Radio 4 to air Loose Chippings, Victoria Wood's unheard audio diaries
- Victoria Wood - Loose Chippings will air over Christmas, featuring unbroadcast songs and stand-up
- Highlights include audio diaries, recorded while she was making dinnerladies
- Long thought lost excerpts from her first ever concert and career-launching first New Faces song are also featured
Radio 4 is to air Victoria Wood's previously unheard audio diaries, songs and stand-up this Christmas.
Victoria Wood - Loose Chippings will broadcast on 14th December and will be repeated on Christmas Day as part of the channel's Archive On 4 strand
The hour-long programme consists of entirely unbroadcast material, including a diary that Wood kept while making her classic BBC One sitcom dinnerladies, reflecting upon the series she was writing and starring in, as well as her wider thoughts and reminiscences spanning her entire career.
Wood's biographer, Jasper Rees, was granted access to the tapes as well as her own private archive, which included stand-up routines and treasures such as the previously-thought lost song that launched her career on ITV's New Faces in 1974, and a recording of her first ever concert as a student at Birmingham University that has lain hidden for half a century.
The project has been in development for more than a year. But "in the last few weeks we have been putting the programme together," wrote Rees on Facebook. The journalist, who published Let's Do It: The Authorised Biography Of Victoria Wood in 2020, and Unseen On TV, a collection of unfilmed and unpublished written work, also writes and narrates Loose Chippings.
He added: "I'm thrilled that, unless the compliance people take exception to Paula Du Val, it is going out on Radio 4 at 8pm on Saturday 14 December, before being repeated at the same time on Christmas Day."
Loose Chippings is produced by David Tyler (Thanks A Lot, Milton Jones!, Glenn Moore's Almanac) for his production company Pozzitive Television, which made two series of dinnerladies between 1998 and 2000 with Wood's production company Good Fun, and previously made the 2018 two-parter, Victoria Wood: From Soup To Nuts for Radio 4, also featuring unheard material from Wood's archives, which was presented by Rebecca Front.
The programme title takes its title from Wood's observation that: "Life's not fair, is it? Some of us drink champagne in the fast lane and some of us eat our sandwiches by the loose chippings on the A597."
The comedian, who died of cancer in 2016, was a four-time BAFTA winner, for her acclaimed performances on Victoria Wood As Seen On TV and An Audience With Victoria Wood, before she won best actress and best single drama for the drama Housewife 49.
Let's Do It: The Authorised Biography Of Victoria Wood
"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
- Publisher: Trapeze
- Pages: 506
- Catalogue: 9781409184096
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- 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
- Publisher: Trapeze
- Pages: 320
- Catalogue: 9781398707450
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