A Tribute to Victoria Wood

The thing about Victoria Wood is that she was always there; I never expected her to die, so I never thought that I would have to write these words. Growing up, she was the lady behind the grand piano, the one who always made my mum laugh, the one with a perfect blonde helmet of hair stuck to her bobbing head. It was only as I got older that I recognised her brilliance; the sheer perfection of her songs, how they reflected the kind of characters seldom seen on television, but often talked about.

She was a trailblazer in comedy. Not only was she one of the first female comedians on an all male dominated scene, supporting Jasper Carrot on tour a few years before the 1980s alternative comedy boom, she gleefully kicked the door off its hinges for a new generation to follow. One of many paying tribute to Wood was Susan Calman, writing: 'She was the reason I got into comedy.'

Wood was unapologetically northern, and happy to create wonderfully subversive characters to mock the status quo. Susie Blake, her snooty TV announcer character, once announced, “We’d like to apologise to our viewers in the North. It must be awful for you.”

Born and raised in Bury, she decided at the age of four that she wanted to be famous. She loved to watch comedy shows on TV (so much so, that one day her father wrapped the family TV in a mackintosh in an attempt to make her stop) and she also taught herself how to play the piano.

After school, she studied drama at the University of Birmingham, singing songs in folk clubs before auditioning for the TV talent show New Faces in 1974. Although she won the first round, she was eliminated in the second, narrowly missing out on the final.

However, New Faces led to several high profile gigs, and the 70s and 80s marked a hugely productive and popular period for her as she wrote and appeared in shows like Wood and Walters, As Seen on TV (which spawned the cult hit Acorn Antiques, a pastiche of the popular and ropey soap opera Crossroads) and An Audience With Victoria Wood.

The 90s and beyond saw Wood turn her hand at comedy drama, writing her first sitcom, Dinnerladies, before delving into full on drama with the Bafta-winning WWII TV movie Housewife 49, for which she won a Bafta for Best Actress and Best Single Drama.

It’s a very human thing, to assume that the people that you grew up watching on TV will always be there, because in some ways they always have. You hear their songs in your head, and you can quote entire sketches without thinking. And you lose track of time, of their work, of them.

So, when they die, you dig out that old DVD, you spend an hour or more on YouTube watching badly edited clips of their best moments, and you just relive it all. This is where I found myself this morning, laughing at her tales of pregnancy and childbirth and looking, one last time, for the lady behind the grand piano to tell me what to do with my copy of Women’s Weekly.