Victoria Wood made audiences feel warm; she did not always make collaborators feel comfortable. Becoming Victoria Wood resists the temptation to smooth that contradiction away, examining the early years of a comic voice that was shaped as much by resistance as by talent.
Becoming Victoria Wood (available on U&Gold on-demand) is a new documentary examining the comedienne’s early years developing her craft and profile beyond songwriting into a fully-formed act. It fleshes out the shy introvert as someone who struggled to gain acceptance by an industry that was unable to define or place her. Yet throughout, it is her resolute determination drives momentum, with key individuals like ex-husband Geoffrey Durham playing a critical role in developing her craft and her output. When she found allies she accelerated.
Wood’s origin story has more weight with emphasis given to what role the absence of Wood’s parents played in her innate self-reliance. Her home – a remote bungalow on a hill few other than the family ventured into – plays a pseudo-gothic role in the story, a potent symbol of psychological isolation.
Michael Ball waxes lyrical as he often does, where Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders are circumspect, celebrating volume and achievement whilst judiciously avoiding qualitative assessment. Here the documentary circles a quandary with Wood: she broke through with something fresh after a long hard slog, and whilst her achievements left people feeling warm and fuzzy, the person behind them as seen in many of the interview clips, didn’t seem especially likeable or easy to be around. The highly personalised and offensive reviews Wood received from critics in the 70s likely hardened her resolve and made trust hard-earned and determinedly protected. This sets up the contributions that delicately touch on her control. Maxine Peak’s reference to Wood’s spikiness in particular underlines this documentary commitment to honesty, so too the real reason Peak was cast in the still unfathomably popular sitcom Dinnerladies.
Becoming Victoria Wood isn’t the usual love-in looking at this trailblazer seen through a diffuse lens and archive clips though there are many including a lot of unseen gems. Each emotional beat starkly drawn by actress Jessica Borden’s tender and direct voicing of letters by the comedienne at various stages in her career. Wood didn’t easily fit the mould when she started out. When she found it there’s a sense she wasn’t easy to collaborate with. Britain loves an underdog that came good and died relatively young. Rather than rehabilitating Wood, the documentary reframes her — not simply as a beloved comic voice, but as a guarded architect of her own career. That control still pervades ten years after Wood’s death. In an era that mythologises frictionless “content creation”, this portrait reminds us that authorship is often hard-won, defensive, and unapologetically controlled.
