A celebration of the comedy of Victoria Wood at 70

Written by: Georgy Jamieson
Published: Friday 19th May 2023

'Beat me on the bottom with a Woman's Weekly....'

If ever there was a line that sums up the comedy of Victoria Wood, for me, it's this one. It's the climax of her legendary song The Ballad of Barry and Freda, also known as Let's Do It. It's a bit daring but also really rather homely in a way and of course it includes Victoria's beloved brand names. She always thought brand names were funny, probably because they're so specific. You could say magazine but 'Woman's Weekly' is better, you could say toilet cleaner but Harpic is funnier... but it was because she made them funnier.

Over the years I've seen many drama groups doing an evening of sketches and pick some of Victoria's, thinking they would be sure fire winners, only for them to fall flat and not even raise a titter. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing flawed with her sketches - they're brilliant, it's just they need to be done by Vic or one of her regular ensemble of actors. The comedy is all in the delivery.

That's the genius of Victoria Wood, you just can't imagine anyone else doing it, something I've been reminded of whilst listening to a collection of some of her best sketches and songs from Victoria Wood As Seen On TV on a new double green and brown coloured vinyl LP released today on what would have been her 70th birthday. In someone else's hands those sketches and songs would have seemed too clever by half instead of witty, too sarcastic instead of acutely observational, and the shy girl at the piano too introverted instead of appealingly vulnerable and warm.

It was Victoria's warm and witty lyrics that led her to win her heat on the ITV talent show New Faces in 1974, losing out in the next round, a monthly all winners final, which meant she didn't progress to the grand final at the London Palladium. Off the back of her TV appearance though she did sign with an agent, on a contract she says she didn't read because she was too shy to question it, 'I thought, it'll look so rude; it'll look like I don't trust him. God knows what it said.' The norms and conformity of manners and shyness wasn't just in her comedy, it was in real life too.

Her act was mostly at the piano at this point and cabaret work followed, along with replacing Jake Thackray for a fortnightly stint singing her comic songs on the BBC TV Sunday night consumer show That's Life, a format which mixed catching out rogue traders, cheery vox pops on the street with the British public, dogs that could say 'sausages' and Esther Rantzen holding up rude shaped vegetables. If ever there was a combination that was ideal for Victoria Wood this was it, but she always felt she never really fully capitalised on what should have been her big break. But by the time her run on the show had ended it was 1976 and she was still only 23 years old.

A turning point in Victoria's career was her play, Talent, which started life in Sheffield when the Crucible Theatre, flush with funds after hosting The World Snooker Championship, commissioned a season of new writing. In 1979 Granada made the TV version and cast a young actress called Julie Walters. Victoria and Julie had briefly met before in 1970 when Vic had applied for a drama course at Manchester Polytechnic and Julie was showing potential students around, but this was the first time they had been seen on TV together.

The play was a success and Victoria received letters of congratulations from prominent figures in acting, and playwright Alan Plater became a fan. Off the back of the success of Talent, in a move that could have totally changed the landscape of British comedy had she not turned it down, she was offered a place on a new satirical sketch comedy show Not The Nine O'Clock News. Victoria didn't want to join a team and the spot went to Pamela Stephenson instead.

For Victoria it was all about writing and performing her own comedy, but she still didn't feel confident enough to carry the title of a show on her own, hence Wood And Walters, made by Granada with a pilot in 1981 followed by a series in 1982. Victoria and Julie had worked together before on Talent and prior to that in a show called In At the Death at the Bush Theatre in London and this show was almost like a dry run for what was to come with more successful offerings at the BBC.

In 1983 she embarked on her first solo tour, Lucky Bag, which spawned an album and book of the sketches and songs and it was whilst honing her craft as a stand-up, or sit down comedian really as a lot of the show was at the piano, she had the beginnings of the ideas that would lead to the show which is still much loved and often quoted by anyone who was a student in the mid-1980s.

Victoria Wood As Seen On TV ran from 1985 to 1987. There were two series and a Christmas special and the sketches and songs predominantly celebrated Vic's love of television. It was in this show that she not only introduced us to characters like Patricia Routledge's Kitty, Julie Walters as Mrs Overall, Miss Babs and Mr Clifford, played by Celia Imrie and Duncan Preston and Susie Blake's snobbish and acerbic continuity announcer, but to the actors themselves, as her own personal cast of repertory players, many of whom would stay with her throughout her career. Everything was poked fun at, nothing was safe; there were spoofs of daytime TV, adverts, documentaries, the aforementioned continuity announcer and of course soap operas.

Vic, by her own admission watched a lot of Crossroads, the teatime soap set in a rundown Midlands' motel with notoriously dodgy sets and low budgets meaning it was shot 'as live' with botched lines and entrances often left in, as second takes couldn't be afforded. This led to the creation of Acorn Antiques - the spoof soap that gave us one of Julie Walters' most famous characters - Mrs Overall, the char with the tray of coconut macaroons and a thick Brummie accent.

So enduring was Acorn Antiques, Victoria reprised the characters in a musical version in 2005 with Mrs O tap tap tapping away in big production numbers. Julie Walters says that she gets recognised in life for two things, her Oscar nominated role in the 1983 film Educating Rita and as Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques. Vic played Miss Berta in the sketches but never shied away from giving other actors some of the best lines. She was incredibly generous when it came to writing parts and laughs for other actors and one of her most famous sketches doesn't even have her in it at all!

I find it impossible to order soup in a restaurant without doing the line, 'Two Soups'.

The sketch is actually called Waitress and was inspired by Vic and Julie visiting a near-deserted cafe on a wet afternoon in Morecambe, but this classic sketch didn't look like anything much on the page to start with.

Victoria and director Geoff Posner had their doubts that it would work, but the key to the comedy was Julie's performance and that the double swing doors, supposedly to the kitchen, had to be a long way away from the two diners, played by Celia Imrie and Duncan Preston, both of whom couldn't get through the rehearsals without corpsing. Even in the take used in the show it's possible to see them holding back the laughter just enough to get through and Imrie has said she had blood in her mouth from biting the inside of her cheek so hard. It is the mark of Victoria's generosity as a comedy writer that she would give this gem to three other actors and not even want to be in it herself.

In 1988 she performed a one hour special for LWT that would be seen as her tour de force and add to her haul of BAFTAs from As Seen On TV.

An Audience With... was a series of one-off specials where a performer would chat, sing, tell jokes and take questions from an invited celebrity audience. Many had gone before such as Dame Edna Everage, Billy Connolly, Peter Ustinov and Kenneth Williams, all who'd had roaring successes with theirs. Victoria's was slightly different. The questions from the audiences were basically feed lines into jokes or routines and she sent the whole concept of the 'celebrity audience' up - in her opening monologue when she says, "I should explain there is supposed to be a celebrity audience here tonight but so far they're not here" and "We've not done bad here tonight. Who have we got? Some friends of Wincey Willis and some people from Guildford, well that's not bad. They're all up there in the balcony the people from Guildford, we don't show them because they're not famous". Bearing in mind the audience was a who's who of late 80s comedy and light entertainment, it was a brave start and the celebs roared with laughter.

She drives through the hour with new routines, observations and some of her well-known songs and looks confident and self-assured in front of her peers. Her love of brand names takes on new life when she invents her own perfectly plausible make up and skin care preparations in Welcome to the World of Sacherelle. It's striking how physical her comedy is, especially when she demonstrates the dumb waiter machine in a seaside bed and breakfast - the type with the candlewick bedspreads with the bald bits where people have picked it off - and when a fella's inflatable 'girlfriend' is punctured in a pub with a dart. This physicality is even more remarkable given that Victoria was 6 months pregnant at the time and keen to keep the news from all but her very close circle of friends. I love how, after the sketch with the woman doing surveys in the street, she tosses the clipboard away knowing all she has to do is the last song and she's done it.

And what a song! She closes the show with the musically complex and increasingly fast tempoed, Ballad of Barry and Freda and brings the house down.

The show was a triumph but afterwards she and husband Geoffrey Durham were not happy with it and didn't think it had gone well, so they were flabbergasted at the reaction both on the night at the drinks party afterwards and then later from the press and public. The show won two BAFTAs in 1989, for Best Light Entertainment Show and Best Light Entertainment Performance.

The 1990s saw two big stand-up tours and West End residencies including her 15 night sell out shows at the Royal Albert Hall in 1996 and a brief return to the TV sketch format in 1992 for a Christmas special, Victoria Wood's All Day Breakfast, but by the mid-90s Vic's mind had turned to comedy drama.

Pat And Margaret was a long held ambition for Victoria, her own original film script, which was made for TV by the BBC in 1994. It starred many of her regular cast of trusted actors; Celia Imrie, Duncan Preston and Anne Reid along with Julie Walters as Pat to Victoria's Margaret. The tale of two long lost sisters reunited on a Surprise Surprise style show called Magic Moments taped into the ever-increasing zeitgeist for reality TV. Once again Vic's love of television and keen observational eye could see the way TV was changing, where the public were the stars and how this could be an area of conflict for drama. And in it you can see the very early seeds of some characters that were to evolve later on in her writing.

It was the first time Vic and Julie Walters had acted in a drama together since Nearly A Happy Ending in 1980 and, as always, Julie shines as the vain and egocentric Pat. While she was writing it, Victoria called Julie and said "I'm writing a monstrous part for you. A horrible megalomaniac called Pat." Julie was delighted, as she always was when Vic wrote for her - she has been quoted as saying about her dear friend "I remember thinking the heavens had sent her to me". The part was indeed a gift but Victoria relished exercising her own acting chops as the downtrodden Margaret and showed us glimpses of what was to come with later more dramatic roles, and in what many would see as a reverse of fortunes, it was Victoria not Julie who was nominated for the Best Actress BATFA the following year for her part.

Then, in 1998, Victoria confounded us all again and did something new for her, she wrote a sitcom. She had been on a 68-date tour of the UK and then took the show around Australia and New Zealand so, when she returned, it was back to writing. This show is, in my humble opinion, her greatest work.

dinnerladies (with the small D she insisted on) is set in a Manchester canteen of the factory of HDW Components. We have no real idea what it is the factory does but the sheds hum with activity and the girls, led by canteen manager Tony, feed the faces of folk who work there.

The action never leaves the canteen and kitchen set and it is a true ensemble cast led by strong female actors many of whom Vic had worked with before, like Celia Imrie, Julie Walters and Anne Reid along with Duncan Preston as one of the 'token males', Stan the handy man.

For some of the cast, this show was their first job straight out of drama school, with Vic spotting the talent of a young Maxine Peake, or it was their first big break on TV as with Shobna Gulati, who plays the naive Anita and has gone on to star in Coronation Street and many other TV dramas.

But for me my favourite piece of casting in this comic masterpiece is Thelma Barlow, who had a renaissance after years in Coronation Street as dithering Mavis Riley, and it makes me ache that she didn't leave the soap years before and spread her comedy wings. Never once do I think of Mavis when I watch her as the gloriously snobbish, weight obsessed Dolly Bellfield and her and Anne Reid, as sparring partner Jean, have dialogue and timing to die for. One of the most beautifully written gags of modern British sitcom is this Dolly and Jean exchange:

Dolly: Who has sex on Christmas morning?

Jean: The Dalai Lama.

Dolly: Well, he must peel his sprouts the night before.

I have been a Victoria Wood fan all my life but for me dinnerladies is perfection, with each of the 16 episodes having an overriding narrative arch that brings the whole story to a satisfying conclusion for all the characters.

She plotted the whole thing out on a magnetic wall chart, knowing how it would end before she'd started - but, as she was writing it, she wasn't sure it would work. When Jennifer Saunders launched Absolutely Fabulous, Victoria thought she'd missed the boat considering it 'what a sitcom should be' and that now she'd 'lost her edge'. But when the cast first got together at the Groucho Club in Soho to do a readthrough of Series 1 the room rocked with laughter. However, Vic also realised she'd over written each episode by 7 minutes and had to go away and edit them down.

The shooting style of dinnerladies broke the mould when it came to comedy because Victoria wanted to film it twice, making it one of the most expensive British sitcoms ever made. She had become fascinated with how they shot sitcoms in the US, where they'd film the final dress rehearsal so they could refine the gags and see where the laughs came, but rather than do that Vic wanted to actually run it in front of a live studio audience twice. That and the last-minute editing and line changes meant the cast were on a knife edge and, although they knew the lines and characters were a gift, they were very stressed; "If you saw behind the flat of dinnerladies you'd see Julie and me taking Rescue Remedies. It was like being on a skating rink" said Celia Imrie.

There was another Christmas special in 2000, Victoria Wood With All The Trimmings, and a final stand-up tour in 2001, including 12 nights at the Royal Albert Hall, but dinnerladies was her last big true TV comedy project and after that she mostly worked on drama.

In 2005 it was back to the theatre but this time with a musical, which she described as her Mamma Mia. Acorn Antiques The Musical was directed by Sir Trevor Nunn at the Theatre Royal Haymarket and, although it received mixed reviews, Celia Imrie won an Olivier Award for Best Performance in a Supporting Role in a Musical. The script was revised before it went on tour but it signalled the last time Victoria worked with both Celia and Duncan Preston.

From then, Victoria's work was much more drama based. The 2006 award winning ITV television film Housewife 49, based on the wartime diaries of an ordinary Lancashire housewife and mother, Nellie Last, had been a back burner project of Vic's since she was given a copy of Last's diaries in 1982 by Keith Waterhouse, and cemented her in the minds of the British public as a serious actress, when she won the Best Actress BAFTA for the lead role.

Then in 2011 another drama, for the BBC this time, based on the early life of Morecambe & Wise, telling the story of how the pair met and teamed up through to their first ill-fated dabble into television with the series Running Wild. In Eric & Ernie, Victoria played Eric Morecambe's formidable mother Sadie Bartholomew, a woman without whom British comedy would be a very different place.

From 2011 to 2014 she worked as writer and eventually director on That Day We Sang, based on a true story of the reunion of the Manchester Children's choir, set in 1969 with flashbacks to 1929. It was commissioned as a stage play for the Manchester International Festival in 2011, a new cast took over in 2013 at the Manchester Royal Exchange and finally Vic directed the TV version with Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton in 2014. Vic was not in it, preferring now to be behind the camera.

Apart from popping up on a celebrity version of The Great British Bake Off for Comic Relief in 2015, her last appearance on TV was in that same year in a 3-part version of the children's book Fungus The Bogeyman.

Victoria Wood was a very private person. Very few people knew she was ill and when on 20th April 2016 it was announced she had died I didn't know what to do with myself. I was utterly shocked. I knew she'd been born in Lancashire, had been married to Geoffrey Durham (known mostly for his stage persona as the Spanish magician The Great Soprendo), I knew that they had a daughter Grace and a son Henry and were now divorced, but I didn't know a great deal else about Victoria Wood. I only knew she was a vegetarian because she'd written the forward to Delia Smith's Vegetarian Collection.

What I knew was her comedy. I knew I could quote it. I knew that I couldn't order two soups without laughing, or asking 'Is it on the trolley?' when I wanted a dessert. I knew to never touch prawns ('do you know they hang around sewerage outlet pipes with their mouths open?'), and I knew that if I was relaying a tale and went off track, I'd come back by saying 'back to the story, I'm being chased by the man from the supermarket'. I definitely knew all the words to The Ballad of Barry and Freda and even though I knew it was coming, 'beat me on the bottom with a Woman's Weekly' would make me howl with laughter every time.

The day Victoria Wood died I went shopping. I put an avocado and a copy of Woman's Weekly in a trolley, took a picture and posted it on social media. There was no caption, because there was no need. Everyone knew it was a tribute to her, such was the greatness of her comedy and her place in the hearts of the British public.

Happy 70th birthday Vic, think on and look sharp.

Victoria Wood Presents

After two series of her sketch show Victoria Wood - As Seen On TV (BBC, 1985-1986), Victoria Wood returned to longer narratives with these slices of comic observation. Modest in ambition and scale but rich in wit and acuity, the six playlets showcase Wood's eye for human foibles and her distinctively eccentric characters.

First released: Sunday 20th May 2007

DVD

Distributor: Cinema Club
Region: 2
Discs: 1
Catalogue: CCTV30608

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Victoria Wood As Seen On TV

Britain's queen of comedy is loved for her mischievous perception of daily life. This tongue-in-cheek blend of songs, sketches and the tacky soap opera Acorn Antiques, ably assisted by friends Julie Walters, Celia Imrie, Patricia Routledge and Susie Blake, received six awards including 4 BAFTAs, was a huge hit with audiences, and spurred a sell-out West End play.

All 13 episodes of Victoria Wood - As Seen On TV are included in this set.

First released: Monday 2nd April 2007

DVD

Distributor: Cinema Club
Region: 2
Discs: 2
Catalogue: CCTV30475

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Dinnerladies - The Complete Collection

Includes Series 1 and 2 of the television comedy Dinnerladies.

The programme follows a group of Northern factory canteen workers who manage to find a seam of humour in their humdrum jobs. There's hard-working and normal Bren (Victoria Wood), her love-interest Tony the canteen manager, and a clutch of peculiarly eccentric characters on both sides of the counter. And then there's Julie Walters as Bren's filthy, drunken, scene-stealing mother Petula.

Dinnerladies is a classic magic blend of comedy and touching pathos.

First released: Monday 13th November 2006

DVD

Released: Monday 24th May 2010
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Region: 2
Discs: 3
Minutes: 473

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This particular release has been discontinued, however you may still be able to find second-hand copies.

Distributor: Universal Playback
Region: 2
Discs: 2
Catalogue: 8245439

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Victoria Wood - Screenplays

This set brings together three television plays from multi-award-winning comedienne and writer Victoria Wood. Originally broadcast between 1979 and 1981, the plays provided an early showcase for the bittersweet, distinctly Northern humour and mastery of dourly comic,sometimes poignant dialogue that has made her one of Britain's best-loved and most consistently successful performers.

Included is the highly acclaimed Talent, commissioned in 1978 by the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield and the play which first brought Victoria Wood to the attention of Granada Television; the productions also reunited Wood and long-time friend Julie Walters, and marked the beginning of their phenomenally successful television partnership. Wood And Walters stalwart Duncan Preston also appears in all three plays, with turns from Tracey Ullman, George Costigan and stand-up veteran and Bullseye host Jim Bowen.

Talent: Julie, a young woman seeking an escape from the encroaching drudgery of domestic life, and Maureen, her frumpish friend, prepare for a talent show at a seedy club.

Nearly A Happy Ending: Maureen has been faithfully attending the slimmers' club for months. Now the weeks of endless crispbreads have paid off - but is her optimism misplaced?

Happy Since I Met You: Frances is 28, single and happy, despite ritual interrogations from her family as to why she's not married. Then she meets Jim, and finds she has decisions to make...

First released: Sunday 17th October 2010

DVD

This particular release has been discontinued, however you may still be able to find second-hand copies.

Distributor: Network
Region: 2
Discs: 1
Catalogue: 7953223

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An Audience With... - Victoria Wood - Special Edition

The incomparable Victoria Wood (Acorn Antiques, Dinnerladies) is the star of this special show that won two 1989 British Academy Film and Television Arts Awards - for Best Light Entertainment Programme and for Best Light Entertainment Performance.

Before a celebrity audience this wonderfully funny comedienne treats her star guests to a sparkling selection of her witty monologues and songs, including her timeless anthem to sexual frustration - "Let's Do It".

Watching her performance are Dave Allen, Judi Dench, Susan Penhaligon, Julie Walters, Denis Norden, Adrian Edmondson and Dawn French, to name just a few of the familiar faces from the small screen.

Extras:
Interview on Aspel & Co. (1985)
Interview on Clive James (1985)
Interview on The Glass Box (1985)
Interview on Sunday Sunday (1990)

First released: Sunday 18th June 2006

DVD

This particular release has been discontinued, however you may still be able to find second-hand copies.

Distributor: Network
Region: 2
Discs: 1
Catalogue: 7952480

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Let's Do It: The Authorised Biography Of Victoria Wood

By Jasper Rees

"I was born with a warped sense of humour and when I was carried home from being born it was Coronation Day and so I was called Victoria but you are not supposed to know who wrote this anyway it is about time I unleashed my pent-up emotions in a bitter comment on the state of our society but it's not quite me so I think I shall write a heart-warming story with laughter behind the tears and tears behind the laughter which means hysterics to you Philistines..."
From Pardon? by Vicky Wood, aged 14. Bury Grammar School (Girls) Magazine, 1967

Victoria Wood was a true pioneer among entertainers, earning her the rightful place as a national treasure time and time again.

Wood's career was one of the most illustrious and wide-ranging in British comedy, and one of the greatest sadnesses following her death in 2016 was that she left the world without leaving her own full account of her life, having never written an autobiography.

"I will do it one day," she told journalist and author Jasper Rees when he first met her in 2001. "It would be about my childhood, about my first few years in showbusiness, which were really interesting and would make a really nice story."

Tragically for us that autobiography never came to pass, but now with complete and exclusive access to Victoria's extensive archive of personal and professional material, and with exclusive interviews with her family and closest friends - including Julie Walters, Dawn French, Celia Imrie and many others - Jasper Rees, who interviewed Victoria Wood more than anyone else, will finally tell her rich story in full.

First published: Thursday 15th October 2020

Hardback

eBook

Audiobook

Publisher: Trapeze
Pages: 506
Catalogue: 9781409184096

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Publisher: Trapeze

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Get this audiobook for nothing by signing up for a free trial of Audible from Amazon

Publisher: Trapeze
Minutes: 1,256

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Victoria Wood Unseen On TV

In the five years since Victoria Wood's death, one great sadness has been the realisation that we'll never again be surprised by new material from her.

But now, as part of the research for the Sunday Times bestselling and critically acclaimed biography Let's Do It, her official biographer, Jasper Rees uncovered a treasure chest of unseen work. From her first piece of comic prose written for her school magazine through to material written for the great TV specials of her maturity and beyond, the store of her writing is full of secret gems that span nearly half a century.

This is a unique and intimate insight into the working of a singular comedy talent.

From the first to the last, these are words that no one else could have written, which will make you laugh in the way that only she could.

First published: Thursday 28th October 2021

Hardback

eBook

Publisher: Trapeze
Pages: 320
Catalogue: 9781398707450

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Publisher: Trapeze

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Victoria Wood As Seen On TV

Sketches and songs from the much-loved BBC TV series, written by and starring Victoria Wood, presented on green and brown vinyl for the first time.

"Not bleakly - not meekly - beat me on the bottom with a Woman's Weekly..."

It's got to be one of the most celebrated comedy songs in recent history. The Ballad Of Barry And Freda (AKA Let's Do It) - originated in Victoria Wood's ground-breaking television series As Seen On TV. It's just one of the many treasures on this double vinyl LP release, which also boasts a plethora of Victoria's best-remembered comedy sketches.

Written by and starring Victoria herself, the sketches also feature Julie Walters in an array of comedic guises, perhaps most memorably as Mrs Overall in the soap opera spoof Acorn Antiques. With Celia Imrie as Miss Babs, Duncan Preston as Mr Clifford, Susie Blake as a perpetually snooty continuity announcer, Patricia Routledge as agony aunt Kitty, and a riotous supporting cast, the scene is set for an affectionately biting send-up of 1980s TV.

Two 140g vinyl LPs (one green and one brown) are presented in a wittily illustrated gatefold sleeve, featuring images from the TV series. Cast and credits are accompanied by an exclusive sleeve note by Jasper Rees, author of the bestselling Let's Do It: The Authorised Biography Of Victoria Wood and editor of Victoria Wood Unseen On TV. Two full colour inner sleeves supply a complete track listing.

First released: Friday 19th May 2023

Vinyl

Distributor: Demon Records
Discs: 2
Minutes: 132
Catalogue: 5014797908161

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Victoria Wood With All The Trimmings

Victoria Wood With All The Trimmings is a great big Christmas pudding of a show, stuffed full of stars in plum roles. Wonderfully funny sketches, brilliant pastiches, snowflake sweaters, tons of celebrities, warm woollen mittens, believe me, it's Christmassy. If you like your comedy roasting on an open fire, this is the video for you.

The all star cast includes Alan Rickman, Julie Walters, Pete Postlewaite, Celia Imrie, James Bolam, Delia Smith, Richard E Grant, Derek Jacobi, Bill Paterson, Geraldine McEwan, Billie Piper, Robert Lindsay, Hugh Laurie, Hannah Gordon, Lindsay Duncan, Bob Monkhouse, Imelda Staunton, Angela Rippon, Alan Titchmarsh, Roger Cook and Betty Boothroyd.

First released: Tuesday 26th November 2002

DVD

Distributor: Vision Video Ltd.
Region: 2
Discs: 1
Catalogue: 9021049

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Victoria Wood's Mid Life Christmas

Victoria Wood's Midlife Christmas features highlights from the Midlife Olympics 2009, the popular costume drama Lark Pies To Cranchesterford and the further adventures of soap star Bo Beaumont played by long term collaborator Julie Walters.

First released: Monday 29th November 2010

DVD

Distributor: Universal Pictures
Region: 2
Discs: 1
Catalogue: 8278559

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Victoria Wood: Live In Your Own Home

Victoria Wood returned to screens on Christmas Day 1994, assisted once again by Duncan Preston and Julie Walters, for another round of festive fun and larks in her own inimitable style.

First released: Sunday 17th October 2010

DVD