next television work was a series of single plays just called Victoria Wood. So self-contained half-hour stories. But she was still very keen on live work. She embarked on a series of sell-out theatre tours, performing stand-up and character comedy in big venues, including a 1993 tour which broke box office records and finished at the Royal Albert Hall, where she sold out 15 consecutive nights – the first comedian ever to do so.
Abigoliah: Has anyone done it since?
Tom: No. Oh – actually, yes. One person has. In 1996: Victoria Wood again.
Abigoliah: See, this is what I was talking about. It’s how, like, when people talk about women in comedy, they forget the women in comedy. That she’s the Taylor Swift of ’80s British comedy, basically.
Tom: She came back to television in 1998 with the sitcom dinnerladies, which we already talked about. That ran for two years and 16 episodes, and again featured many of her established company of actors. Again, she worked with Geoff Posner. She persuaded him and the BBC to let her shoot every episode twice.
Abigoliah: Why?
Tom: So they would record it on Friday night, and then she’d use the feedback from that Friday-night audience to make changes to the script. They’d rehearse Saturday during the day, and then they’d record it again on Saturday night with a different audience, and then use the best bits of both recordings for the final take.
Abigoliah: Clever girl.
Tom: Yeah. At its peak, dinnerladies pulled in 13 million viewers on BBC One. It won a press prize at the Montreux Television Festival, Best New Comedy at the British Comedy Awards, and was nominated for two BAFTAs.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: And then Acorn Antiques: The Musical opened in 2005 at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, directed by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Trevor Nunn.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: And with many of the television cast reprising their roles. Victoria Wood herself was Julie Walters’ understudy as Mrs Overall. So I think if you went on the weekends, you saw Victoria Wood, and during the week you saw Julie Walters.
Abigoliah: I love that she understudied.
Tom: There was a revised version which Victoria Wood directed herself in 2007, which came back into the West End. By now, she’s just this – she’s kind of part of the comedy landscape, part of the furniture. Everybody loves her. She appears on I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue, which we’re getting to at the end of our series. She acts in glossy dramas. She fronts documentaries. She appears in a Comic Relief edition of The Great British Bake Off.
And then, in 2016, she died of cancer. She’d been diagnosed the year before, but she hadn’t told anyone. She’d kept it private, so she was suddenly taken from us at 62. I had no idea she was even sick. And I remember I was in the middle of an airport, and I found the news, and I called Deborah, and I cried, because we weren’t going to get to see any more of her.
Abigoliah: Did you? Because you’ve mentioned, you know, people who know Victoria – did you ever get to meet her?
Tom: No, I wish I had. I did see her live in the West End doing stand-up. Oh, it was amazing. Absolutely incredible. You can see her doing this on TV – she does this in An Audience with Victoria Wood. She opens the second half in this brightly coloured coat with this sort of beret, wandering through the audience as if she’s somebody lost, and then comes up on stage saying–
Victoria Wood: Hello. I’m looking for my friend. Kimberly. Have you seen her?
Tom: And she was just – she was an absolute comedy superstar. She burned so brightly, and she would have done many more things. It’s probably unfair to say her best work is As Seen on TV, but it’s probably her most concentrated. Probably the best time you can have watching Victoria Wood is to be in a theatre watching her do stand-up.
Abigoliah: Are there any records of her live stand-up? Okay, yeah. So that’ll be easy to find.
Tom: Other TV projects she did as well. Her voice was so singular. Her take on the world, her use of language was so precise. I remember from that live show – again, a lot of the stuff is about class, and describing middle-class parents taking their children to school in great big enormous cars. And I just remember her using the phrase – I can’t remember how she described the car – but she said this enormous machine required to deliver one spindly child to the school gate. And “spindly” is such a–
Abigoliah: Such a choice.
Tom: Such a choice word. Such a beautiful use of language. She was a superstar.
Abigoliah: I’m just – I’m besotted. I think I’ve fallen in love. I think – I think I’ve absolutely fallen in love. I’m so glad that we watched that. And it was completely different than what I thought it’d be, because all I’ve seen is, like, the one still image that you and I have passed back and forth to make socials. So I really thought – I thought it was going to be much earlier. I thought it was going to be somewhere in the ’70s.
I was a little – I was like, what if I don’t like it? I had no clue it would be so – well, as you said – fresh. I didn’t know there’d be stand-up in it. I knew it was going to be a sketch show. I didn’t know there’d be stand-up. And it was really nice to watch some stand-up. And I want to go away and find everything she’s ever done. Did she do any memoirs and stuff?
Tom: I don’t think she wrote her own autobiography. There are a couple of different biographies, of which I’ve read one and kind of glanced at another. When I glanced at the second one, it seemed to be going over more or less the same ground. But she writes little things – collected sketchbooks and music books – and I’ve got several of those. And I remember little bits and pieces that she’d written about her process.
But no, I think she was quite a private person. She had kids, but she didn’t do a lot of reality stuff, even though that was already starting to become a thing by the time she died. She didn’t use her family for promotional purposes or anything like that.
Abigoliah: They don’t make ’em like that anymore.
Tom: All right. So where does this go on the shelf? So it’s going on the shelf of fame – but where does it go? So currently you have Not Only But Also at one, and then The Young Ones at two, and you have eight empty slots.
Abigoliah: And I think Victoria Wood As Seen On TV is going to have to go in the bargain–
I can’t even keep a straight face as I say it. No. Victoria Wood As Seen On TV is 100% going to number one. And to be honest, I liked it so much, I don’t know who’s going to knock that out. I was so surprised how much I liked it.
I didn’t really know what I was going to get with Not Only But Also, but that had everything I liked. That had stand-up, it had sketch, it had music, and it was all fabulous. So yeah – that’s number one. Not Only But Also is going to stay at number two for now, because, as we know, I’ve been watching a little bit more of The Young Ones.
Tom: Oh yes, I was going to ask you about that, and I neglected to do so. So you’ve caught up on more of The Young Ones?
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: So are you – are you allowed, if you do more research, to move things if it turns out you watch more and think, actually, this isn’t so great?
Abigoliah: I absolutely think 100% it’s okay for me to move stuff around. I will hold off on my complete review of The Young Ones until I finish it, because I’ve only seen series one so far. I still have to watch all of series two – all six episodes.
However, I will say I almost thought about moving it, but then I was like – I went back on YouTube and watched some Not Only But Also, and I was like, I can’t move it. I can’t move it yet.
So yeah, we’re going to keep The Young Ones at number three right now. Just to recap what we’ve covered so far: my favourite shows are Victoria Wood As Seen On TV, Not Only But Also, and The Young Ones at number three. And then in the bargain bin, the shows I did not care for are Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Goon Show, which are the two that you were like, “These changed everything more than anything.” And I’m like, yeah, yeah.
Tom: But to be honest, I was 50/50 on whether you’d go for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I thought it quite unlikely you’d go for The Goon Show, but equally I was also 50/50 on Not Only But Also. But you loved that.
Abigoliah: I loved that. I love that.
Tom: So we’re both learning here.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Look at us go.
Tom: All right. So next time – as we’ve discussed – British television shows tend only to have a handful of episodes. And this is another one which ran for a whole two series. But versions of it are still being made all over the world. So if you add up all those episodes, you’re probably over 500.
We’re going to Slough for the first two episodes of The Office. The British Office. The original, you might say.
Abigoliah: It only ran for two series over here?
Tom: Plus two specials.
Abigoliah: Wow. And just a quick shout-out – so you said we’re going to watch the two episodes.
Tom: I think watch the first two, because it’s much more serialised than anything else we’ve watched so far.
Abigoliah: If I can just give a quick shout-out real quick – if any of our listeners want to watch another Office, our mutual friend–
Tom: Felicity Ward.
Abigoliah: Felicity Ward is in the Australian Office that came out this year, and it is on Amazon Prime, and it is most excellent. So please also go check that out as well if you’re looking for more Office things to watch.
I’ve never seen the British Office. I’m looking forward to this.
Tom: Excellent.
Abigoliah: Guys, thank you so much for listening. As always, if you have the time and inclination, please go into your podcatcher app, leave us a five-star review, tell a friend about the show, and thank you. Thank you so much for listening to our episode today all about Victoria Wood.
Till next time, I’m Abigoliah Schamaun.
Tom: And I’m Tom Salinsky. Goodbye.
Abigoliah: Goodbye.