When Victoria Wood was about six, she had an epiphany in Buxton. "It was the first time I'd seen anyone stand on their own on stage," she said. "I didn't realise that there were jobs like that before – that one could stand on stage and speak, with no props except for a nice frock and people would die laughing."
The woman was Joyce Grenfell, the great yet genteel comedian and monologuist. Wood, who has died aged 62 of cancer, was a diffident child who found inspiration in Grenfell. “Stand-up comedy is the ideal place for a shy person because you’re completely in control,” she said later.
But there was another reason: Grenfell was an interloper in a male world. In her 1980 TV play, Nearly a Happy Ending, Wood played a frumpy character, Maureen, who tells her wannabe famous friend Julie that girls can't stand up and tell jokes. "Girls don't," says Maureen. Victoria Wood did.
In her teens she plotted a career to become the greatest female entertainer of her day. In many respects she succeeded: she was widely adored not just as a stand-up comedian but as singer and songwriter, TV dramatist and, to a lesser, extent actor. Appointed CBE in 2008, she had seven Bafta awards and two South Bank Show profiles to prove it.
She was feted often for acutely skewering some very English neuroses, especially suburban ones about sex and grammar. She excoriated fools gladly.
Top performer
Some found her comedy cruel. Reviewing the 1996 stand-up show that won her top female comedy performer at that year’s British Comedy Awards, critic Ben Thompson wrote: “There is an uncomfortable suspicion that Wood’s much vaunted flair for the everyday might actually be rooted in contempt rather than sympathy.”
Seen in this context, her fondly observed sitcom Dinnerladies (1998-2000), about canteen workers in a factory, can be seen as atonement for any such comedy crimes.
Not only was Wood a woman in a traditionally male world but she was also a northerner loosening the Oxbridge chokehold on comedy. However, she was a different proposition from typical northern comics: she was a middle-class, sophisticated woman whom critics compared to Noël Coward and Alan Bennett.
Wood was born in Bury, Lancashire. “I was brought up in one room with a television, a piano and a sandwich,” she recalled. “I just lived on my own. My parents were in other rooms. My father and mother didn’t watch television at all.”
She was the youngest of four: her brother was much older and her two sisters were as outgoing as their sister was, as she put it, ingoing.
After leaving school she studied drama at the University of Birmingham, and while there got her big break. She had already played comic songs in folk clubs in Birmingham when she successfully auditioned for the TV talent show New Faces.
Even though she didn't make the New Faces final, she was selected to join comedian Lenny Henry and singer-comedian Marti Caine to appear in The Summer Show, a variety series fronted by Leslie Crowther. She went on to become the resident pianist for That's Life, for which she wrote songs riffing on current events.
At that time, she also met the love of her life, a former librarian called Geoffrey Durham who was to reinvent himself as a conjuror called the Great Soprendo. They later married and had two children.
But Wood was not just a stand-up. She wrote sketches for a revue called In at the Death at London's Bush Theatre for actors including future collaborator Julie Walters. While there, she was invited by David Leland, then director at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, to write a play for its 1978 new season. The result was Talent, which Wood wrote expressly with Walters in mind, about a woman called Julie preparing backstage for a talent show with her friend Maureen and realising that the contest is rigged.
Sketch show
Granada producer Peter Eckersley asked Wood to adapt
Talent
for television. The resulting film, starring Walters, proved such a success that Eckersley commissioned two more TV plays –
Nearly a Happy Ending
and
Happy Since I Met You
– and urged her to write a sketch show called
Wood and Walters
(1981-82).
In 1984, Wood moved to the BBC, where she was able to choose the actors who performed in her sketches for the series Victoria Wood As Seen on TV (1985-87), thereby assembling a repertory of like-minded regulars – Walters, Celia Imrie, Duncan Preston and Susie Blake among them.
She went into therapy for a while in the 1990s, emerging with a confidence that surprised those who suspected she was doomed to be awkward and vulnerable.
“I am self-confident and I am self-contained,” she told an interviewer. Was she always? “No, not at all. Not as a teenager and not as a young woman.” She and her husband attended Quaker meetings. “As I’ve got older, I am more interested in having a belief,” she said. “If you don’t, it makes everything seem pointless. To only think, ‘you’re alive, you have acne and then you die’ makes you wonder what it’s all for.”
In 1994, she wrote Pat and Margaret, about two sisters, one the star of a US soap, the other a motorway service station waitress, who are reunited after 27 years. "Margaret's all the people who don't have a voice and don't have any way of getting themselves up the ladder," she said. But Margaret was also a homage to the woman she could have been. "If I'm honest there is part of me that feels, or rather felt, very vulnerable and patronised, and this is my way of showing that side of myself."
In 2002, her 22-year marriage ended. She told an interviewer in 2011 she had not been in another relationship since. Her work in the new millennium diversified beyond funny and included plays for TV and the biopic Loving Miss Hatto.
The critic and writer Clive James said of Wood: “As a TV dramatist alone, she is on a par with Alan Bennett, while as a creator of comedy programmes she changed the field for women and indeed for everybody, because very few of the men were trying hard enough as writers before she came on the scene and showed them what penetrating social humour should actually sound like.”
She is survived by her children, Grace and Henry.