Victoria Wood

Two soups

I was shocked and - frankly - pretty devastated to hear of the death of Victoria Wood, well before her time. Cancer stole her from us at the age of only 62. Which is so utterly unfair. There are no words at a moment like this, especially as she was the one with all the good lines. Lines that made you laugh and made you cry in equal measure. I find it hard to accept that there will be no more, that her work is now complete. For her words made the everyday hilarious, the mundane massive and brought the things you had never noticed to the fore. The hostess trolley, the avocado. The Woman's Weekly, the Berni Inn. Judith Chalmers. Soup. Since Victoria Wood incorporated them into songs or sketches they have brought a snigger or knowing smile to our lips. But now they carry a bittersweet memory too.

I remember watching this stand-up show with my mum once and Mum laughed until she weed. Watching it again post-childbirth, I can see why. And not just because I am now that woman at the bus stop trying to exercise her pelvic floor. For I have had the poo-coloured wardrobe phase. I have been the new mother trying to get out of the house with toast in her hair. Victoria Wood was saying all these things before all the Mummy bloggers out there now. Back then it was so original and refreshing to hear someone tell it like it is.

Remembering my mum laughing like that makes me sad. My mum died of cancer at a similar age to Victoria Wood, and with similar speed. But given she used to drive between schools giggling to tapes of Victoria Wood she is lucky she didn't bump herself off in a car crash much earlier.

About ten years ago I managed to get two last-minute tickets to see Acorn Antiques: The Musical in the West End. As the tickets were in the stalls, it was the most money I have ever spent on going to the theatre. But it was totally worth it. Julie Walters as Mrs Overall was - as ever - astounding. And as the curtain lifted on the shop scene at the start of the second half, it's the first time I have seen a set alone get a cheer and round of spontaneous applause. Someone else played Miss Berta - Wood only appeared (as Mrs Overall) for some matinees, when Walters (according to Wood) was at Bingo.

The last thing of Victoria Wood's I saw (apart from her winning cakes on Comic Relief Bake-Off) was That Day We Sang, which I blogged about here. The quote at the top "I have a bit of life still owing" has an entirely different resonance now.

Victoria Wood was a true genius. Clever in such a down-to-earth way. She was witty and northern, shy and modest, awkward yet exuberant. And we all - probably without exception - loved her.

So farewell. And at least we will always have Barry and Freda:

..on me lower portions

Beat me on the bottom with the...

Bend me over backwards on me...

Antiques Roadshow

I don't actually watch the Antiques Roadshow. I could never take it seriously after that Victoria Wood Christmas sketch when someone took in a lidless blender. ("Now you've settled an argument!") But I happened to catch the final few minutes last night before tuning in to new "psychological crime thriller" From Darkness. (More on that later.) They were in Durham. A lad was showing his grandfather's World War II medals. He claimed he would never sell them, but after hearing they might fetch £3,000 there was - dare I say - just the teensiest bit of wavering to be detected in his eyes. Then Fiona Bruce showed us a mystery object brought along by Glenda (which rhymes with blender). This turned out to be a knitting stick, or goosewing - basically a carved strip of wood you wedge in your armpit to hold one of your knitting needles. This frees your arm up to do something else, like hold a glass of wine, or - as they suggested - herd sheep along to market. Multi-tasking the old-fashioned way. Anyway, I thought my friend at the Twisted Yarn might be interested. Because frankly even a third arm wouldn't help my knitting.

But it gave me a little moment of nostalgia. I am sure that the Antiques Roadshow has visited Durham many times over the years, but this sent me back to September 1997, when I saw it being filmed there. I wasn't taking along any family heirlooms to be valued, you understand, of which we have none anyway. Back then I was about to embark on my Master's degree at the University of Newcastle. I had gone up a week before the start of term and my Jesmond flatmates hadn't moved in yet, so I had spent a couple of days going completely stir-crazy by myself, not knowing anybody or having anything to do other than unpacking. I felt a long way from home. (I was a long way from home.) I had just split up with my boyfriend, and while this was no bad thing ultimately, I have to confess I felt terribly lonely. So on a sunny day on Tyneside, I decided to get out and explore. And I took myself off to Durham on the train for the day. It's only a ten-minute journey from Newcastle Central. And what a lovely city it is. As Bill Bryson says, if you haven't seen Durham Cathedral, then what have you been doing all your life? You must. You can even (apparently) borrow his car. I'd lend you mine, but it only just scraped through its MOT and there's not enough tread left on the tyres. Look, it's simply stunning:

(Durham Cathedral, that is. Not our car.)

Anyway, down by the weir on the river, er, Wear, looking up at the cathedral, the then Antiques Roadshow presenter Hugh Scully (on a break from filming) strolled past me on a bridge. And he gave me a lovely smile and said hello. Just because he was friendly and nice. In my miserable frame of mind that day, it meant a lot. 

The rest of my year in Newcastle was brilliant. But it definitely had a shaky start. And Hugh Scully of the Antiques Roadshow - of all people - made me feel a little bit better about it. 

That Day We Sang

"I have bit of life still owing and I am more than just my name"

This was a delight from start to finish. It was like Dennis Potter with all of the singing but none of the psoriasis. It was very Victoria Wood, with arguments over yoghurt flavours and missing boxes of Matchmakers, and songs about Berni Inns ("Fancy words like garni - that just means they bung on cress") and the problem with being called Enid. One song even featured her immortal line from The Ballad of Barry and Freda - "Let's do it".

"Nymphs and shepherds come away..."

In 1929, the 200-strong Manchester Children's Choir recorded Purcell's Nymphs And Shepherds with the Halle Orchestra in the Free Trade Hall. This was a very big deal for those young boys and girls, some of whom lived in slums and came from troubled backgrounds. They were brought to the door of the Free Trade Hall in specially commissioned trams. Most of them remembered the occasion their whole lives long, which is why one of them organised a reunion of the choir during the 1960s. Victoria Wood watched a documentary about this reunion in 1975, while she was living off the dole in a bedsit, and That Day We Sang is the musical that resulted many years later. Initially a stage show, it was turned into a film by the BBC for Boxing Day.

The story focused on Tubby and Enid, two fictional members of the choir. They don't remember each other from being children and meet at the reunion as if for the first time. The reunion ignites a spark in their seemingly drab everyday lives, and a spark between each other too. They start to realise that they are missing out. They want to rediscover the joy that singing (with two Gs) awoke in them. Manchester is at the height of the swinging sixties, but they are stuck in a timewarp, living alone or with a lodger, working in dull office jobs, dreading decimalisation, and eating their lunchtime sandwiches with a boring regularity in the Piccadilly Gardens. Tubby is Mr Affable, and has cared for his mother all his life, after they were abandoned by his father. His mother has recently passed away, leaving him rather lost. Enid is shy and nervous, and is having an illicit affair with her uncaring boss, but the relationship is merely seedy, with none of the passion she deserves and dreams of. (It is subsequently destroyed in a hilarious scene broadcast over the office intercom.) Tubby is played by Michael Ball, and Enid by the wonderful Imelda Staunton, who we regularly listen to reading the Gruffalo on a CD in our car, and who - thanks to her stature, curls and ability to mix neurosis with occasional moments of exuberance - would be the perfect actress to play my mother in a film about her life.

The choir is run with military precision by a stern lady called Gertrude Riall and Mr Kirkby, an ex-soldier with Basil Fawlty-esque shrapnel in his leg. They aren't anywhere near as nice as Gareth Malone, but face the same issues as any modern choirmaster -  kids not turning up, other kids mucking about at the back, and bad pronunciation from all of them (there is an H in "Flora's holiday", the children are reminded - "We want all that pride in coming from Lancashire, we want the spirit of Lancashire, but not the accent."). It's quite surprising that a woman is in charge of the choir at all, since apparently the Halle's chief conductor in the 1920s Hamilton Harty (lots of Hs there) sacked all of the females in the orchestra when he took over, claiming that a lady could not possibly manage the touring lifestyle of a musician. Go figure.

Flora's holiday?

My parents were at university in Manchester in the 1960s, and I always have a sense that they too, like Tubby and Enid, were missing all of the fun. Manchester in 1969 is very different to 1929, with the trams gone, the Free Trade Hall bombed to rubble but the Arndale Centre not yet built. Another 40 years on, and it's very different again - the trams are back, the Arndale Centre was bombed to rubble by the IRA, and the Halle now play in the state of the art Bridgewater Hall.

The construction of Bridgewater Hall began in 1993, coincidentally the same year as my last - and only - visit to Manchester's city centre. I was living in Sheffield at the time and went over for a crazy afternoon with a friend, who was from there and wanted to show me around. I remember being hugely impressed by the scale of the city, its cosmopolitan feel and cultural offerings - it felt like the proper sort of place that Sheffield could never be.

It's strange, given my parents' attachment to Manchester, that I had never seen the city centre before. We had made several trips to the suburbs with my family over the years - we had relatives in Sale, friends in Didsbury, and my dad was always keen on attending his own annual reunion - the convocation dinner of his hall of residence, Dalton (now Dalton-Ellis) Hall in Victoria Park. But as far as I can recall, we never left the outskirts. Probably because small kids and a big city are a bad mix. Or we were always on a tight schedule en route to see grandparents in the Lake District. Whatever, all I can remember are long afternoons walking round the grounds of Dalton Hall playing pretend games of tennis (no racket, no ball) and being very, very bored, while Dad was otherwise engaged.

Victoria Wood, in a documentary about the making of That Day We Sang (called That Musical We Made) sits at the BBC playing people the tinny recording of Nymphs And Shepherds on her phone, which makes it sound even tinnier. And the strange thing is that hardly anyone remembers it. "Come on Eileen!" her frustrated voiceover encourages a baffled looking Kevin Rowland while Dexys Midnight Runners are waiting to appear on Terry Wogan's show. Instead, everyone in the green room at Radio 2 remembers O For The Wings Of A Dove, recorded by 15-year-old Ernest Arthur Lough at around the same time. I don't know if Nymphs And Shepherds stuck in her memory as a Manchester local and O For The Wings Of A Dove - sung by a London chorister - in everyone else's as some sort of North-South gramophone divide. (None of these people were around in the 1930s, but the records were played for decades afterwards.) However, I'm so glad that Nymphs And Shepherds stayed with Victoria Wood, though how she translated her memories into giant pantomime prawn cocktails, Ryvita ("Be cautious - they shatter!"), a doorman with a limp and a song called Happiness Street is a secret at the heart of her great genius.

As a little aside:

In 1986, a choir of 12 year old girls from my school made this record for the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson after our music teacher won a song competition on That's Life. It hasn't yet achieved the fame of Nymphs And Shepherds. But just in case Victoria Wood wants to write a musical about it, here it is on You Tube.
My school was not responsible for the sleeve artwork.

Christmas Television

Christmas reading

I treated us to the Christmas edition of the Radio Times yesterday. Partly because, if I'm quick enough, I can use it to get a free Paddington book from the Early Learning Centre. I took my daughter to see the film of Paddington on the day it was released. We were having some windows replaced at home so I needed to get her out the joiner's way and Paddington was the perfect diversion - the walk to the cinema gave Charlotte some exercise, the box of popcorn fulfilled a promise from a song at her music class the day before, and the film provided nostalgia for Mummy and diversion for the four-year-old. We have a DVD of the original television series, which Charlotte absolutely loves. Notting Hill must have changed almost as much as animation techniques for an ursine Peruvian immigrant between the television series and the film. But the original is a true testament that technical quality is never an issue as long as writing quality is high. Paddington falling on the cream cakes, Paddington in the taxi, Paddington taking a bath and Paddington on the escalator all make Charlotte laugh hysterically time after time. So it was with great joy that we saw that these scenes had been replicated (and enhanced to new levels of funniness) in the film. All of us oldies will miss Michael Hordern's narration. But with Hugh Bonneville as Mr Brown, Sally Hawkins as Mrs Brown, Julie Walters as Mrs Bird and Jim Broadbent as Mr Gruber in the film, what was not to love?

Cream cakes

What was not to love? Oh, yes, Nicole Kidman as the evil taxidermist, out to stuff Paddington for the Natural History Museum. In a back story at the start of the film, her father discovered Paddington's tribe of bears deep in the Peruvian jungle. But he let them be, after teaching them a love of marmalade and enough English to be able to talk about the weather. Returning to London minus an unlive specimen, he was dismissed in disgrace by the National Geographic Society. And his daughter is determined to succeed where he - in her eyes - failed.

Children's television shows drawn out into full-length movies always have to include a scary baddie. Postman Pat had to battle a tribe of laser-wielding robots (and a Simon Cowell lookalike) earlier in the year. I don't think it's necessary. Charlotte would gladly have watched Paddington falling over and storing things under his hat for 90 minutes. Postman Pat: The Movie took away all that was familiar from CBeebies, and this doesn't work. It's the mind of a pre-schooler - they love slapstick, and they don't need scary. Scary causes meltdowns and trembling and shrieks demanding to leave the building. They don't know yet that things will always come good in the end. That in Paddington's case Mr Curry (Peter Capaldi doing his best Phil Mitchell accent - they were at one point, after all, near neighbours in Crouch End) will stop voting UKIP, the teenagers will stop being embarrassed by their parents, and a drunk Mrs Bird will... well, I'd better not include too many spoilers. It's hard to explain to a little girl that everything will be OK - because in life it usually isn't, and even a young child in a comfortable and privileged Yorkshire home can work out that she is often denied a happy ending. Mummy doesn't always give in to her arguments. The chocolate button may be denied, the broken toy irreparable, and the television switched off.

Anyway, speaking of television, what delights await us over the festive season? I haven't even bothered looking at any scheduling before Iggle Piggle sails off in his boat, because until then my control over the remote control will be, well, remote. But I am very much looking forward to Professor Branestawm, a set of books I loved as a child. I am curious about Victoria Wood's musical about the reunion of the Manchester children's choir who recorded Purcell's Nymphs and Shepherds in 1929, even if it does star Michael Ball. But otherwise, with no new Julia Donaldson feature (though I believe Stick Man is promised for 2015), it's same old, same old. Doctor Who. Call The Midwife. EastEnders. Downton bloody Abbey. Dad's Army. Morecambe And Wise. Well, it wouldn't be Christmas without television tradition. Or would it?

Having a young child does bring a lot of excitement and fun and early starts into Christmas. But it's a time of year I always find really hard. I miss my mum. Even if the word she most commonly used to describe Christmas was "crap". And even though the arguments in our house during the cooking of dinner could be spectacular until the opening of the sherry. But all of our Christmas tradition died with her. We had to find new ways of doing things. Even if it meant we just had to all be apart, to try and numb the pain of her absence a little. I can't help but be envious of my friends who all still have their family units intact, and a wealth of doting grandparents to make Christmas huge and lively and involving for their children.

So while cancer denied our family the happy ending ten years ago, we do have the girl, and a happy girl on Christmas Day will bring much of the joy back. I will, however, remain in denial that a happy girl will only be achieved with large doses of Frozen, and frozen fish fingers.

Christmas dinner in a box

In The Club

I didn't even manage to get to the end of the first episode of this new drama by Kay Mellor. It was so stereotyped it did my head in. Six pregnancies trying to cover as much of a textbook variety of situations and symptoms as possible. A teenager in denial. An acrimonious divorce. A lesbian couple. A toyboy. A blogger. Financial despair. Indigestion. Baby brain. Waddling. Twins. Nausea. Swollen ankles. Overwhelming fear.

It being set in Leeds meant that the “it’s grim up north” card then had to come into play, punctuated with really bad Yorkshire accents and unemployment. Having visited Leeds only yesterday, I can report that the city appears to be booming, with its ever expanding law firms, shopping precincts, concert venues, restaurant scene and riverside apartment developments. Yet this drama seemed to think that its citizens are still living in back-to-back slums and eating coal with their chips. To get into the role, two of the actresses (Tara Fitzgerald and Jill Halfpenny) seem to have spent the last few years chain-smoking. Not that they were smoking in while pregnant on screen (health campaign advice must be stuck to!) – just that their voices had become unrecognisably rasping and lowered in pitch since I last saw them in anything.

I didn’t stay long enough to watch the couples’ “parentcraft” class. One lady was already in labour and about to deliver twins and I just didn’t have the patience to endure the huffing any longer, and wanted to quit before the “Get t’bloody anaesthetist in to gi’ us a bloody epidural” lines hit. (Though apparently the contractions were only Braxton Hicks anyway.) I did have time to notice that the thick one from Victoria Wood’s dinnerladies was going to be one of the leaders taking the class, which meant no one was going to be able to take it seriously anyway.

It’s hard to write anything about NCT antenatal classes that hasn’t already been said by Dara O’Briain (tear or cut, anyone?) or Kirstie Allsopp. Like most people, I went along to NCT classes just to make friends. Which thankfully I did. My daughter still plays regularly with some of the children in our class who we first met as “bumps”. As meeting people was my motivation to attend, I generally ignored the crap the class leader told us about childbirth, and kept asking arsey questions instead. I was already being threatened with an assisted delivery as I have a small hole in my heart which the obstetric consultant decided to stress unduly about, even though the hospital cardiologist thought it was a matter of no concern. Plus I had spent the previous three years doing speech perception experiments with babies at the university and had met so many mothers still traumatised by their horrible birth experiences nine months after the event that I had been left with no illusions. There was no doubt in my mind that the whole procedure was likely to be absolutely dire rather than magical.

So I was really angry when our NCT teacher said, “I am not going to tell you about Caesarians because I don’t want to scare you.” Yet she had just shown us statistics which revealed that nearly 25% of births in York end in a C-section. Which meant that at least two of us were gearing up for one. What is scarier, being told calmly and rationally about surgical procedures in an ante-natal class, or being told during labour that your baby is in distress and needs to be cut out of you immediately, with you having no idea about how they are going to go about it? As far as I am concerned, it’s just wrong for NCT ante-natal class teachers to let people believe that it will all go swimmingly, that if you inhale aromatherapy oils and let your husband massage the small of your back in your birth pool at home, the baby will slip out without any bother. And that you should never even need to go to hospital. Such a naive view (which our teacher herself contradicted by telling us that only 5% of births in York are at home) leads to new mothers possibly feeling an overwhelming sense of failure if all goes horribly wrong. And anyway, my husband has always been crap at giving massages. 

And all this before we start on the nonsense they told us about breastfeeding being the easiest and most natural thing in the world. Or the insanity of making us practise changing nappies by wiping Marmite off a doll’s bottom. This was our only preparation for the mad, bad, dark and exhausting newborn days ahead: it wasn't enough.