I bought Mandi a box set of various works of Victoria Wood for Christmas and we have been dipping in and out of it, and I have been struck by the various strings to her bow. For starters we watched the travelogue Victoria's Empire, in which she visited the former British Empire countries that Queen Victoria didn't, because evidently she couldn't be arsed. There is something about comedians that seem to make brilliant travel presenters, I don't know what it is exactly, perhaps because comedians don't properly grow up and maintain a sense of wonderment. Did Michael Palin start this? Palin, Billy Connolly, Paul Merton, Paul O'Grady and Karl Pilkington are just a few names I can think of while I write this.
Victoria Wood presented this show in the same natural way that she performed stand-up, as if she was sitting in a pub chatting to her friends. I have said before that Wood, Alan Bennett and Peter Kay are all from the same school of writing and delivery, I would have loved to have seen the three of them doing an unscripted work on stage or television at some point.
My main knowledge of Victoria Wood was her stand up shows, in fact on the night she died we dug out two VHS tapes and watched them. She didn't waste a single word throughout the whole show which I don't doubt that wasn't scripted to the letter but made to look as if she had just wandered in and started talking. What I was less familiar with was the series Victoria Wood as Seen on TV which ran on BBC2 for only two series, as do a lot of the classics. Of course I was aware of the famous sketches, but mainly due to seeing them in retrospective clip shows. What I didn't realise was despite writing every word of the show herself, Wood was happy to allow others to take the lead. For example, one of the most famous sketches from the show (Victoria Wood's very own 'Dead Parrot' or 'Four Candles'), to me at least, is 'Two Soups' and she doesn't even appear in it. Patricia Routledge appears as a prototype Hyacinth Bouquet/Bucket called Kitty who delivers a monologue to camera which I didn't time with a stopwatch but I guess took up a good four minutes of the half hour. Obviously Victoria Wood knew what she was doing because these sketches work perfectly, I wonder if there exists the first take with Wood performing?
The other thing that had escaped me was how the show jumps around with regards to content. As the opening credits fade we are met with Victoria introducing the show with a few minutes of introductory stand up comedy before she jumps off the stage and it's showtime proper. On the surface we have a very broad mainstream sketch show peppered with some strong quickies, characters, and of course the dodgy daytime soap opera Acorn Antiques. What I hadn't remembered or realised until I re-watched was how dark some of the content was, and how much of a jarring gear change this would be if handled by a less talented, less capable comedian and writer. The first example being Swim the Channel, in which a young girl who these days we aren't allowed to refer to as 'a bit slow' talks of her ambition to swim the channel despite having no parental support or safety boat following her and goes missing presumed dead. In the sketch On Campus, Wood plays a plain, overweight girl who initially befriends her roommate only to be eventually bullied into a suicide attempt. This is the kind of territory that The League of Gentleman might have attempted twenty years later but was a new and shocking thing to include in a sketch show in the 1980s, I certainly don't think Little and Large or Russ Abbott would have got away with such behaviour.
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