Victoria Wood: The star who was comic royalty but never cared for the limelight

Funny women were a rare species on television in the 1970s and 1980s, though rarer still were northern, working-class funny women. At the point at which Victoria Wood, who has died aged 62, rose to fame, the BBC was awash with moneyed, middle-class male comic actors, many of them alumni of Cambridge Footlights. Yet, in operating apart from the male-dominated mainstream, Wood became the mainstream. She was also a star who was completely ordinary. Her appeal lay in the fact that she was one of us.

Throughout her 40-year career Wood was a stand-up, a TV comic, an actor, a singer-songwriter, screenwriter and director. She opened the door for scores of working class, female comic performers, among them Caroline Aherne, Jane Horrocks, Caroline Quentin, Kathy Burke and Sheridan Smith.

It has long passed into cliché that Wood was a national treasure, yet she was just that. As one of the country’s best-loved television stars, she once beat the Queen Mother into second place in poll of People You’d Most Like To Live Next Door To, and in the mid-2000s was voted by Radio Times readers as the funniest woman of all time. Despite her status as comic royalty (Wood was awarded a CBE in 2008), she didn’t much care for the limelight and was rarely seen on the red carpet sporting a glittering gown. She once said she’d prefer a blue carpet where she could shuffle past the paparazzi in a pair of flat shoes.

Wood’s sketches brimmed with silliness yet were based on close, clever observation. “Life’s not fair is it?” she once noted “Some of us drink champagne in the fast lane, and some of us eat our sandwiches by the loose chippings on the A597.”

She was endlessly amused by life’s humdrum moments. Her sketches were, on the surface, innocent and gentle, though there was sedition under the surface, from 'Is It On The Trolley?', a sketch in which she drives two city types to distraction as they try and fail to request a cup of coffee (in the process they are revealed to be over-privileged blowhards), to her most popular song ‘Let’s Do It‘ (‘Beat me on the bottom with my Woman’s Weekly’), in which the stereotype of the sexually submissive wife is upturned by Freda, whose appetites leave her husband, Barry, exhausted and unwilling.

Wood was one of the great feminist comedians. She wrote generously and sympathetically for and about women. She would talk blithely and unthreateningly about periods, weight gain, cystitis, disappointing sex and the trials of middle age. “I looked up the symptoms of pregnancy,” she said. “Moody, irritable, big bosoms ... I’ve obviously been pregnant for 36 years.”

There was also a strong seam of melancholy in her work. Her characters, who included aerobics instructors, waitresses and supermarket checkout girls, were women whose sunny demeanours often belied the drudgery of their existence. She once told The Independent “I can’t imagine writing something that had loads of male parts. I don’t understand men at all – they’re a complete mystery to me.”

In her later life she would branch out from comedy into serious drama. 2006’s Housewife, 49, which Wood wrote and starred in, was a tender and poignant drama in which she played a downtrodden wife and mother who struggled to find meaning in her life after her children had grown up.

The youngest of four children, Victoria Wood was brought up on the outskirts of Bury in Lancashire. Her parents were said to be distant; she and her older sisters were left to their own devices and would often eat meals by themselves. Wood suffered from low self-esteem and later talked about being shy, lonely and overweight as a child. In the Nineties she had therapy relating to her past, though the specifics were never revealed. She also talked openly about her struggles with an eating disorder.

Having once been mesmerised by Joyce Grenfell on stage in Buxton, Wood found her passion in performing and studied drama at Birmingham University. She also became a skilled pianist after her father gave her a piano on her 15th birthday. Her career got off to an auspicious start when she won the talent show New Faces in 1973. Following a stint as a novelty act on That’s Life!, she subsequently appeared in a Wild West Show in Leicester opposite the magician Geoffrey Durham, whom she later married and with whom she had two children (the pair split in 2002).

In the mid-Seventies Wood’s career began to dip and she spent several years on the dole. Durham encouraged her to keep writing, however, and Wood duly wrote a series of dramas including 1978’s Talent, which was televised by Granada. It was there that she met the actress Julie Walters with whom she co-starred in 1982’s Wood and Walters. They remained lifelong friends and went on to appear together in Victoria Wood – As Seen On TV, Pat and Margaret, Dinnerladies and Acorn Antiques.

Throughout the 1980s, Wood’s sketch show As Seen On TV was a prime-time staple. She was also a roaring success on the live circuit and once sold out the Royal Albert Hall for 15 consecutive nights. There were TV specials too, including 1989’s Bafta-winning An Audience With Victoria Wood.

Over the last decade she has written a musical, presented a documentary about the British Empire, one about landmines in Laos, and another about tea. In 2011 she co-produced and appeared in Eric and Ernie, about the early career of the double-act Morecambe and Wise. Wood played Sadie, Eric’s mother.

As the years went by Wood became increasingly disenchanted with the BBC. She was irritated by the preponderance of loud-mouthed men on its panel shows (though she agreed to appear on QI), and was irked by the lack of trust in its more seasoned stars. Speaking of her fury at one executive telling her how to do her job, she said: “You think, well that’s fine, but what’s your qualification for telling me what’s funny? Please don’t tell me what’s funny, cos I know what’s funny... That’s why I’m on television and you’re not.”

Victoria Wood, comic, writer and actress; born 19 May 1953, died 20 April 2016.