Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography Of Victoria Wood
Jasper Rees Trapeze £20
No one pinpointed the essence of Middle England both as lovingly and as sharply as Victoria Wood. In witty couplets she skewered the secret lives of the dowdy middle-aged – think of her Ballad Of Barry And Freda, the song about a couple getting frisky during an episode of Gardeners’ Question Time, with its lyrics ‘Not bleakly, not meekly – beat me on the bottom with the Woman’s Weekly’.
Full of insecurities – about her Northern roots and her weight – she subsumed her angst into her myriad jokes and sketches, TV shows and plays. ‘We’d like to apologise to viewers in the North, it must be awful for them,’ her snooty Southern continuity announcer said.
‘There is no use denying,’ she sang, ‘that inside every jolly fat girl is another one crying.’ And she found particular words and expressions intrinsically funny: ‘macaroon and minestrone, balaclava and raffia, grouting and guttering and vinyl flooring’.
No one pinpointed the essence of Middle England both as lovingly and as sharply as Victoria Wood (above). In witty couplets she skewered the secret lives of the dowdy middle-aged
When Jasper Rees’s authorised biography recalls these many blissful comedy moments, it’s a joyous read. Yet unfortunately, too often they’re suffocated by painstakingly earnest details about what can seem like every single moment of Wood’s life, from her childhood in a remote Lancastrian house disconnected from mains utilities with neglectful parents, to her death, aged only 62, in North London, a bona-fide national treasure.
Some super-fans may revel in Rees’s nearly 600-page tome but many will struggle with the chronicling of every inconsequential family holiday, poorly attended gig and celebrity encounter.
It’s a shame these minutiae often bury insights into the prickliness behind Wood’s light-hearted public facade. She was terrifyingly exacting: actor Andrew Dunn recalled ‘the look of fear and dread’ on the faces of the cast rehearsing her sitcom Dinnerladies.
‘Vic at her most lovely, most loving… but honestly quite demanding!’ sighed her friend Dawn French after Wood had stayed with her in Cornwall.
And yet there’s little insight into some of the darkest moments in Wood’s life, mainly because she rarely discussed her demons, preferring to turn them into jokes. Her divorce from magician Geoffrey Durham after 22 years was ‘painful and horrible’, and we learn little about the shock of her untimely terminal cancer diagnosis (we’re not even told which cancer she had), except that Wood fumed at suddenly being stuck in bed, watching MasterChef, unable to work.
Shy and insecure to the end, Wood would have no doubt been simultaneously flattered and embarrassed by the efforts Rees has put into documenting her life. At the same time she’d have spotted the irony in the passage about her partnership with Granada Television’s Roy Eckersley, who taught her the invaluable lesson that less was always more.
‘By the time we finished [a script] it was half an hour shorter and a lot funnier,’ Wood recalled.
If only Rees had taken that advice on board.
Blitz Spirit
Becky Brown Hodder & Stoughton £16.99
Rating: 
Blitz Spirit’ is a phrase beloved of politicians who want to invoke the sacrifices of the wartime generation and appeal to our collective sense. In the introduction to her new book, Becky Brown succinctly describes it as ‘a psychological bunting that festooned the national mind’.
But what exactly was Blitz Spirit, and can it tell us anything about ourselves then and now?
A perfect place to start is the treasure trove of documents that comprises the Mass Observation archive. Founded in 1937, Mass Observation set out to create ‘an anthropology of ourselves’ by asking a posse of untrained observers to record their experiences of everyday life.
While there’s a lot of praise for Churchill’s (above) oratory and leadership, there’s also some suspicion, even resentment
Brown’s book features an eclectic selection from the wartime years and is full of fascinating and sometimes surprising insights.
Take the attitudes of ordinary people towards the Government. While there’s a lot of praise for Churchill’s oratory and leadership, there’s also some suspicion, even resentment.
‘I bet that Churchill & Woolton (Food Minister) aren’t freezing themselves,’ a teacher in Bedford reports someone muttering in a discussion about fuel supplies, while the sister-in-law of an observer in Buckinghamshire wonders why the Prime Minister always has to have a cigar in his mouth ‘when we are told to avoid spending money’.
There is also a widespread distrust of the media, with special contempt reserved for ‘nobs’ who act as if the rules don’t apply to them. Britain was much more class-conscious then than it is now, but the book adeptly captures a society in transition, particularly among women enjoying for the first time paid employment and determined not to return to domestic drudgery once peace is restored.
‘Oh I am proud, but I am tired too,’ a secretary in Glasgow writes when the end of the war is announced. For me that quiet tone of understatement captures perfectly the spirit of wartime Britain.
Simon Griffith