An exhibition celebrating the life of Victoria Wood opens in her native Bury on Saturday.
The show at Bury Art Museum includes original scripts, song sheets, photos and costumes, including the yellow beret she wore playing one of her most-loved characters, the lost girl looking for her friend Kimberley. (“She’s really, really tall and really, really wide. If she had a suitcase on her head she’d look like a fitted wardrobe.”)
Other highlights include the red velvet dress Wood wore to play Ann Widdecombe in a Christmas song – “I’m like the suits I wear / Unsquashable but washable / I can’t relax / When in slacks” – and the military jackets donned by Richard E Grant and Alan Rickman in her Pride and Prejudice spoof, Plots and Proposals.
There are three versions of the lyrics to The Ballad of Barry and Freda, her tribute to middle-aged love-making (“Stop pouting / Stop shouting / You know I pulled a muscle when I did that grouting”). Edits reveal she originally intended the song to be called Let’s Do It but changed her mind before going on stage.
Also on display for the first time is backstage footage of the filming of Victoria Wood’s All Day Breakfast, her Christmas Day BBC special in 1992, and a recording of a rehearsal of Dinnerladies before a live audience.
There is also a script she sent to the BBC while a student at Birmingham University, rejected by the broadcaster and returned to sender, as well as an even earlier Wood original: a story she wrote for Bury grammar school’s magazine in the 1960s, called Pardon?
The items were selected from Wood’s literary estate, a treasure trove in London maintained by her old agents after her death aged 62 in April 2016.
Susan Lord, the curator of the exhibition, said the show was “a behind-the-scenes look at Victoria Wood’s creativity. It gives an insight into her thought process. She was a very lateral thinker who loved to take ideas and play with words.”
Wood’s brother, Chris Foote Wood, who has written a biography of his sister and will give a speech at the opening of the exhibition on Saturday, said he was looking forward to better understanding how she worked.
“She would write, rewrite, write again and rework her scripts,” he said. “Actors would complain that they turned up for rehearsals and learned all their lines, only to come in on the Saturday to find Vic had been up all night rewriting them all. She was adamant that the audience should be given the best.
“When she was making Dinnerladies she would write more episodes than would ever be broadcast so that the weakest one could be thrown away.”
Foote Wood has raised money to have a statue made of his sister, which will be erected in Bury next year. He said she would have mixed feelings about being celebrated in her home town.
“Victoria had a double view of fame. She always wanted to be famous, ever since she was a little girl. But she just wanted fame to enable her to do new things. For example, if she won an award she would say she was pleased to receive it but saw it just as confirmation that she was doing a good job. Then she would come home and put the award in a cupboard. They weren’t on display on the mantlepiece but for her a means to an end.”
Her Baftas and her OBE have been dug out of the cupboard for the Bury exhibition, which opens on Saturday and will run for a year, admission free.
Bury Art Museum’s Victoria Wood exhibition runs from 8 September this year until September 2019.
