By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK? *****

I was 14 when Victoria Wood: As Seen On TV 1st aired in 1985 and suddenly I had comedy sketches so funny I could delightedly recite with my friends at school.

• Read on for reasons including how it was Wood’s uniqueness which made her success so hard-fought but her reputation everlasting

This 90-minute documentary was shown in cinemas before airing on channel U&Gold on 12 February featuring talking heads from those who worked with her including Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Maxine Peake and Michael Ball.

Wood may have appeared to me as if fully-formed over 40 years ago but Becoming Victoria Wood explores how her sex, weight and image meant she was already 31, more than a decade after appearing on ITV’s New Faces, when As Seen On TV aired.

The documentary explores Wood’s unconventional childhood in Bury, finding her tribe at Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop and then the long road to comedy immortality via That’s Life in 1976 and writing ITV’s Wood and Walters, with regular foil Julie Walters, in the early 80s.

Neglected by her parents, Wood grew up with a TV set in her room which perhaps explains the television theme of her best-loved work which I remember collected in book Barmy from my childhood containing much of her greatest work.

Manchesterford-set soap Acorn Antiques boasted Celia Imrie as proprietor Miss Babs and Walters as cleaner Mrs Overall and was unstinting in mocking the wobbly sets and stilted acting of the live Crossroads as its source material.

Archive material includes Wood citing Joyce Grenfell as an early inspiration and ruminating on the barriers men put up in the way for her explaining such influences were now out of date and that there really was no-one else like Wood in the 70s and 80s comedy hall of fame.

French And Saunders explain how she was an inspiration and it’s on comedy song Barry and Freda, where the woman turns the expected tables on her sexually uninterested partner, that Wood’s comic majesty really finds its throne and crown.

Whether it’s Wood’s ‘I could handle half the tenors in a male voice choir’, ‘bend me over backwards on me hostess trolley’ or ‘beat me on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly’ that suddenly meant the women and gay men of middle England had found their voice is unclear. But it was female and with a northern accent.

Wood went on to tour extensively including a record run of sell-out nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall and pen TV Christmas specials.

Later in her career she wrote the Dinner Ladies series for BBC1 and its star Maxine Peake recalls how she was cast because Wood recognised in her the same underdog qualities she possessed.

Acorn Antiques later became a musical we saw at Theatre Royal Haymarket in 2005 again starring Imrie, who won a Best Supporting Actress Olivier, and Walters.

Wood may have been inspired by Grenfell but this documentary reveals it was her uniqueness which made her success so hard-fought but her reputation everlasting.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Becoming Victoria Wood Tickets
• Have you seen Becomg Victoria Wood before and what did you think of it? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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