Hello and welcome to Sitcom Geeks, I'm James Carey. And I'm Dave Cohen. And this is episode 154, would you believe? In a little while we're going to go back to the rest of our interview with Jasper Reese about Victoria Wood, it was really, really interesting and this is all the other stuff we talked about that was not related to Dina Ladies, but it was great stuff wasn't it Dave?
Yeah, yeah, from the early beginnings and all the way through Beyond Dina Ladies as well, really insightful and such a good book as well, I really recommend it. If you're stuck for Christmas presents at this point, anyone who likes Victoria Wood will love this book I think. Yeah, and if they're British and they can read they probably do love Victoria Wood and will love the book. So it's a pretty safe bet.
Although, you know, getting a hold of books these days is not as easy as it was. That's very true. Well, I don't know actually. He said that they were already printed a load and a load more coming so hopefully we'll get a new batch and get them out to people as quickly as possible.
So how do you become the next Victoria Wood? That's the big question. And we've got some sort of breaking news haven't we from the BBC writers' room, Dave? What is that all about?
We have, well, it was the 20th anniversary this week of the BBC writers' room and they celebrated the inverted comments by saying, we're going to have to shut down our comedy operation, which is kind of half the story. There is more to come. It may have come between us recording this on Tuesday afternoon and going out on Thursday. But as far as we're aware, an announcement is coming from Shane Allen, head of comedy at BBC about how the BBC will be picking up scripts from new comedy writers.
So, I mean, it already just ran the Gordon and Simpson bursary thing. And there's the Felix Dexter thing as well, isn't there? Yeah, and Caroline. So in a way, they're already doing some of this stuff anyway.
And I think they think they're planning just to join things up a bit. But we can't really speak for them. We've not spoken for them. But I guess it's kind of worth knowing that the BBC writers' room aren't going to be doing another comedy window, not an out-and-out comedy sitcom window.
It's going to be comedy dramas and drama here on in. Is that if I got that right, Dave? That sounds just about right. Yeah, I think so.
And the comedy drama window actually opens this Monday, the 7th of December. So you've basically only got a month to get your script into shape. And then, unfortunately, as far as the writers' room's concerned, that's it probably for another year. So that all happened very quickly.
First we knew about it was I happened to be looking something up in the writers' room about 10 days ago and saw this drama and comedy drama window. And I'm, oh, that's interesting. They've never done comedy drama before. And sent various emails to the writers' room and didn't hear back a lot.
And eventually Simon and Amanda from the writers' room, the comedy section got back to us and said, sorry, obviously everything was moving very fast at that time. I think that the plan has been, for at least a year now, Shane Allen, has been looking at how to bring everything to do with training or as much as possible to bring it under his department's wing. And so, sort of, and tied in with that as well, of course, and the fact that he's dealing with huge cuts and everything, every area of the BBC is being cut and cut. So it's...
I don't know why. Because the licence fee is guaranteed by Parliament. It's nothing to do with the economy. Well, there are all sorts of...
They are actually cutting... I think there is a budget from the government that's being cut. And also, there's talk of... You'll just get told off if you don't have a licence fee.
Oh, yes, that's right. They're going to decriminalise it, aren't they? And so, they have to now pay for licence fees for people over 75 as well. We do that wonderful thing where we thought it would be a great idea to make somebody pay for something for those people over there.
And we're going to pay for it. And then they get used to the idea that it's free. And then the government say, well, we thought it would be a good idea if then you paid for it. And I'm like, well, we never agreed to that.
So it's always a sleight of hand as the government always do, really, or successive governments. And in a way, the way the government do things is not that dissimilar from the way the BBC do things. Because from the outside, you may be looking at it going, well, why are the BBC writers doing this? And why BBC comedy doing that?
And why can't the BBC do dot dot and you go, well, hang on, you've just put three things together there that aren't necessarily related, which is the BBC, the BBC writers room, and BBC comedy. And they're all slightly different parts of the BBC, one of which is BBC Studios, which is an independent company now, and makes profits that go back into it. So there isn't... There's no one BBC.
It's a name, it's an idea, it's a way of life. What is the BBC? Well, as we were talking to Simon and Amanda yesterday, as we discussed, if you've ever worked for BBC Radio Comedy, or you've worked for Kids TV, or you've had contact with the BBC writers room, you know that these are basically tiny little cottage industries stuck in a corner of an office of some big management thing. And they are basically two people in a cat doing 20 people's work and producing tensor...
They are actually the total engine room. And I think about the amount of radio comedy that gets made, the amount of kids comedy that gets made, the amount of training that happens at BBC writers room, it's basically a tiny little individual pockets are all independent of each other, and as was hinted by Simon, you know, some of them don't always get on with each other, quite as well as you would hope. So there is some sense, I think, to Shane as the head of comedy, having under his roof. I mean, the long-term bad news, I would say, is that the way that they tend to be looking more for writer-performers, as opposed to writers or writer-performers who might want to write something that's not just for them.
And the hesitate to use the words good news, but the window for the next year, at least, I would say, for pure writers, is that there aren't writer-performers for development producers to look for at this point. And so they are actually having to read scripts rather than go and see shows, as they are obviously not going to show to see. So for the moment, this is not necessarily a bad thing for writers. Yeah, I mean, these things all go in circles, they all have their day, you know, it doesn't strike me that this is necessarily a positive or a negative move, but more of a realisation.
Comedy is nominated now by writer-performers, and I would say if you're not interested in performing, that's completely fine. Maybe comedy-drama will increasingly become your friend anyway, and if you end up getting involved in drama, that is a purely writer-led thing, because you don't really have any drama-performers, if you're sure to mean, you have comedy-writer-performers, but you don't have any drama-writer-performers in quite the same way. So in a way, it's worth exploring both. And if you are out in out comedy, it's worth maybe producing some of your own stuff and getting people to be in it, but also be, there may be some performers out there who are good, who've got an interesting voice that you can team up with and help them and write for them and become part of their team.
So I think we just need to be a bit candid about it. And I include myself in that, because it's not immediately obvious to me how I'm going to get another show on TV anytime soon. So, you know, we're all in the same boat. Absolutely, yeah.
And I think I am actually genuinely quite excited by this inclusion of comedy-drama. In the drama window, because, and this relates directly to the things some of you may have already signed up, but I do have heard you sign up. I'm doing three weeks of daily emails starting this Monday, 7th of December, in which I'm trying to kind of work out what do we mean by comedy-drama. And the reason I'm saying that is because there isn't, it's a relatively new thing.
Nobody has defined it yet, and it will become defined, I think, by you and by what you can come up with. And interestingly, I've already had a couple of email chats with two writers, one who is very much Danny Peake, who's written a lot of comedy, a lot of sitcoms. He's written lots of episodes of Not Going Out. But he also has written Code 404 for Sky TV, which is very much- Oh, that explains why I haven't seen this.
Because I was wondering, oh, that Code 404 shows, that must go, look at that. I don't know what's going on at the moment. Exactly, yeah. But I've seen a few trailers and things for it.
But it is very much a drama with jokes. But I also had quite a long discussion with Lisa Holsworth, who is a drama writer, really. And she started on Emmerdale, she wrote loads of episodes with that. And she's written for all sorts of shows like New Tricks, Atley Bridge, The New Version of All Creatures, Great and Small.
These are drama shows- I saw her episode, and it was really funny. Yeah, these are drama shows that have humor in them. And both Danny and Lisa con echoed the thing almost that you were saying when we had our Patreon Q&A last week, when people say what's the difference between sitcom and comedy drama? And the answer from a few people including yourself is, well, there is no difference.
It's a comedy. A sitcom can have drama in it, and a drama can have comedy in it. And in fact, Danny gave some really great examples. He talks about West Wing, which is a drama, and that had lots of funny parts in it.
And then he talks about, he says, you know, like, you can watch six whole six episodes of series four of Black Adam, and be laughing all the time right up to the last moment when everybody goes out and gets killed. And it suddenly becomes a very affecting drama. So there's a lot of room for a lot of interpretation, and for you, new writers, to be able to. It feels like we're coming back to the situation that we hadn't had for a while.
I'll actually, you've got a bigger canvas to draw, and you don't have to necessarily be thinking about a bunch of half a dozen or twenty-something sitting in a flat talking about nothing at all. Yeah. Yeah, no, and I think the only thing that we need to learn and be mindful of is as people are writing their scripts and sending them through to a comedy drama thing, an initiative or just sending it to agents or whoever, is you do need to be mindful of what the rules of your world and your show are. Because in a way, whilst it is all relatively undefined, you need to be pretty clear how funny your show is meant to be and what it's about and what it's meant to look like.
And I think clarity of character and story is even more important than it was. I mean, it was already paramount. So you just need to be crystal clear on what kind of a show is it? Because somebody who's picking up a pile and reading it and somebody who's switching over and watching it, they kind of need to know because they're although the boundaries are blurred, they still have kind of reference points in their head.
Is this a comedy comedy show? Is this a silly show? If they sit at the studio, it's a sitcom. There's no such thing as comedy dramas filmed in front of an audience.
Not really, anyway, not intentionally. And then if it's going to be kind of quite exciting and excitable or dramatic, but then it's got some really good jokes in it. Like I mean, life on Mars, for example, wasn't really a comedy, but to me was one of the funniest things on for a few years. This is another thing actually, because I asked the writers' room to help us and to give a definition.
Again, I'd say sign up to the emails, a funnyup02outtogmail.com, and you'll be able to read what the writers' room have said about what they mean by comedy drama. And actually, the only thing they said definitely is it's not audience sitcom. But even then, funnily enough, I've just been writing these emails now, and I started with a history of comedy drama. And can you guess what was the first comedy drama?
Well, it was in the UK. Yes, I'm sure. I wouldn't have any idea. Give me a clue.
I'm about to take a sip of tea. How's it in drinking game? Yeah. Oh, and it's set to and so.
Oh, well done. I'm pretty sure that that is the first comedy drama. You said it's a film in front of an audience? Yeah, well, I was just thinking actually, yeah, there's something about watching an audience sitcom with a moment.
And Frazier has quite a few of these moments where there is a moment of silence, and it's actually 10 times more powerful as a piece of drama, because you can almost hear the studio audience holding their breath going, oh my god, this has hit me in the summer. And then the big joke comes, the release comes after it. And I'd love to see some more sitcoms that have those moments again. Well, they're kind of a good sitcom normally does, but they are very hard to do, and they're not making that many of them.
And I wonder if, as it may be, the National Theatre and the RSC or whoever start live streaming more stuff, and so you're watching something that's got an audience and you're still watching it, you know, as, because although people go to watch stuff at a big screen that's being live cast, as it were, or has been pre-recorded and being broadcast, I wonder if that will open up the opportunity. I remember with him and her, which was obviously a show I didn't particularly go for, but it was obviously a comedy drama, it was very slow. And it kind of was its own thing. And I thought to myself, well, you know, this is an audience thing, so it's fine.
But I just thought it's kind of like Pinter. And that's a studio audience show. I mean, Pinter plays are theatre. So, you know, I wonder what would happen if you played him in front of a studio audience?
And if they knew what they were watching, they weren't expecting Mrs Brown, but they were expecting something where it's much more downbeat and subtle. So yeah, we could hardly be more subtle than Mrs Brown, it could hardly fail to be more subtle than that. Which has its moments of pay-offs as well. It does, yes.
And then they immediately berates the audience for going, oh, I'm a block in a dress. You know? It's a bit of a cheat, I think. But, you know, there you go.
So, yeah, so how these things all shake out, we don't know. But what we do know is that comedy drama window is now opening for BBC Writers' Room. And you've got till the sixth, I think six or seven of January, which is considering that that's supposed to be a holiday period, there's a little bit of a... Why not ruin your holiday by frantically rewriting your script and get Dave's emails about it as well?
And then the day after that on the 7th of January, Big Drum Roll. My sitcom writing course called Writing Your sitcom drops, lands and becomes available to the world. So, there'll be more about that. But if you want to get a full taste of it, as it were, I'm doing some YouTube videos, short YouTube videos, which are on its own YouTube channel called The Situation Room.
We'll try to get links in the show notes. Or go and find us on Facebook, the sitcom gigs page on Facebook, and I'll put up links. So, Dave, you're going to become an influencer? Possibly, yes.
So, yeah, it's 12 lessons, which takes you from, you know, basic idea all the way through to hopefully a polished draft that you don't actually hate. Because I think the one thing that I struggle with is when people say, oh, I sent you the script, but it wasn't any good. And I knew it wasn't any good. The question is, well, why did you send it then?
And I get it. I know why people say that for a mixture of reasons and that's all fine. But the idea behind this course is, I think, just going back to the beginning, starting again, have a fresh start, fresh look. The course tells you everything you need to know and doesn't tell you anything that you don't need to know, because there's an awful lot of advice out there, which can be quite overwhelming.
So, hopefully that will be of use. So, for the next round of things that happen in 2021, who knows, even if 2021 will ever arrive, and maybe there'll be a nuclear war before that comes along. Oh, thanks. Very cheery.
That's the way 2020 has gone, really, isn't it? I mean, what's left? Yeah. So, on that note, almost a Victoria Wood-like note, really.
Yeah. We should probably get back into that interview with Jasper. So, in the words of Victoria, let's do it. Can we just talk about those early years?
Just because the things, when I started reading your book, I plan to get to the dinner ladies bit quite quickly, because we're sitcom geeks and that's kind of what we're into. But also, we're about people establishing themselves as writers and writing careers and all that kind of stuff. So, I got really hooked on the earlier stuff. Because one tends to assume my memory of her, really.
My first proper memory is an audience with Victoria Wood, which was one of the first things that I recorded off the television, because we had a Panasonic VCR. The one with the barcode scanner that didn't really catch on. It kind of got blown away by video plus in the following decade. So, I've memorized an audience with Victoria Wood, because it's one of the first things I've been seen it, probably 100 times.
Before you go on, could I just ask you, was it a surprise to you to learn that she was six months pregnant? Yeah, that would be surprising. Yeah. You wouldn't get that.
Yeah. So, the fact is you watched it all those times and you never tweeted it. No, no, no, no. It's a well-designed costume.
It's astonishing. It's not terribly flattering, but in a way, I'd already had her in mind as that, and every time you go back, it just confirms what you already know. I guess it's a self-fulfilling thing. But the thing that was surprising is I'd heard that she'd won new faces, and it wasn't you, wasn't it?
That was something real I'd have. Yes. You want to keep. Right.
And therefore, you'd just think that there's a kind of a smooth transition from that to where then she became well-known. And actually, it was a disaster for a long time, wasn't it? And I'd be interested in your take on how did she keep going? Because she seemed to have 100 reasons to stop.
And she didn't even know who she was or what her voice was, really, did she? Well, she kept going because she had faith that it was going to happen eventually, although she did when she met. So she won her heat of new faces in 1974, just after leaving Birmingham University. And she carried on doing, you know, getting sort of various gigs, but she spent a hell of a lot of time doing nothing.
But following the following year, she did meet Roger McGough, who got up to Edinburgh. So she started to meet like-minded people. And then she got that's life in early 1976, and that was going to be a big break. And she did write so much rather than using songs.
But the problem was that when she took her show by herself, when she wasn't in shows with other people, she didn't really have an act. She had funny songs, but she had no ability really to kind of sell herself on the stage. And it was only really when she met, well, two things happened. She met Jeffery Durham in 1976, and he slowly started talking about how they could turn her into, in quotes, Victoria Wood.
And then she met Julie Walters when she was cast in this show. Or asked to do these songs with this review in Shepis Bush and Cynthia. So that changed everything. So it was a kind of four-year period where she was just struggling to break out of her quizzeless.
And it was a very, very long and arduous and at times extremely demoralizing process. Well, I found interesting in that section. There are two main things because I was a stand-up before comedy writing. But I came along a little bit later.
So there was a kind of- there was a structure in place for people, for there was a thing called alternative comedy. And interestingly, there was Victoria Wood and someone else who featured in your book, Michael John Dowie, who was too early. Both of them were too early to be alternative. But they would have easily fitted into what became alternative comedy.
And in fact, they were perfectly successful. Well, Victoria was perfectly successful going down the mainstream route because she was everyone. But then the other aspect of it was that kind of people talk about comedians being the sad clowns or the thing. She reminded me of so many comedians that I remember from that period, people who went on to be successful.
I think the word is more dysfunctional maybe rather than sort of sad. And there's a lack of confidence, but there's also a kind of very short- she had this incredible shortness that I'm going to be a star. And she was sort of saying that, what, when she was 15 or something? Imagine meeting someone who's totally shy and sick, doesn't say anything.
The first thing she says to you is, yeah, no, it's all right, I'm going to be a star. I mean, that must have been kind of hard for people around her. Well, it was, they never told me that. But I mean, it is, yeah, I can't disagree with any of that.
But she, I often asked myself this question when I was looking into these years, when she's, and it's quite stark and bold when she says, you know, when she's doing the summer show in 1975, which is absolutely awful, new faces spin off in which she said they got all the scripts out of other people's dust bins. And she even then when she was doing interviews and she didn't fit in, there was, Marty Caine was easily the biggest star in it. And she was, even then she was doing tabloid interviews, saying, I'm going to be huge. She was like, I'm going to be a big star, I'm going to make it.
And you just, where do you get this from? And I never quite satisfactorily have answered to myself the question of whether she was saying this in order to convince herself or whether she was saying it because she believed it. And probably the answer is a bit of both. But going back to John Darry, I mean, yes, I completely agree with you that they, you know, and Victoria often said I came along a little bit.
You know, I was earlier, just a few years earlier than all those alternatives, comedians who came along in the early 80s. And, but when she did, I mean, it was luck that she met John Darry and they went out on a very startling attended tour in 1977 and she loved working with him. But I mean, it's impossible to imagine those two. I would love to be go back and be sort of teleported back to see those two together because that's so different.
And they did have this, they did have this mantra that I put in the book that they started using when they were touring. When they worked out, they were done a gig in Cardiff and they were trying to imagine a comedian who dies on stage. What do they say to themselves at the coming off stage? And they imagined that they would say fuckshit, tick went ballad as they, as they were coming off.
And so because Victoria and John couldn't possibly both hit the bull's eye with the same audience who would come to see them both. And one of them, when they came off having died in front of the audience, would say fuckshit went ballad. So they were going on with them, prosper and thrive in front of the audience. So anyway.
I love that. I can also, being, you know, comedians, comedy writers, we just crave terrible gig stories. Because the success is not actually all that interesting. Because success often looks quite similar.
Whereas there are lots of different ways of failing. I just think they're endlessly fascinating. I couldn't agree more. And I've always loved and being fascinated by biographies that are forensic about that process.
The sort of, you know, the Janus moment where you go through a door, you know, in Byron's phrase, you know, I won't confirm myself famous. But when suddenly you're a nobody, having been a nobody suddenly you become a somebody, there was a very good book called Take It Like A Man, which by George, I presume, wrote with someone else, which is actually a brilliant, brilliant memoir, in which he describes the process of becoming famous, incredibly, in incredible detail. And you really sort of follow him on that journey. And I was, as you alluded to, those years where Victoria was struggling to fulfill what she regarded as a destiny, and her ambition from when she was a child, a small child, to become famous, it was such an arduous process.
So I just, I mean, there have been people who've said a very tiny minority who have been listening to the audio book with this book, so I couldn't get past, you know, it's too long. It's just taking her too long to make it. And you know how it ends? I mean, it's amazing, isn't it?
Yeah. But I agree with you, James, that yes, yes, your success, there is a, you know, arguably there's a sort of blandness to success. But I would argue with Victoria, her success was, there was never that kind of, I don't know, it was just sort of whitening out. Her career is so extraordinary that I hope that her story doesn't come to that.
Oh, not at all. And the listeners of this show will love all that stuff anyway. So I think it's got the failure and the success. Go on, James.
I'll have to write this down. I just thought it was such an amazing. I'll go back to that and then we'll move on. But the first time Julie Walters met Victoria when she was an A-Rosa Teenagers, they were auditioning for something.
Julie Walters described her as frightened and shy, and she had glasses and was shrinking from everyone else in the room, which is just, that she could remember somebody as being so memorable. You know, that's an amazing thing. But actually, to kind of move on from that, I mean, one other thing, and again, I hope I'm not overthinking this or over theorizing it, but it did strike me, reading about her and about the struggles that she had. And I've been thinking a lot about the women who came through in comedy, the solo women who came through in comedy around that period, a bit later, like Carolina Hearn and Linda Smith and Victoria.
And a woman, James and I, knew, called Debbie Barham, who's a comedy writer. And they all died quite very young, you know, and I was sort of thinking about this as I was reading, and knowing what the, how male dominated the comedy circuit was in those days, and just wondering if, you know, it was part of the reason for that struggle was that there wasn't a place for funny women, you know, I don't know, it's just a theory. I can't, I mean, I'm a fan of Linda Smith and Carolina Hearn, but I mean, I don't know that you can sort of loop them all into a sort of wider theory as to, because, you know, Carolina Hearn is quite a lot younger. And indeed, you know, when we get on to talking about Dina Ladies Carolina Hearn does pop up as a sort of theme, but we'll get to that.
But I think, I think in a way, the fact that she was the only one, and Victoria really was the only one in 1978. In fact, when she started doing stand-up, in proper stand-up in 1980, she was acutely conscious of the fact that she was the only one, she loved it, she loved it the fact that there was no competition. And she had this field that was completely free for her to explore on her own. And when she, I mean, she sort of joked about French and Saunders when they came along, she said, oh, I avoided them for years.
I didn't, you know, I didn't understand at them. But, you know, I mean, in fact, as it happens, she was actually privately, you know, very collegiate with them and encouraging. But I think Victoria would, she, I do explore in a way, in this book, the way in which she didn't want to be seen as part of a sort of feminist project or a feminist wave or tide, you know, she had quite disciplining things to say about spare rib, et cetera. I mean, when she said, there's quite something like, you know, I know I've got, I know I've got, I know I've got them written referring to ovaries, I just don't want to sing about them.
So, you know, she couldn't be co-opted in that way. Yeah. The thing that surprised me also just is a kind of one last stepping stone to Din Ladies is the amount of theatre she'd written. And this was a complete revelation to me that in the course of one of the pathways to success was writing that show called Talent, which I'd never heard of.
And then there was another play as well. There were kind of musical plays, they weren't quite musicals, were they? They were sort of, they were kind of their own thing. And I guess that kind of must have stood her in really good stead for writing situation comedy, although she'd done a lot of sketch work as well through as seen on TV and that kind of thing.
Just feels like a whole load of planets were aligning at that point. But that was a really interesting period that I didn't know about her. And I'd wonder if you can reflect on what the lesson she was learning through that. Well, with Talent, she wrote just in three weeks.
Talent, we came as a result of in at the death that review show she did at the Bush Theatre in the Summer of 17.8. She got commissioned to write this play for Sheffield, and it had to be on by December. So, she wrote it in three weeks. And I mean, it's an absolute gag attack.
It's just, it's absolutely packed with zingers. But it's also because it's very autobiographically, it's about their experience of talent contests. And about her relationship with Julie, or be it sort of tangentially, and you know, passed through a prism and a self exploration. It's, you know, there's a lot in that play.
And it definitely has, you know, merited when it was revived in 2009. It still had something to say. The next place she did also for Sheffield was good fun, which she struggled with more. But it was a sort of, there was strong elements of sitcom in it.
So, again, it was completely sort of enriched by, you know, just joke after joke after joke. So, so, so in terms of craft, both of those plays were a very good sort of training ground for when she finally came to do sitcom. She did an attempt, so many other attempts to write plays. Yeah, well, that's, I remember telling on the TV and just being amazed by it, and then kind of forgetting because partly because she was out of the public eye for another sort of two, three years or so after that.
But I thought, and again, this is a reverse of the standard kind of root for a comedy writer. Certainly around that time you had people like John Sullivan and David Renig and Monty Python. They start on sketches and then they get bigger. She started big, she started with the plays, but actually where she found her real power was in the shorter sketches.
So, again, I'm interested in that being a kind of, and I don't know anyone else who's kind of taken that root really. Well, without scanning the kind of encyclopedia in my head, which is, I can't figure anyone either. I mean, one of the reasons why plays didn't quite work for her is that first played was came out in a splurge incredibly quickly. She wasn't brilliant, I hope this is not regarded as heretical to say this, but she wasn't brilliant on plot.
And you do really need that with theatre. And also she wasn't, theatre plays have to be about something. And she was actually a terribly autobiographical writer, as I contend in her biography. And I don't think she had anything really else that she wanted to say in theatre.
And I suspect in the various attempts she made at writing theatre, she discovered that too. But when she came to doing sketches first in Wood and Walters, and then obviously primarily, and wonderfully in, as seen on TV, I mean, it's not really, it's, to call it a sketch show is to undervalue it because she was writing all the songs, some of which are quite melancholy, absolutely brilliant songs, which she obviously performed herself. There were sketches there were sort of piss-stake ads. She was doing a kind of this, she was showing the world of television, but sort of filtering it through the prism of her own imagination.
And doing many documentaries, I don't think you can call those many documentaries sketches. They're far more sophisticated than what one might have said. So, there's one of the girls swimming the channel, aren't we? Well, that is article one in my theory about how she was constantly telling her own live story in her comedy, in her comedy writing.
That's really interesting what you say about theatre, and I've really not thought about that before. I think that's really insightful how theatre needs to be about something. And if it's not going to be about anything, as it were, then it needs to have a pretty decent plot. It needs to be far sick, you know, I'm thinking noise is awful, that kind of thing.
So, it needs to kind of biffle on like a cooney fast. And the stuff in between doesn't quite, it's kind of neither one thing nor the other. Well, good, sorry to interrupt, James. Good fun is absolutely stuffed with jokes, but she was unsatisfied with it.
And Michael Cogerna, the theatre producer who had sent me commissioned it, was unpasswaded, it deserved a place in the West End. So she came to regard it as a less than brilliant piece of work later on. But it was the same, it had the same gag rate as dinner ladies. But, you know, she was, you know, hugely suited to the half-hour format.
So, that, because we should probably round off fairly soon, but you just sort of touched on the fact that she was generally dissatisfied with the industry itself, the TB industry. And she was critical there in private about, you know, southern over-educated types who aren't actually very original, which is, I think it's very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, but I did find that towards the end, there was quite a lot of sourness in her mainstream comedy. There was quite a lot of kicking television and the sort of people who make television. There were one or two Christmas specials quite late on, I remember just thinking, you seem to be a little bit bitter about the medium that has made you an absolute ton of money and celebrity.
Not sure that's particularly good look. And some people like that keep doing it. But do you have a, I mean, do you have a take on that? Am I just being a little bit paranoid?
It just felt like a little bit, it was a bit ungracious. But obviously she put up with a lot. She did have it in her to not always be generous. But she didn't, generally speaking, have a good time with, until Peter Salmon with controllers of panels.
And she felt quite unbloved when she was making, as seen on TV, no one ever kind of wrote a letter saying, well done for winning those awards. And actually she did like Peter Salmon and weirdly, it was, it was, it was, it was the year after doing dinner ladies, she did all the trimmings, which is the first time, which, which you're alluding, that's one of the shows that you're alluding to, in which he gives the BBC a kicking, is partly because Peter Salmon had come in for a lot of flack that year. And she was the only person who wrote to Greg Dyke to say, I think he's doing a brilliant job. And it was of him that I am doing you Christmas special.
It's in large part because of him. And it was at the same time as Big Brother was happening. And she was, she was angry about reality shows, although they were kind of right for comments. She was angry because she thought they were taking money out of actors mouths.
And she thought similarly about the only ways Essex and shows like that later on. And, and she didn't like the proliferation of new channels. So there's lots of jokes in all the trimmings about, you know, BBC Good Old Days, BBC, Brain Dead, etc. So she didn't like the way in which television was becoming, I don't know, was sort of bifurcating endlessly.
But she got much angry at many years later when in 2009 when Christmas, she was promised a slot on Christmas Day and then it turned out she got one on Christmas Eve. And it wasn't so much the fact that she didn't get that slot. It was the way in which she was told. They were younger executives and they didn't really know how to talk to her.
And they were quite high handed or offhand. And so she did get angry with them. And she gave a very withering interview to Deckard Aiken head in the Guardian about them. So yeah, I love to write about that stuff.
I mean, John Cleese takes the bait every time by the looks of it. You know what I mean? He's regularly, and also John Lloyd is always very happy to say these people don't know how to read scripts. And when he was on this podcast, we did everything we could for him not to feel he had to say that.
And he still said that. It was very interesting. We've all been kicked in the pants by John Cleese. Speak for yourself.
Well, that's a, I wrote a review of Holders Sunset. Which is the most unutterable part of the build, in my view. And I thought so. Neither of you were involved in it.
And he didn't like what's not about it. Fair enough. You wouldn't expect it. But before we do draw to her clothes, I just, I wondered whether we could talk a little bit about her range of, is it time to talk about jokes that she, because there was, yes, we've talked about the fact that she structured her sentences and her gags so perfectly.
But one of the things, as a biographer that I was really interested in is obviously when you follow someone's life all the way through, you notice patterns happening over and over again. So just for example, the facts that Duncan's character, Stan, always talks about the fact that he was at Catarick Army Camp in the 1960s. That comes from the fact that Victoria did an absolutely terrible gig at Catarick Army Camp in 1975, or she'd just been in Edinburgh. Or when she goes on the show totally trivial.
She doesn't, at the end of the second series, to try and win some money. She's put someone else puts her up for it without her realizing it. Now that was because she had been put up for new faces without anyone knowing. And Petula Gordino is a grotesque and highly comic exploration of her relationship with her mother.
And Petula says, I've had post-neted this interest for 40 years. I had a baby once before, but I've never really got involved. You remember, Brett? Oh, yes, it was you.
And I put her in an orphanage and lost the address. These are things that Victoria had been exploring since before swim the channel, and obviously continued with Patton Margaret. So Petula is kind of his, her mother. And then even things like Dolly, Dolly Surning, Dolly Belfield.
There was a girl at a very grand school called Belfield, and she just found it a funny surname. So she, and then there's a joke about Canadian Air Force exercises in the second series. Now, Jeffrey Durham, Victoria's husband, had been doing Canadian Air Force exercises for several years in the 1990s. They were kind of dominating theme of her house.
So all of this stuff was sort of mulched. Even when she makes a joke about, do you remember when in the second series when Petula is wielding and announces that she's dying? And she's wielding with another elderly lady who's being transported in the ambulance at the same time. And they have a discussion about whether she can be left in the ambulance or not.
And Petula says she's not a sieve, she's not a cd player, she's not going to get nicked. And Victoria, when writing the first series had in a kind of creative storm, had come into the house and left a car open and her cd player got nicked. So she just remembered that detail and bummed it in. I mean, I could bang on this about there were so many old jokes that she loved, old joke structures that she repeated hugely.
Yeah, and it's not cheating because no one notices and be no one cares. And sometimes you as a performer might not want to do it. And so I occasionally throw I write Milton Jones's radio show with him. And sometimes I notice a joke has disappeared in the script.
And I say, Oh, we're not doing the joke about the beekeeping. And he's like, no, because he's lovely actually to like for love work with him. But occasionally he'll just go, yeah, but it's only the same sort of joke. The other joke you do about the thing is exactly the same kind of, and he's just like, yeah, it's just like he's just not a joke.
And that's fine. He's about that doing it. He's about the sixth sense. So it's okay to do that.
But also I think the other lesson to learn for our listeners particularly who are writing is the fact that you can mine your story. That's not cheating. And also specificity is funny. You know, I think the stuff that you can't make up, you know, and we do need to be writing down weird stuff that happens to you or memorable stuff.
And you don't want to chew horn it in, but you just want that toolkit. You want that, you know, suite of stuff where you can just go, Oh, I need this kind of thing. And that's I think I mean, one of the things that I get when I read a lot of scripts from people and they say, we ask, you know, well, why do you think you're all the person to write this? Well, it's set in a betting shop.
And well, I worked in a betting shop for three years. I know all these people. And I get that, but what I often take is you kind of need permission to lie. But I think at the same time, you know, a lot of these jokes are not these characters.
They're not actually true, but there's an emotional truth at the heart. It's about her relationship with her love, isn't it? And it's about, and like when she and Julie, I mean, it's like, it's sort of like she falls in love with Julie, but where you've written it, I think it's almost like a romance. It's like she's found her, she's found her other half.
And she calls the other actor in talent is called Julie, although it's not, you know, it's a bit like, and you talk a lot about how that in that and in pattern Margaret as well, she's writing about two two sides of herself. So I think that's a really interesting thing also for a writer is to be kind of ruthless on yourself. Do you get that when you interviewed her much? Ruthless about us.
Victoria would never really talk about being an autobiographical writer. I never really extracted that from her. And it was only in the act of writing this biography that I'd really that it's become apparent to me how much she was using her own experiences and the themes of her life, and indeed particular incidents and taking them and imparting topspin to make them, you know, sort of deeper or funnier or whatever. So no, she was and so a lot of the stuff, the evidence for this I would find in her letters and the private correspondence or emails or whatever.
So actually no in asking a question. But I mean, Victoria never, what she had to do in this for the first time is she had to, she didn't kiss for the first time because she also kissed his dumb compressive in pattern Margaret, but she kisses Andy Dunn in this and she also had to cry on camera for the first time. And that was in the second series. And the second series, I never really got to the bottom of what is going on in the second series with, autobiographically what's going on in the relationship between Tony and Bren because when she was aiming for plotlessness in the first series, the second series is really about it's a kind of will they won't they romance soap as well as a sitcom.
She took, you know, she no one took the piss out of soaps more than Victoria or more proficiently than Victoria with a conantiques and did a mow in her all day breakfast Christmas show. But at the same time, the second series of dinner ladies is a soap. It's got the most ridiculous plot lines in it. You know, the baby being left on the stairs or, you know, particular Gordino announcing that she's dying or, and the brain's husband walking in the moment when they're just kissing.
It's just, it's, the plotting is straight out of, I don't know, out of a coordination or something or a letter soap. But she really clearly wanted to rise a romance, she wanted to write a romance for herself. And she got on very well with Andy Dunn. There are pictures in the archive of a photo album.
There's a lovely picture of her cuddling in. And you know, she, the minute he came into the, into the audition for the first time, he was just kind of dropping out. She was completely smitten by his smile. And so I sort of probably slightly failed as a biographer to, to mine or explore that.
But I mean, it does segue quite neatly, dinner ladies all rather messily into the years of her doing, you know, yet more kind of staccain of like overworking, doing all the trimmings and then having an emergency hysterectomy and then going straight out on tour and then a marriage-wearing apart. In, in, you know, all within a kind of 18 month period and the efforts that she made to perfect dinner ladies had a bearing on accelerating or catalyzing the end of her marriage. Well, I would say, much as I would like to talk about that, we should probably draw stumps there. But it's all in the book.
It's all in the book. So we, it feels like in some senses, in podcasting terms, we've done a bit of a deep dive. But we have merely paddled in the shallow end of the material that's available in this excellent book, which, although it is authorised, it is by no means a haggiography. And it's called Let's Do It, and it's by Jasper Reese.
It is available from all good book shops that are open. So that would be online book shops. And it is just an absolute no-brainer for the comedy fan in your life for a Christmas present, isn't it? I mean, it's just, it's just, it's just, just get them this.
It'll just be easier. I am duty-balanced to concur with your conclusion. Absolutely. Yeah.
Yeah. No. So, um, it's, it's a lot of bang for your buck. It's a great read.
And, you know, I've, I've not finished it yet, but I'm certainly going to read every, every, every morsel. Well, have a box of chities ready for the end. Yes. No, I will do.
Yeah. I'm kind of, that's the kind of the unknown that that's, there was, there was that period where Victoria Wood was around and she was, you thought there's something going to be great that's going to come down the pike and that, oh, she's, she's died. Oh, well, that we hadn't, we hadn't finished. Um, so yeah, no, I'm, I'm, I may well shed some tears towards the end because she was just Titanic in, in her presence in the comedy scene and it just felt like it's interesting when you're talking about how so many details of her life are on screen.
And that is why people felt like they knew her, didn't they? Even though she was quite hard to know, you know, and the way you describe her in the book and the way I've sort of, you know, come across references to her in other places as well, she's not quite the person she seems in yet. It's all, it's all on the screen. My, my glib line is that, is that people thought they knew her but that's because she knew them.
I mean, in terms of the, you know, she hadn't, you say she hadn't finished, there was more, more coming, coming along. She did, you know, it's not a plot spoiler to say that she had written a film script which Julie, she was attempting to interest, Julie, in doing it was going to be another wonderful piss-take of the world of, of television. And cinema was the one art form that she had never managed to conquer despite efforts in the 1970s, sorry, in the 1980s to do so. And most obviously when she tried and failed to get the rights to do the comedy girls story.
So she was, she was writing a movie at the end and I read the first draft and it's got lots of wonderful stuff in it. But I guess that will never be seen. No, also, you know, somebody else will finish it for her. It's what she would have wanted.
No, it isn't. That's the one thing we learned. Yeah, well, somebody else could, you know, just punch it up and do the no, no, no idea. Hope you enjoyed that.
We had loads of fun talking to Jasper go and get that book, let's do it, give it to your friends and family for Christmas and they will. Thank you. And then maybe you, they'll just be reading it for the following four or five days and you, and then you'll get a bit of peace and quiet that way. But thanks very much for listening.
Cheers, Dave. Thank you. And see you all very soon. Bye bye.
Bye.