Celebrated for acutely skewering the absurdities of on a regular basis life, Victoria Wood stays one of many comedy greats of her technology. She pioneered a path for ladies as extra than simply the sidekick or comedian reduction. Indeed, the good Dawn French mentioned: “There was none like her before and there’s been none like her since – she was unique.”

Now seven years after her demise, a brand new version of an outdated guide, Chunky, first printed in 1996, brings collectively three traditional collections of sketches and scripts into one compendium to mark the seventieth anniversary of her delivery. It’s a beautiful bran-tub of jokes, that includes every little thing from nook outlets to candlewick bedspreads, grocery store checkouts and suburban lust.

“I can remember when pants were pants,” she wrote in her sketch Service Wash. “Can I thrust by? I’m a diabetic,” mentioned Julie Walters in Self-Service. “It certainly sounds like a genuine Picasso,” opined Celia Imrie in Acorn Antiques, “but I would have to see it to be sure.” “I thought, ‘What would the Queen Mum do?’” questioned Patricia Routledge as Kitty in a beautiful monologue. “So I just smiled and said, ‘We shall have fog by tea-time.’”

Even if she’d solely written the fabric collected in Chunky, Victoria, who died aged simply 62 in April 2016, would nonetheless be among the many best entertainers of the tv age. But there was a lot extra to her 40 years in showbusiness. It’s very laborious to pin down her best achievements, the issues that made her who she uniquely was. But having written Let’s Do It, her authorised biography, I suggest the next seven moments because the pinnacles in a profession like no different. You may have your individual favorite too. Have you seen it on the trolley?

Victoria Wood’s first play modified her life. She’d been on TV sporadically since successful a warmth of New Faces in 1974. But by 25 she apprehensive she was completed.

Then she met Julie Walters once they had been each forged in a fringe revue in Shepherd’s Bush, West London, and Victoria was impressed to jot down a sketch for them each. Within 12 months they had been starring in her personal play with songs on Granada.

Talent was first commissioned by Sheffield’s Crucible theatre. “At the top of the script do I just write, ‘Turn cameras on’?” she joked to a good friend as she tailored it for TV. Audiences had been thrilled to find a superb younger feminine voice writing in regards to the seedy underbelly of the all-male leisure business. “I thought coq au vin was love in a lorry,” croons the aspiring cabaret singer performed by Julie. (The stage lyric was significantly ruder.)

The morning after watching the printed on her black-and-white telly in Morecambe, Victoria awoke to search out herself well-known. The display screen debut of Wood and Walters launched her as a novel comedian actor-singer-writer-composer. She was by no means out of labor once more.

Victoria carried out her best-loved track lots of of instances over practically 30 years. It by no means had the next impression than when she first unveiled it to a TV viewers.

She had stayed up all night time to compose The Ballad of Barry and Freda as an encore for a stand-up present. But when her hit sketch present Victoria Wood As Seen on TV returned for a second collection later that yr, she was a track brief. Her music director David Firman organized a bar-room band accompaniment.

With little time to rehearse an enormous and complicated track that builds over 5 lengthy minutes to a powerful end, all had been dwelling on their nerves. Victoria all however shouted the final strains because the track rose to a climax: “Not meekly, not bleakly, beat me on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly, let’s do it, let’s do it tonight!” Studio audiences are way more demure than theatre audiences. Not this time. As she bounced up from her piano stool on the finish, they went nuts. Years later she remembered that night time: “I was looking from camera to camera and one of my eyes has wandered around I was so tired. I was happy. That was a happy song to do.”

Victoria was anticipating her first baby in 1988 when London Weekend Television invited her to develop into the youngest entertainer ever to star in An Audience With… Much of her preparation concerned discovering a fancy dress that will conceal her being pregnant for the recording in entrance of a celeb viewers.

“Maidenhead and Barnes are like ghost towns this evening,” she mentioned as she welcomed them.

In reality she spent fairly a little bit of time compiling the visitor listing, after which planted questions amongst them. “Do you think large bosoms are a handicap?” Joan Bakewell was requested to ask. Victoria recorded 90 minutes of pitch-perfect stand-up and not using a single retake. This was the primary time TV audiences had been launched to a dim girl in a yellow beret and an orange mac. “I’m looking for me friend. Kimberley. Have you seen her?” Victoria thought it hadn’t gone properly, partly as a result of she disliked performing with the lights up. “I really never want to see my audience. That was the biggest trial for me.” She was amazed when the likes of Judi Dench raved on the after-party.

When Victoria started as a stand-up in 1980, comedians had solely simply began placing on an entire night of leisure on their very own. The thought of anybody taking up the Royal Albert Hall was merely unthinkable.

That Victoria ought to give it a go was the pragmatic suggestion of her promoter/agent Phil McIntyre.

In 1990, to satisfy demand in London she needed to do two months within the West End, and it exhausted her. At the Albert, she may play to an viewers of 5,600 an evening. She was undaunted by its dimension. “It’s quite cosy,” she mentioned. “It’s a bit like a jammy dodger.”

Billy Connolly had performed there in 1987, however didn’t come again due to the venue’s strict language coverage. Unlike him, Victoria was decided to not use facet screens: she wished the viewers to take a look at her and her alone.

“Have we got people at the top tonight?” she’d say.

“Hello! I’ve got a black suit and blue eyes, OK?” She made herself at dwelling, quickly getting used to the way in which laughter travelled extra slowly around the area.

It was a supply of large pleasure that her fortnight’s residency offered out. She did the identical in 1996 and 2001, ultimately filling the well-known outdated corridor 40 instances. “Oh it was wonderful,” she mentioned of the very first time she carried out there. “Instant gratification.”

Her recurring themes had been intercourse, class, physique picture and TV. In Pat and Margaret there was one thing new. The story of two long-separated sisters searching for the mom who deserted them, her BBC drama explored the deep neglect Victoria suffered as
a toddler.

When the sisters ultimately discover their mom, she has a cold greeting: “I didn’t know what love was till I bred my first Afghan.” This was probably the most autobiographical Victoria had ever been.

In the 2 sisters she additionally portrayed two halves of herself. Pat, an American TV star with a monstrous ego, represented her assured public face.

Margaret, who works in a motorway service station, was her shy non-public facet. While the story was touching it was additionally hilarious, by no means greater than when Thora Hird was on display screen. Playing the jealous outdated mum of Margaret’s boyfriend, she nailed each zinger. “They didn’t have dyslexia in those days. You sat at the back with raffia.”

Victoria had lengthy dreamed of doing a sitcom and fretted that she’d missed the boat when Absolutely Fabulous got here alongside. Her worry of wanting outdated hat intensified when The Royle Family was broadcast simply earlier than the launch of dinnerladies.

She needn’t have apprehensive. Her a lot liked sitcom, recorded earlier than a studio viewers, is the end result of a fantastic custom going again to Dad’s Army: the good British gang present. All 16 episodes, unfold over two collection, had been full to the brim with memorable gags. “Where’s my Clint?” “Can you smell my Charlie?” “I was going to go on Mastermind but I can’t sit on leather.”

If the present had a peak, it was Minnellium, the episode set on the finish of 1 millennium and broadcast firstly of one other. Spectacularly, it reached 15 million viewers. It closed with fireworks seen via the home windows of the canteen as Victoria added craving phrases to the wistful theme tune. More than any nice comedian, she knew that on the opposite facet of happiness lay unhappiness.

It was the good Keith Waterhouse who gave Victoria a replica of Barrow-in-Furness housewife Nella Last’s contributions to the wartime Mass Observation challenge in 1983. More than 20 years later, she was able to dramatise it. Housewife, 49 was a chance.

Victoria’s viewers anticipated her to take them out of themselves. This portrait of an sad marriage, following the breakdown of her personal, took her into a brand new path. Adding to the jeopardy was her concern that nobody noticed her as a correct actress.

It was a fantastic triumph to win a BAFTA for her script. But she was shocked to get the very best actress award too. “It’s a relief to win,” she mentioned. “I was engaged on a no-win no-fee basis.”

• Chunky by Victoria Wood, with commentary from Jasper Rees (Trapeze, £25) is out now. For free UK P&P go to expressbookshop.com or name 020 3176 383