Victoria Wood: no sneering, no bile, just very, very funny
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Version 0 of 1. Like many a comic genius, there was in many ways a hesitancy, even a humility to Victoria Wood the person (Lucy Mangan, 21 April), which was of course one of her finest qualities. She was to read at the thanksgiving service in Westminster Abbey for Dame Thora Hird from the dame’s autobiography. First she had to walk up the steps from her seat into the sacrarium at the east end of the abbey with Alan Bennett, who was giving the address. Rehearsing her, as one of the priests on the staff – itself, ludicrously unnecessary – I ventured to suggest that she needed to personalise her presence and the reading by introducing it. “I don’t want to get in the way,” she responded. “But it will make the whole service if you inject something of yourself,” I implored her. She remained unconvinced. But on the day she began, “I was just thinking when I came up those steps with Alan … we should really have come up in a stairlift.” The abbey erupted with joyous laughter as it recalled Dame Thora advertising such lifts. What a gift to make people laugh with so few words. What a loss as one national treasure now joins another via the heavenly stairlift.Canon Chris ChiversCambridge • I heard one of Victoria Wood’s very first broadcasts a long time ago (Radio 4, of course) and actually wrote down her name as I’d literally laughed myself to tears at her observations. She was so very, very funny without ever being unkind – no sneering, no bile, just funny but never safe or bland – and apparently a dream to work with. Julie Walters said in an interview a few years ago how Victoria Wood would always insist that her fellow actors, and especially Julie herself, got all the best lines rather than her – this is quite rare, I imagine. Brilliant writer, raconteur, comedian, actor, observer – oh, and a great singer and musician. If she didn’t have it all, for me she had just about everything that matters. Gone at 62. I’m very sad.Bob PlewsNorthampton • From Stuart Jeffries’ obituary (21 April) of Victoria Wood: “Asked if Wood (a northerner) holidayed in Blackpool, ‘What do you take me for? We used to go to Vienna.’ And they did: the Woods towed their caravan across Europe for their holidays.” Wonderful. Says it all.Dee Thomas (also a northerner)St Albans, Hertfordshire • Lucy Mangan exactly caught our much-loved comedian’s accuracy in her Kelly-Marie punk teenager example: northern voice and ridicule of pretension, plus feminine put-down despite her vulnerability. After buying a posh coat from Jones’ outfitters in Manchester in the same period, my school friend Pauline heard tittering when she was waiting at a Dukinfield bus-stop. She was pointed at because of a Vogue-inspired half-belt at its back: “Who does she think she is with that plunging arseline?”Anne CliftonStonesfield, Oxfordshire • Sad as I was to hear of the death of Victoria Wood, by the time I finished reading Lucy Mangan’s tribute my eyes were streaming – with tears of laughter. To quote Paul Allan in Stuart Jeffries’ obituary, she was “too knicker-wettingly funny”.Neil LevisLondon • In a week that began with a significant increase in the cover price, it would have been easy to make yet another poor judgment. However, putting news of the death of the “Queen of Comedy” on the front page while restricting the predictable stuff on the long life of the other queen to inside pages, demonstrated that you have not lost touch with why so many of us continue to buy the paper.Les BrightExeter, Devon • Quite like Victoria to move on just in time to miss the birthday celebrations…Paul MorrisonBridlington, Yorkshire • Surely I cannot be the only one to demand that Victoria Wood be given a state funeral. Maggie Thatcher was granted one for destroying our society. Victoria added to our sense of wellbeing and humanity.Michael ByrneReading, Berkshire • A headline and three full pages of tributes to Victoria Wood – that’s totally appropriate in my book, for a great and clever lady, loved by millions. She tried to stand me up in 1986, but I forgave her for that. I had booked to record an interview with her for a Radio 4 programme in a Birmingham hotel, the night after she’d done her stand-up show at the NEC. She didn’t turn up. She was already checking out when I rang reception to see where she was, and I accosted her in the foyer. “Oh, alright, then,” she said, and gave me a generous half an hour of lucid analysis of the comedy business, theory and practice: “When you don’t go well, it’s you they don’t like, so there’s no way round that. You can’t say ‘Well, I’m playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto and they didn’t like it.’ It’s you they don’t like. And when it goes well, it’s you they like. Which is why comedians are comedians – because they want to be liked.” She gave credit to Alan Bennett, for the idea that brand names can be used to comic effect. “Everybody loves to use jargon,” she said, “and people use it in a very aromatic way. It proves that they know something that you don’t. So when you take these rather odd terms out of their context, then something like Kayser Bondor becomes funny.” I told her a joke about a posh lady “going to get loose covers at Marshall & Snelgrove” which made her laugh out loud. “Because that’s a rhythm thing also, isn’t it – Marshall & Snelgrove is funnier than John Lewis”. When I got home I boasted to anybody who was listening that I’d doorstepped Victoria Wood, and that she’d given me a lesson in comedy writing. She said: “I think everything is sad, really, and so many of us are very unhappy. I’m not in the business of pointing that out to people, I’m in the comedy business. But it has to creep through somehow.”Tony StaveacreBlagdon, Somerset • Whenever I see one of the celebrity folk in my bit of north London, I pretend I haven’t. Once when I was about to load my boot with shopping on the sloping car park behind M&S, my trolley decided to make its independent way down the hill. A voice called “want any ‘elp, do yer?”. Victoria Wood. I wanted to reply, “Yes. Put this trolley in your next monologue!”. I just chased and grabbed and yelled, “No thanks,” at the very best comedian we’ve had in decades. What a tragedy to have lost her.Betty RosenLondon • I agree with all you have written about Victoria Wood – she will be a sad loss. There were other great funny women before her: Victoria herself credited Joyce Grenfell, but I remember too Gert and Daisy (Elsie and Doris Waters) from whom she may have learned a lot, and Gladys Morgan, a very funny Welsh lady.Graham SmithShrewsbury • They barely get a mention in the obituaries, but for me the outstanding works of Victoria Wood were the mini “documentaries”, including Behind the Scenes at Acorn Antiques (I never really raised a smile at AA itself). They were nearly all wonderful, but Winnie’s Lucky Day, about a Birmingham housewife who wins a million pounds, is probably my favourite comedy sketch of all time.John DavisonLondon • Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com |