That's Another Story: The Autobiography Read online

  It was a play with songs, two of which I was required to sing, one of my own choosing (Stevie Wonder’s ‘Isn’t She Lovely?’) plus one of the numbers from the show. The latter was a gorgeous, sardonically nostalgic song titled ‘I Want to Be Fourteen Again’. When it came to my turn to sing, Victoria played it in my key, a privilege I’m not entirely sure the rest of the auditionees enjoyed. In fact at the end of the audition, just as I was leaving the room, she said, under her breath, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to play it in a really high key for everyone else!’ I took it as a joke, but I’m not certain to this day whether it was.

  Anyway, as history will confirm I got the part and there began a working friendship where Victoria gave me brilliant gift after brilliant gift. We followed Talent with a sequel the following year titled Nearly a Happy Ending. This featured the same two characters, Julie and Maureen, who had appeared in Talent and involved Maureen’s attempts at losing her virginity at some awful sales conference in a dreary hotel. Again it was both hilarious and touching, and an amazingly generous vehicle for me. It was followed fairly quickly by another one-off comedy drama titled Happy Since I Met You, in which Victoria didn’t star, and I played opposite Duncan Preston, my character being a drama teacher and his a struggling actor. It was a gorgeously bitter-sweet comedy.

  Peter Eckersley then decided that Victoria and I should have our own series and so Wood and Walters was launched. Even though Victoria was doing all the writing, she insisted on the use of both our names in the title of the show. Sadly Peter Eckersley died suddenly in between the recording of the pilot and the making of the series, and we missed him hugely, not just as a producer but also as a man. It was never the same and we felt that the series, which was his baby, suffered enormously without him.

  We recorded it up at the Granada Studios in Manchester every week on a Friday afternoon. The television studio audiences turned up with a ticket to see a show but had no idea which one it would be. As this took place in the middle of the day, it was mainly elderly people who were wheeled in and we would invariably go on set to be met by a bank of white heads, with comments that could only be attributed to the aged or the hard of hearing pinging out into the often deafening silence. ‘Who are these girls?’ and ‘What did she say?’ ‘What’s a boutique?’ ‘Is it a comedy?’ and once, ‘We’re missin’ Brideshead for this!’ This last became a private catchphrase for Victoria and me. At my BA FTA tribute in 2003 Victoria was sitting next to me and just before she got up to make her speech, she handed me a scrap of paper on which she had written: ‘We’re missin’ Brideshead for this!’

  Getting through the show was often like wading through cold porridge and to whip the oldies into a frenzy of mirth a warm-up man was employed at the top of the show. Most of his jokes failed miserably, and Vic and I would wait backstage, hearts sinking as we listened to the wind blowing the tumbleweed across the vast empty space in between each gag. On one occasion when the audience was particularly ancient, with the sound of beeping hearing aids and the clack of false teeth filling the air, the warm-up man, after straining to get a laugh out of them and not succeeding, resorted, in a fit of frustration, to dropping his trousers and showing them his arse. You could have heard a pin drop.

  In 1984, Victoria asked me to join her, Duncan Preston, Celia Imrie and a host of other good actors in her new series Victoria Wood as Seen on TV. This could not have been a more different experience to the one at Granada. It was expertly and slickly produced by Geoff Posner, and was recorded on a Saturday night as if it were a live show. There was a sketch set in a shoe shop where I played a rather batty sales assistant and Vic played a customer. She had said beforehand that she wasn’t sure whether it would work because it was so off the wall, and I wasn’t sure how I should play it, but because the whole evening had a live-theatre feel to it, it put a creative edge on everything. Just as the lights went up for the sketch to begin, I decided on the spur of the moment to stumble about in the shop window, creating havoc and knocking shoes everywhere, and we were off; it was like the old Everyman days. The sketch was brilliantly written and would have worked anyway, without my cavorting about, but what was so gratifying for me was finding the character there and then, during the show itself. The studio audience had a ball. In one sketch, involving a very old waitress taking ages to serve soup to a couple, I thought we might have to stop the sketch, as the laughter went on and on and on, with people doubled up, and I could see Celia and Duncan, who were also in it, twitching with suppressed laughter.

  As far as sketch writing is concerned, Victoria is in a league of her own. Her sketches are intelligent, brilliantly observed and, without exception, immensely funny. The soup sketch came out of the two of us ordering soup from an ancient waitress in a restaurant on Morecambe sea front. This small incident was the launchpad for an iconic sketch which, knowing her speed at writing both sketches and songs, probably took her a matter of minutes. Often when we were rehearsing As Seen on TV, Geoff Posner, who also directed, would ask her to write some extra material. She would go off to the corner of the rehearsal room and ten minutes later would be back with something utterly hilarious.

  It was in this series that my favourite character of all time was born: Mrs Overall. ‘Acorn Antiques’ was a sketch based on a badly made soap, inspired by the early Crossroads, in which, much to our amusement, Duncan Preston had played the part of a character called Ginger Parsons very early on in his career. It was set in an antiques shop situated in a fictional town called Manchesterford, run by the snobbish and imperious Miss Babs (no relation), played brilliantly by Celia Imrie. Mrs O was the cleaner and what a gem of a part she was. We always filmed that particular sketch the day before the show, without an audience and thus without the consequent nerves and pressure. It was heaven. I can remember the first time, as I waited to make my entrance, realising that I could see the monitor and therefore I could make sure that my tray, upon which I had tea and macaroons for Miss Babs, could poke out into shot before I was due on. The whole crew joined in, making their own similar cock-ups: the boom being in shot; Mr Clifford (played by Duncan who is six-foot five) jumping up suddenly and banging his head on it; shots being slightly out of focus and clumsily positioned. People would come from all over the BBC to watch when we were recording.

  The very first time we were to record, all the elements of Mrs Overall came together at once. I was being made up, which consisted of a bit of base and a bit of lipstick making a tiny, pinched, dark-red cupid’s bow; I was also meant to be wearing a wig from the BBC wig department. Victoria and I had gone up there to sort through and see whether there was anything we wanted for the show. In the process we tried on everything in our path, including beards, once discovering that the small goatee I was trying to stick to my chin was what was known as a merkin.

  ‘A what?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘A pubic wig.’

  ‘Oh blimey! I wondered what the hole was for! Oh, eugh!’ Finally we came across a quite severe-looking grey bun and thought that this would do fine. So there I was, sitting in front of the make-up mirror with the wig on, a wig stand next to me and my hair flattened down in preparation, restrained by a hairnet that made my head look rather small and pealike. I looked at myself in the mirror and then looked at Victoria. We both laughed, having the same thought at the same time: ‘I don’t need a wig, do I?’ And so she was born. The public loved ‘Acorn Antiques’, a fan club was formed and twenty years later people are still coming up to me in the street and firing Mrs Overall quotes at me. ‘What was it, muesli?’ or ‘Oh, I am pleased’. So when in 2004 Vic decided to set it to music for a production to be directed by Trevor Nunn in the West End, ‘Oh, I was pleased.’

  In 1994 we did our second television film together, Pat and Margaret. The last one had been Happy Since I Met You, back in 1980. In some ways the two characters, Pat and Margaret, mirrored those of Julie and Maureen, in that both Julie and Pat, whom I played, were strident, verbose and ambitious, while Maureen
and Margaret, played by Victoria, were shy, genuine and unambitious. In Pat and Margaret, Pat was Margaret’s famous older sister, from whom she had been separated at a young age. In the intervening years Pat had become a famous actress and had made it in America in a successful, Dynasty-style television series, whereas Margaret worked in a motorway service station cafe’, shovelling out chips all day long. In the story, the two sisters, unbeknownst to one another, are brought together in a ‘surprise, surprise’-type show and from there the drama unfolds. As Pat, I believe I had some of the funniest speeches ever written. She was a bitch and a very angry bitch at that. If only I could be that funny when I was that angry. However, my favourite line wasn’t one of mine; it belonged to Pat and Margaret’s mother, played by Shirley Stelfox, who also played my friend in Personal Services and is now a current regular in the soap Emmerdale. She said, on being confronted by her two daughters about her shortcomings as a mother, ‘I didn’t know what love was until I bred my first Afghan.’

  I have played so many parts written by Victoria and every one has been of the once-in-a-lifetime variety. After reading them for the first time, every one has made me laugh out loud and left me gagging to slip into their shoes and get tottering. And Petula, in the comedy series Dinnerladies, has got to be up there with the very best of the best. Dinnerladies was set in a works canteen. Victoria played Bren, one of the said ladies, and I played her somewhat eccentric mother. We had scene after scene together, where she gave me all the best lines and simply stood there more or less as a feed.

  She has been unutterably generous in her writing, more often than not giving the best lines to me or whoever it might be that she is sharing the scene with, and I have frequently said that, had I her talent for writing, I wouldn’t be giving those punchlines to anyone else. But that’s Victoria.

  16

  Ecstasy with Mike Leigh

  Meanwhile, returning to London from Bristol in 1979, my relationship with Pete having come to an end, I embarked on what I consider to be another of the jewels of my acting life: a play at Hampstead Theatre Club to be written and devised by Mike Leigh.

  It was for me the ultimate acting experience. To begin with, the actors, Sheila Kelly, Jim Broadbent, Stephen Rea, Ron Cook, Rachel Davies and myself, all worked on their own with Mike. First we made lists of the characters who had peopled our lives, many of them in this book, discussed them with him. Then a shortlist was drawn up and discussed again, and finally Mike picked a person from this list as a basis or springboard for the character that would eventually appear in the play. For several more weeks we worked individually with Mike, doing solitary improvisations, and gradually he started to put the actors together in group improvisations. In the course of these, I found that my best friend was to be Sheila Kelly and then that I was going out with Stephen Rea, whom I subsequently married and with whom I eventually had three children. For sixteen weeks overall, often until late into the night, we improvised continually so that these people became unutterably real, the fabric of their lives and the world in which they lived true and vivid. Now, thirty years later, I still can’t go past the Catholic church on Quex Road, Kilburn, without thinking, Oh, that’s where Mick (Stephen Rea) and I got married.

  The play was set in Kilburn in London and so most of the improvisations outside the rehearsal room took place in seedy pubs up and down the Kilburn High Road, with Mike tucked away in a corner listening and watching the goings-on. He had instructed us not to come out of character unless blood was drawn. I played a very rough, feisty, loud-mouthed woman called Dawn, whom I had based on someone who went to my school. On one occasion I rounded, in a Dawn-like way, on a very heavy-looking navvy who was leering at me as I crossed the bar to go to the lavatory.

  ‘Wharra you looking at?’

  ‘Sometin’ that needs a good seein’ to.’

  ‘You should be so bleedin’ lucky! Get fucked!’

  ‘Exactly my thoughts.’ And then into his pint, ‘Scrubber!’

  ‘What did you call me?’

  ‘I called you what you are - a scrubber!’

  He was now looking pretty menacing and my heart, that is, Julie’s heart, was pounding in my throat, whereas Dawn was up for a fight. There had to be a compromise here. I turned on my heel, throwing a loud ‘Cunt!’ over my shoulder, and disappeared into the Ladies’ with as much of a swagger as I could muster, whereupon I dashed into a cubicle and locked the door, fearful that the navvy might be in hot pursuit. Once inside I collapsed on to the lavatory, shaking and hardly daring to breathe, as I listened to pub customers coming in and out. Eventually Jean (Sheila Kelly) came to see where I was and as Dawn I had to concoct a story involving constipation to explain my absence.

  On the first night of the show, which was titled Ecstasy, at Hampstead, about twenty minutes into the first half a woman stood up at the back and declared in a loud, very middle-class voice, ‘Who are these people? They’re not actors!’ and walked out. Mike was thrilled, indeed we all were, and of course highly amused. It was a compliment as far as we were concerned, a tribute to the realism of the piece.

  On another occasion, halfway through the second half, Jim Broadbent suddenly declared, ‘Oh God! I don’t feel very well !’ The audience giggled knowingly at this, obviously thinking they were into an Abigail’s Party scenario, where one of the characters has a heart attack. However, on stage we were in panic mode.

  ‘Am yer all right, Len?’ I said, staying in character, to which Jim mumbled something unintelligible.

  We tried to carry on with the play, each of us trying to ascertain how ill he was by asking questions in character, none of us taking our eyes off him, until suddenly he stood up and blurted out, ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, I think I’m having a stroke!’ and blundered off the stage.

  For just a few seconds the place went deadly silent, all of us, actors and audience alike, reeling from being yanked out of Leigh world and plunged shockingly and confusingly into the real one. Sheila Kelly then stood up and said, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ About twenty-nine people put their hands up. It was Hampstead after all. There ensued a polite discussion:

  ‘Well, you go then . . .’

  ‘No, please, you go . . .’

  ‘No, really, I think this is more your sort of thing . . .’

  Finally one of them came backstage and tended to poor Jim, who was by now lying flat out on the floor of one of the dressing rooms, in extreme discomfort. It turned out to be a very nasty virus from which he recovered in a few days, but more importantly, it was something for us all to dine out on for months - did I say months? no, years - to come.

  During the play the characters spent a lot of their time drinking and on the last night, the prop drinks, which were supposed to be vodka and tonic, beer and bottled Guinness, were replaced by the real thing. I’m pretty sure it was Stephen Rea who was responsible, as I seem to remember him confiding in me before the show and swearing me to secrecy lest Mike should find out. But what I remember clearly was the mutual private glee we shared as Sheila and Jim discovered that their normal beverage was rather more warming than usual and that it went straight to the spot. A great deal of near-corpsing took place as Stephen, with the devil in him, insisted on constantly filling up everyone’s glass, with Sheila, ever the professional, realising she was fast getting drunk and trying to stop him, and all of it conducted whilst remaining steadfastly in character. All I can say for my own part is that Dawn liked a drink and Julie was well and truly plastered by the end of the show.

  17

  Rita on Stage and Screen

  In the spring of 1970, whilst appearing in Victoria Wood’s play Good Fun at the Sheffield Crucible Theatre (which was set in an arts centre up north, where a group of its employees prepare for a cystitis sufferers’ rally), I was sent a script of a new stage play titled Educating Rita by Willy Russell. It had been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Mike Ockrent set to direct, and was to be put on in their studio theatre, which at that ti
me was the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden.

  I was immediately attracted to the character of Rita, a working-class hairdresser who realises there is more to life than the narrow horizon she sees before her. She wants it broadened, and she wants an education, so she embarks on an Open University course. During the course of the play she finds herself marooned between her own working-class roots and family, on the one hand feeling that she has somehow left them behind, and the middle-class life she craves on the other, sensing that in essence she is an outsider. Although her marriage to her husband Denny breaks down because he does not understand and is threatened by her aspirations, all comes good in the end when she grasps that, through education, the most important thing she has gained is choice. There was not a scene in the play that I didn’t identify with and, without wanting to sound like a complete pill, just like Talent before it, it felt a little like destiny.

  At the time Good Fun was rumoured to be going into the West End and I really couldn’t face a long run, even though every night was a riot on stage and my character, Betty, a cosmetics saleswoman, brought the house down. Her opening line after knocking on the door and being told to come in was: ‘I’m sorry . . . I never lay my hand on a strange knob.’ One night the hysteria grew to such a pitch that we simply couldn’t continue with the scene and everyone, the cast included, just collapsed with laughter that went on and on. Nevertheless a nice, short, three-month run, in repertoire, which meant playing only half the week, with another production taking the other half, was a far more attractive deal than a run in the West End with eight shows a week for nine months, even though the difference in money would be huge. So I plumped for Educating Rita, thinking it would be all over by the autumn . . . How wrong could I be? I’m glad to say it was never to be over.