Victoria Wood
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Morrissey discusses Victoria in Autobiography:
"At the turn of the 1980s Victoria Wood had entered the television realm singing Northerners, looking like someone with no advantages, hurt transformed into useful fantasies. This was her first series for Granada Television, and it presented life as seen from behind a tea-tray – full of Alan Bennett inscrutability, it is cabbage-soup humor of genius, but you can sense fat-person pain behind each scream of a joke. Wood sings the words ‘Fog, smog|sitting on the bog|cobbles in the morning mist|Park Drive|dead at 45|from a back-street abortionist’ and whilst it ought not to pay to have great fantasies about television comedians, I cannot ever forget these lines or how they were delivered because of the relief of hearing self-analysis born out of despair. Victoria Wood is now very much the deserved mighty dome of establishment, but in 1981, with her very first weekly TV series, she moved as if running out of time – the flattened heart with no more cards to play. Her sketches were easy to read, and they all told of not a snowball in hell’s chance, with the dimmest view held by Wood for her own Manchester self – as if derision were surely all that she had coming. Born in the Prestwich area of Manchester, she did not betray herself with self-pity, but each written line revealed a lifetime of having been passed over or refused. Consequently, a Genet-type genius bubbles to the surface, and the girl who sang ‘Pretend to be northern|just smile and act dense|pretend to be northern|it doesn’t have to make sense’ changed British comedy for both men and women whilst accidentally also saving herself. As with Alan Bennett’s students, people who studied Victoria Wood became funnier people in themselves. With the first airing of her mythic As Seen on TV the mountain finally came to Mohamed, and rightly so."
Mentioned In
- Victoria Wood, RIP - true-to-you.net (April 20, 2016)
- Death is not the final word - true-to-you.net (December 20, 2016)
- Turning The Inside Out. - Morrissey Central (July 5, 2021)
- SHAKE THE HAND THAT SHOOK THE HAND - Morrissey Central (January 5, 2024)
Wikipedia Information
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Victoria Wood (19 May 1953 – 20 April 2016) was an English comedian, actress, lyricist, singer, composer, pianist, screenwriter, producer and director. Wood wrote and starred in dozens of sketches, plays, musicals, films and sitcoms over several decades and her live comedy act was interspersed with her own compositions which she performed at the piano. Much of her humour was grounded in everyday life and included references to activities, attitudes and products that are considered to exemplify Britain. She was noted for her skills in observational comedy and in satirising aspects of social class. Wood started her career in 1974 by appearing on, and winning, the ATV talent show New Faces. She established herself as a comedy star in the 1980s, winning a BAFTA TV Award in 1986 for the sketch series Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV (1985–87), and became one of Britain's most popular stand-up comics, winning a second BAFTA for An Audience with Victoria Wood (1988). In the 1990s, she wrote and co-starred in the television film Pat and Margaret (1994), and the sitcom dinnerladies (1998–2000), which she also produced. She won two more BAFTA TV Awards, including Best Actress, for her 2006 ITV1 television film, Housewife, 49. Her frequent long-term collaborators included Julie Walters, Celia Imrie, Duncan Preston, and Anne Reid. In 2006, Wood came tenth in ITV's poll of the British public's 50 Greatest TV Stars.
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