Victoria Wood - Wonderful Woman No. 21

Victoria Wood - Born 1953
British Comedienne, Screenwriter, Actress, Singer, Songwriter & Director

I have loved Victoria Wood for as long as I can remember.

When I was young, my family and I used to stay in the same apartment every year on family holidays, the apartment had a VHS and an extremely limited video collection. One of those videos was Victoria Wood. I must have seen that same video more than a hundred times, it never failed to make me laugh.

Victoria was born in Prestwich, Manchester not too far from where I grew up myself. She first found fame on the TV Talent show New Faces.

Since the early 1980s, Victoria has wrote comedy shows and appeared on British screens in various guises. Her sketches and sitcoms are whimsical windows into every day life, she is a brilliant spectator of social interactions, British culture and makes the mundane entertaining and laughable.

She appears in many of her work in a less than glamorous character, seemingly unafraid of how she looks or sounds. There is one sketch that I remember particularly well, she plays a young girl planning to swim the English Channel. The spoof documentary is filled with pathos, her parents appear but seem uninterested and unimpressed by their daughter's ambitions and the day she sets out to swim only the documentary's film crew are there to see her off. Indeed, she goes missing at sea but nobody seems to notice that this is a worry. Victoria plays the part so seriously, even though the situation is filled with comedy. She allows her buxom figure to be filmed in a rather unflattering one-piece swimsuit and covers her head with a ridiculous swimming cap. Indeed, she looks ridiculous. And it is that she is strong enough to allow herself to look ridiculous for the sketch to work that I admire about her. She is fearless, determined, as well as wonderfully talented.

My mother has always been a particular fan of Acorn Antiques, the spoof soap-opera with over-the-top acting and wobbly sets. It really is quite brilliant.

Also, special mentions to her fantastic work as a stand-up and for writing some amazingly hilarious songs.

Victoria Wood is too alive and too productive to be talked of merely as an historic event, but it would a mistake to leave that aspect out, because modern television would be a lesser thing if she had not first broken down so many barriers.
Clive James

Last year, I watched Victoria act her socks off in a non-comedic role as a young Eric Morecame's mother in the BBC Play, Eric & Ernie (which she also co-produced).

There are, of course, many other shows I could write about with equal admiration and enthusiasm. I could list awards she has won and critical acclaim she has received. It was never my intention to write biographies, just to say what makes these women wonderful in my eyes... with Victoria Wood, everything I have know her to do makes her wonderful to me.