Victoria Wood As Seen on TV was the 1980s sketch show which established the comedian as one of the UK’s top comedy stars.
Featuring spoofs of TV shows and commercials, sketches, songs, and its very own soap Acorn Antiques, there were two series of six episodes that aired in 1984 and 1986, and a 40-minute Christmas special in 1987, all of which are available on BritBox.
Victoria was joined by a regular supporting cast of Julie Walters, Celia Imrie, and Duncan Preston, who all appeared in various guises throughout the series, while Susie Blake was the pussy-bowed continuity announcer with a tendency to share some unwarranted opinions (“Tomorrow’s play is Fitted Kitchen, Ill Fitting Relationships and it stars… someone I don’t like I’m afraid.”) The four actors would feature in Victoria’s later work, including Dinnerladies, Pat & Margaret and the series of short comedy plays, simply called Victoria Wood.
The series also featured multiple appearances from Emmerdale actress Meg Johnson (aka Pearl Ladderbanks), New Tricks star Denis Lawson, Oscar-winning actor Jim Broadbent, and Bergerac actress Deborah Grant. There were also guest turns from other famous faces including Dora Bryan, Anne Reid, Maureen Lipman, and Pete Postlethwaite, and Patricia Routledge cropped up several times as Kitty, an irrepressible and opinionated spinster from Cheadle. Many of these supporting actors would also crop up in Victoria’s later work.
Here we take a look at the series, Victoria Wood’s comedy partnership with Julie Walters, the cast and guest stars of As Seen On TV and some of the show’s funniest lines…
‘Victoria Wood As Seen On TV’ explained!
Each episode began with a stand-up routine from Victoria, which was then followed by sketches, spoofs and a visit to Acorn Antiques. There was also a song and spoof documentary at the tail-end of each show, and it was all interspersed with links from Susie Blake’s announcer.
As the title suggests, many of the sketches lampooned TV, including programmes such as Play School and The South Bank Show, as well as commercials and documentaries.
The first series featured a series of quick sketches, usually just a couple of lines set in department stores, doctor’s surgeries and libraries, including this one…
OLD LADY: Last week, I asked for a book with no sex, no drugs, no violence and no bad language. And you gave me this.
LIBRARIAN: Yes?
OLD LADY: Well, it was bloody boring. I’d like some filthy ones please!
There were also some regular characters including young couple Gail and Carl, daytime TV presenters Margery and Joan, and Kitty, played by Patricia Routledge.
The second series saw the return of some of these characters as well as new characters such as the talkative Kelly Marie Tunstall, who Victoria played alongside Mary-Jo Randall as her gormless friend who didn't say much.
Some of the most memorable moments of the series included Julie Walters as a doddering elderly waitress in the sketch known as Two Soups and the first TV performance of The Ballad of Barry and Freda (Let’s Do It), the song that was to become Victoria’s most famous comedy composition.
'Victoria Wood As Seen On TV' - How Victoria met Julie…
In 1971, Victoria applied to do a drama course at Manchester Polytechnic, where a debilitating attack of nerves during her audition caused her to vomit. Meanwhile, Julie Walters was a young English and Drama student who was showing people around the campus and regaling potential undergraduates with stories of her time as a nurse wheeling a commode around the ward.
“She had lots and lots of shoulder-length brown hair, very, very thick with a great big fringe and lots of eye make-up, very small eyes and lots of blue liner underneath,” Victoria once recalled. “She was just keeping the whole room completely entertained walking around the room. I didn’t know her name, but I used to wonder.”
Victoria’s application was unsuccessful and she ended up going to Birmingham University, but several years later she met Julie again when they worked on a topical review called In At The Death at The Bush, a tiny theatre above a West London pub.
Says Julie: “Vic said, ‘We’ve met before’, and I said, ‘No, we haven’t. What do you mean? When?’ She said, ‘I auditioned.’ Then I remembered in my first year I was used as an usher, which I loved. An image of this little girl flashed up. I said, ‘Oh my God, I do remember you being sick in a bucket!’”
The pair performed a sketch called Sex in which Julie played a librarian who had just been dumped and Victoria played a housewife who doesn’t think much about sex or male genitalia: “How’s he expected to take you to the brink of ecstasy with something that looks like a school dinner without the custard?”
Victoria said it was the first sketch was a life-changing revelation. Not only did she realise how to be funny and write a joke, she had found someone to be funny with. “When we stood on stage doing that sketch – and we both loved doing it – it gave me such a boost.”
Inspired by her new friend, Victoria wrote the play Talent, which is about an aspiring singer, also called Julie. In 1979 she was invited to adapt it for TV, with both her and Julie starring in it. They later appeared as the same characters in a sequel, Nearly A Happy Ending, which focused on Victoria’s character, Maureen, who was determined to lose her virginity after hitting her target weight at a slimming club.
Julie also appeared in another TV play written by Victoria. In Happy Since I Met You, she starred opposite a young Duncan Preston, who would later be her co-star in As Seen On TV and like the rest of the cast, was among the pool of actors that Victoria would recruit for her later work.
Julie and Victoria next worked together on the ITV show Wood & Walters, which wasn’t a great success and only lasted for one series. Two years later when Victoria began working on As Seen On TV, Julie was immediately booked into appear in the series.
'Victoria Wood As Seen On TV' – The story of the show
As Seen On TV wasn’t Victoria’s first comedy sketch show because in 1982 she wrote the ITV series Wood & Walters which featured Victoria and Julie as a double act and included a mix of sketches and songs as well as material from Victoria’s stage plays.
Compared to As Seen On TV, Wood & Walters is hit and miss, less hit and more miss in fact. Although there are some moments of brilliance including Julie Walters as agony aunt Dotty, a song exploring what it’s like to be a Nolan Sister, and a few other sketches, there’s a lot about it that doesn’t work, including some bizarre contributions from Rik Mayall and Jill Summers, better known as Coronation Street’s Phyllis Pearce.
It was made on a budget and doesn’t have the same production values or polished feel as As Seen On TV. Apparently, Victoria didn’t see eye to eye with the producer.
One sketch, The Woman with 740 Children, was ill-advised. It featured Victoria as a woman who had the biggest surviving multiple birth in the world, which meant filling the studio with dozens of babies. Victoria and Julie, playing a reporter from a women’s magazine, can barely be heard as most of the babies are crying and screaming!
With the promise of bigger budgets and more creative control, Victoria was lured over to the BBC in 1984. She also had the enormous luck to meet a TV producer called Geoff Posner, who had previously directed Not the Nine O’Clock News and The Young Ones. After seeing her stage play Good Fun, he was already an admirer of her work and keen to work with her.
Victoria needed reassurance that the material she had written constituted a TV series. Geoff loved it and gave her the guidance that she had lacked at ITV. He told her that he knew what they needed to do to make it work and began by telling her to write more material than she needed. That would give them more to play within the final edit of the series, so they could ditch sketches and segments that didn’t work.
Some sketches were filmed but didn’t make the final cut but are featured in the book Barmy, including a spoof of BBC1 police drama Juliet Bravo (“Oscar Delta Tango Charlie Farnsbarns, come in please – this is Bippetty Boppetty Eggwhisk Goulash Pantygirdle, over.”), a sketch about an encyclopedia salesman and another set in a gift shop (“How about these Bangladeshi washing stones – I believe you spread the clothes on one, and bang them with the other. I understand it gets them marvelously clean, though it’s probably not tremendously good for the buttons.”)
Geoff also had the luxury of an indeterminate budget, which meant he could splash the cash on things like hiring a coach and horses to gallop up the drive of an old country manor in a two-minute spoof of a Sunday-night period drama.
'Victoria Wood As Seen On TV' cast - Victoria Wood
When As Seen On TV first aired in 1985, Victoria was already a familiar face on television, having appeared on the ITV talent show New Faces in 1974 and Esther Rantzen’s light-hearted consumer affairs programme That’s Life! in 1976.
Victoria had also appeared in the TV version of her play Talent (1979), which had done the rounds in theatres across the UK. It was so successful that she was commissioned to write a sequel, Nearly a Happy Ending (1980). Both plays featured song and dance numbers and co-starred Julie Walters. Victoria also wrote another play, Happy Since I Met You (1981), which also starred Julie alongside Duncan Preston, in his first of many collaborations with the comedian.
Victoria wrote all of As Seen On TV herself and appears in many of the sketches as well as performing a spot of stand-up and a song in each episode. She plays Miss Berta in Acorn Antiques and has a recurring role in the Margery and Joan sketches in which she and Julie play the presenters of a women’s TV magazine which appears to be inspired by 1970s daytime shows such as Afternoon Plus.
After As Seen On TV, Victoria was invited to do An Audience With… on ITV. The series of occasional specials saw comedians and other entertainers perform in front of an audience almost entirely made up of famous faces. Previously, the series had featured the likes of Kenneth Williams, Dame Edna Everage, Joan Rivers and Dudley Moore.
Among Victoria’s audience was Joan Bakewell, Miriam Stoppard, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, Dave Allen, Julie Walters and Crossroads actor Tony Adams!
The show featured stand-up, songs and an hilarious monologue in which Victoria played a woman on a department store’s beauty counter: “All of Sacharel’s sales assistants are fully qualified in all aspects of make-up and beauty therapy. On top of which Wendy comes to us with a diploma from the Geneva school of blackhead popping.”
Victoria’s next TV project was a series of 30-minute comedy plays, simply called Victoria Wood, in which she played a version of herself alongside many of the actors who had appeared in As Seen On TV playing other characters.
In 1992, Victoria Wood’s All Day Breakfast was a Christmas special which lampooned This Morning with Victoria and Duncan as a pair of daytime TV presenters who were very much like Richard and Judy! It also saw the return of Acorn Antiques’ Mrs Overall in soap spoof The Mall which took inspiration from the ill-fated soap Eldorado. Two other specials followed, Victoria Wood with All the Trimmings (2000) and Victoria Wood’s Mid-Life Christmas (2009).
Her other work included: Pat and Margaret, a feature-length comedy inspired by the family reunions on ITV show Surprise Surprise; canteen comedy Dinnerladies (1998-2000); and wartime drama Housewife, 49 (2006).
She also wrote the 2012 drama Loving Miss Hatto, starring Francesca Annis, and the musical That Day We Sang (2014), starring Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton.
In her later years, Victoria took roles in TV dramas that she hadn’t written including Eric and Ernie (2011), Case Histories (2013) and Fungus the Bogeyman (2015).
Victoria was also known for her stand-up shows and toured for more than 20 years. She also head the record at London’s Royal Albert Hall for 15 consecutive sell-out shows.
As well as writing and performing sketches for Comic Relief, she also filmed a report on the charity’s projects in Africa and recorded The Smile Song which was part of a double-A-side charity single that was shared with The Stonk by comedy duo Hale and Pace.
Victoria also presented documentaries including Victoria Wood’s Big Fat Documentary (2004), Victoria’s Empire (2007) and Victoria Wood’s Nice Cup Of Tea (2013).
In 2015, Victoria was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, but kept her illness private. She died on 20 April 2016 at her home in north London.
'Victoria Wood As Seen On TV' cast - Julie Walters
Before As Seen On TV, Julie’s star was already in the ascendant having starred opposite Michael Caine in the 1983 film Educating Rita, which won her a Golden Globe and a Bafta as well as earning her an Oscar nomination. She had also gained notice for her role in the BBC drama Boys From the Blackstuff, for which she was nominated for a Bafta.
In As Seen On TV, Julie is usually the one who delivers the killer lines in sketches, while Celia Imrie and Victoria tend to play the straight parts.
PHILIPPA (Julie Walters): Nick, apparently, is in love with someone else.
FAITH (Victoria Wood): How long’s that been going on?
PHILIPPA: Must be yonks, because he told me ‘their tune’ was ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’.
FAITH: Who is it?
PHILIPPA: You know I mentioned a very small neighbour of mine - buys children’s clothes and spend the VAT on tequila? It’s her. I wondered why he had that cat-flap widened.
Victoria knew Julie was good at playing old women so often cast her as women who are much older than her, such as the waitress in the Two Soups sketch and, of course, as bent-over cleaner-cum-tealady Mrs Overall in spoof soap Acorn Antiques.
Julie’s starred in many other films, including Personal Services (1987), Buster (1988), Billy Elliot (2000), Calendar Girls (2003), all the Harry Potter films, both Mamma Mia! movies and the big-screen versions of Paddington.
Her TV roles include The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Age 13¾, Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, National Treasure and Indian Summers. She also played the leads in the biographical dramas Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story and Mo, about the late politician Mo Mowlam.
After As Seen On TV, Julie always found time to appear in some of Victoria’s other work, including the 1989 series of comedy playlets simply called Victoria Wood, canteen comedy Dinnerladies and the feature-length TV film, Pat and Margaret, as well as various TV specials including Victoria Wood’s All Day Breakfast and Victoria Wood’s Midlife Christmas.
In February 2020, Julie revealed that she was in remission after treatment for bowel cancer, which was diagnosed in 2018. In an interview with Victoria Derbyshire, she announced she was going to take a step back from acting but later stated she would make an exception for Mamma Mia 3!
'Victoria Wood As Seen On TV' cast - Celia Imrie
Celia and Victoria met through a mutual friend and became friends themselves in the mid-1970s. Celia had always claimed that she was a terrible actress, but Victoria disputed that when she saw her friend playing the then Lady Diana Spencer in Scottish sketch show 81 Take 2. “I thought she was really good and thought what had she been on about?” It gave Victoria the idea that Celia could play the straight girl in As Seen On TV’s sketches.
In the series, Celia often appears in supporting roles and rarely delivers any of the gags. That was mainly left to Julie. In one sketch, she’s an assistant in a vegetarian cafe while Julie is an old woman bemused by the offerings of tofu and goat's milk. It’s in Acorn Antiques where she takes centre stage, playing shop owner Miss Babs.
BABS: Quite frankly, Clifford. I’m flat, flat broke.
CLIFFORD: But you gave me oysters!
BABS: Oh, instant mashed potato and a heck of a lot of nail varnish!
Before As Seen On TV, Celia appeared in the Jersey-set crime drama Bergerac and had small roles in detective series Shoestring, Upstairs Downstairs and To The Manor Born.
As well as appearing in some of Victoria’s other shows, including Victoria Wood, Pat and Margaret and Christmas specials, Celia has appeared in TV dramas including the acclaimed Jeanette Winterson adaptation Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1990), The Riff Raff Element (1993-94), Kingdom (2007-09), and Titanic (2012). From 2007 to 2008 she starred alongside Nicholas Lyndhurst in the BBC1 comedy After You’ve Gone.
More recently, she’s starred in the US drama Better Things and the third series of BBC1’s Welsh thriller Keeping Faith.
Celia’s also appeared in many films including Calendar Girls (2003), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) and its sequel The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2013), Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016) and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018).
'Victoria Wood As Seen On TV' cast - Duncan Preston
Duncan had previously appeared in Victoria’s TV play Happy Since I Met You with Julie Walters, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have to audition to be part of As Seen On TV, which left him a little disgruntled. “You always had to audition for her,’” he said. “I thought, she knows what I do. I’m not quite sure what to do here. Is she asking for something different? I made a right pig’s breakfast of it and thought I’ve blown that.”
In the show, Duncan took on a few small parts in sketches, but one of his biggest contributions was as Corin Huntley, the exasperated reporter in the mockumentaries of the second series. “There must be other jobs I could do,” he says at the end of one spoof. His other big role was as Acorn Antiques' Mr Clifford, based on actor Ronald Allen, who played David Hunter in Crossroads, the soap from which Acorn Antiques was inspired.
Before As Seen On TV, Duncan had appeared in the police drama Hunter’s Walk (1973-76), and had small roles in The Professionals, Porridge and Shine On Harvey Moon.
After As Seen On TV, Duncan was heard but not seen in Victoria’s self-titled series of playlets in 1989, as he provided the voice of an airline pilot in the airport-based story We’d Quite Like To Apologise. He did appear in front of the camera again, however, in some of her Christmas specials, most memorably playing a daytime TV presenter modelled on Richard Madeley, opposite Victoria’s version of Judy Finnegan! He also appeared in the film Pat and Margaret and starred as caretaker Stan in the canteen comedy Dinnerladies.
From 1989 to 1995, Duncan starred as surgeon Jonathan Haslam in the ITV sitcom Surgical Spirit, but in more recent years he’s been best known as Doug Potts in Emmerdale, who he played from 2007 to 2020.
'Victoria Wood As Seen On TV' cast - Susie Blake
Susie plays the frilly-bloused continuity announcer who shares all kinds of unwarranted information while introducing programmes. Evidently, there are other facets to her job as she is also called on to read news items and, in one episode, to read out birthday messages. Although her name is never revealed, Susie apparently called her Pamela in private.
It was felt that putting Susie in other sketches would affect the impact of her segments as ‘Pamela’ so Susie only appears in another guise in the whole series. She appears in a big musical number which is set in the tearoom of a department store and features various women relaying their experiences of shopping.
Susie had previously appeared in the comedy sketch show Russ Abbott’s Saturday Madhouse and the drama series Armchair Thriller, which were both on ITV. After As Seen On TV, Susie appeared in various roles in Victoria’s self-titled series of playlets and some of her Christmas specials. From 1988 to 1991, she had a lead role in the ITV comedy Singles, which followed the exploits of a group of people who were patrons of a singles bar.
She also had roles in The Darling Buds Of May and One Foot In The Grave and in 1997 she provided the voice of Soo in the kids’ series Sooty’s Amazing Adventures on ITV!
From 2003 to 2006, she played Bev Unwin in Coronation Street and returned for a brief stint in 2015 to deliver the devastating news of Deirdre Barlow’s death.
More recently, she’s had a recurring role in Mrs Brown Boys. In the BBC1 comedy, she plays Hilary Nicholson, the snooty mother of Mrs Brown’s daughter-in-law, Maria.
In the fourth series of The Real Marigold Hotel on BBC1, Susie was among a group of celebrities who travelled to India to sample what life might be like if they retired there.
'Victoria Wood As Seen On TV' - regular items
STAND-UP
Each episode of Victoria Wood: As Seen On TV begins with Victoria performing stand-up, which was the part of the show that she was most nervous about.
Although Victoria had been married to her husband Geoffrey Durham for quite some years by the time As Seen On TV aired, she relates stories as if she is single and jokes about dating. In one she tells a story meeting a man in a library and because he'd never had a girlfriend before, she took him home so they could do everything that couples do.
"What a night. We put shelves up. We had a row about whose turn it was to clean the grill pan...”
In another monologue, Victoria says:
“I’m meeting a man tonight. He’s taking me to a créperie. We’re going to creep in, have a crêpe and creep out again.”
Here are a few other lines from Victoria’s introductory stand-up…
“I went to one of those swapping parties where people throw their car keys in the middle of floor. Well, I don’t know who got my moped, but I drove that Peugeot for years!”
“Across the aisle [on a train], a couple were having sex. Nobody said anything. When they finished, they both lit a cigarette. I said, ‘Excuse me, this is a non-smoking compartment!’”
“We didn’t have sex education, we picked up what we could from the television. As far I was concerned, if Pinky & Perky didn’t do it, I didn’t want to know about it. I did see that film A Taste of Honey with Rita Tushingham. I thought you could have a baby if you walked along the side of a canal while someone played the harmonica.”
“I bought this house I should never have bought. The estate agent talked me into it. God they’re liars. I can just see them showing newlyweds around the Acropolis saying, ‘Well I’m not saying it needs a bit of work doing to it…’”
“I lost a contact lens in the pool so they had to drain the whole pool. I was in a bit of a rush so I grabbed the first thing I could see… and I’m not sure this isn’t a verruca!”
ACORN ANTIQUES
The soap spoof is probably the best-remembered segment from As Seen On TV. Although it’s often thought to be a spoof of ITV’s long-running motel-based soap Crossroads, Victoria also found inspiration in the “abysmal dialogue” of Waggoner’s Walk, a Radio 4 serial about the racy lives of three women living in Hampstead. She also drew inspiration from radio soap opera The Archers, TV drama The Cedar Tree and Scottish soap Take The High Road which featured a grumpy cleaning lady called Mrs Mack, who gave her the inspiration for Mrs Overall.
Victoria said: “Acorn Antiques… took all the worse things from television, like wobbly sets and people drying and people being seen before their entrances.”
Acorn Antiques features all these and more: the scenery beyond the shop window sways from side to side; the shop door doesn't close properly; the same extras lurk in the background of each episode. Basically anything that can go wrong, does go wrong!
Then there are the ridiculous plots. In one episode, the shop reopens as “a health club and leisure centre with sunbeds.”
One of the things that Victoria loved about soaps was when characters suddenly discovered they were somehow related to each other. In Acorn Antiques, Mrs Overall discovers Berta and handyman Derek are her long-lost twins, while Trixie learns that Miss Babs is her mother, which means that she’s engaged to her brother!
Celia Imrie plays the shop’s proprietor Miss Babs, while Victoria plays Miss Berta, who’s presumably the co-owner. Duncan Preston drifts in and out as the enigmatic Mr Clifford, and Julie Walters plays the bent-over cleaning lady with lumpy tights, Mrs Overall, who probably makes more blunders than any of the characters.
MARGERY & JOAN
“And there will be more needlework hints from Phillippa next week when she’ll be telling us how to stitch up the mouth of a talkative friend or relative. And now, as usual on Friday, it’s over to Margery to find out what sort of week she’s been having…”
Julie and Victoria play Margery and Joan, respectively, the presenters of a TV magazine show aimed at women. It’s reminiscent of afternoon TV shows from the 1970s and the early 1980s, such as Afternoon Plus and Good Afternoon, which were hosted by the likes of Mavis Nicholson and Judith Chalmers, and featured the early TV appearances of Mary Berry in cookery segments. We can’t help but wonder if Victoria was inspired by episodes such as this one on YouTube!
In one sketch, Margery tells Joan about what sort of week she’s been having (“On Monday, my husband and I tiled the bathroom. More on that later. And on Tuesday we filed for divorce.”) She then reveals how she’s been looking into a “revolutionary” alternative to double glazing, which basically involves bricking up your windows! In another sketch, the pair are cooking in the kitchen when Margery’s “nice little pottery bowl from Malaga” smashes on the floor and in another Margery’s all about gadgets and gizmos, which includes an alarm that sounds when you have body odour!
It’s clear that the two women don’t like each other as they exchange bitchy comments about each other and that becomes clearer in the second series when the pair are talking about holidays:
JOAN: You’ve also been looking at singles’ holidays, haven’t you Margery?
MARGERY: That’s right, Joan, because for every outgoing, popular, physically attractive swinger like me, there’s an emotionally repressed, lumpy old pongo like Joan.
KITTY
“Good evening. My name’s Kitty. I could have married, I’ve given gallons of blood and I can’t stomach whelks. So that’s me for you. I don’t know why I’ve been asked to interrupt your telly viewing like this but I’m apparently something of a celebrity since I walked the Pennine Way in slingbacks in an attempt to publicize mental health.”
Patricia Routledge was said to be extremely nervous about performing this segment in which she plays a snobby, opinionated spinster from Cheadle, who’s seemingly been hired to “talk about aspects of life in general, nuclear war, peg bags.”
It’s a sort of ‘Thought of the Day’ type segment where she’s presumably supposed to pass on nuggets of wisdom, but there’s not much you can take away from her monologues, as she mostly just ends up complaining about and passing judgment on people.
In one monologue, she becomes an agony aunt, responding to readers’ letters.
"'Dear Kitty…'" she says, reading out one letter. “‘My boyfriend and I used to make love at least twice a night, but recently it’s dropped off.’ I’m not surprised! ‘Is he getting tired of me?’ Well, I’m getting tired of you and I’ve never even met you!”
SPOOF DOCUMENTARIES
Most episodes include a spoof documentary, with the exception of the last episode of the first series which has a South Bank Show spoof about the making of a musical.
The title of each one is taken from the dialogue that introduces the mockumentary so for instance, in To Be An Actress, the title appears on the screen when the narrator says, “Sarah Wells is 24. Since leaving drama school three years ago, she has never had an acting job, but she’s determined to be an actress…”
In the second series, instead of a narrator, we see Duncan Preston as Corin Huntley, who follows the subject or subjects of each film.
The first mockumentary of the series, A Fairly Ordinary Man, follows a day in the life of a man called Jim (Jim Broadbent), a 32-year-man from Lancashire who runs his own telephone deodorising business and has been engaged to his fiancée Pat for 16 years!
The other spoofs look at life on a university campus, follow three privileged pupils at a posh private school for girls and examine the life of a pensioner.
In Mr Right, Anne Reid (who later played Jean in Victoria Wood’s sitcom Dinnerladies) plays Pamela Twill who is looking for a man to spend her life with: “I believe there is one man who is meant for me and I’m looking for him quite assiduously. And I’d really quite like him not to be Mexican, just because of the sombrero. It would give us all sorts of problems with the serving hatch.”
A Very Funny Young Man Indeed follows stand-up comedian Baz Bennett (Peter Lorenzelli) who gets his big break on a TV talent show called Star Search. But he seems more interested in his perm than making people laugh!
“I get a fantastic buzz quite simply from having this perm!”
The ‘mockumentary’ that most people remember is called Swim the Channel. It features Victoria Wood as naive schoolgirl Chrissie who’s preparing for the ultimate swimming challenge: "It's just one of the things I've always wanted to do, swim the channel. And meet Bonnie Tyler." The film follows Chrissie, who wears her swimming cap day and night, as she trains for her big swim, while her parents show no interest whatsoever in what she’s about to do. When Chrissie sets off to the beach, her parents head off to London for the day and plan to see a show! When Chrissie disappears, her mum and dad are completely unfazed…
Dad: I’m sure she’ll turn up eventually. Slow but sure, that’s our Chrissie.
Mum: Yes, she’s probably just swimming about, looking for a nice beach with ice creams and donkeys. You know how kids are.
Presenter: What do your other children think about it all?
Mum: I’d forgotten we had any other children.
Dad: Oh I don’t know where they are.
SONGS
These are some of the songs that usually featured towards the end of each episode.
Seasons of Love
Victoria sings this song which tells the story of a doomed romance through the seasons…
“I came home to my apartment as Summer neared its end
I saw you through the window having sex with my best friend
There were clothes strewn on the pavement
I recognised the socks
I tried the door and found you had changed the locks…”
Keep On Shopping
Set in a department store restaurant, women relate their shopping woes. It features Victoria Wood, Meg Johnson (Pearl in Emmerdale) and Hope Jackman, a veteran actress with lungs of leather!
“I was in a mess looking for an inexpensive cocktail dress
It’s isn’t easy but Lord knows you have to try
I wanted polyester, not too dear
But the changing rooms have altered since I was here
It’s all communal, like a nude tribunal
It makes you cry, yes cry
But I said, no, I will not go
Stood in the middle of that daring throng
What did I feel?
I felt podgy, I felt pimply
I felt my bottom was all dimply
But I won’t stop shopping
I’ll keep shopping all day long!”
P****d Off With Love
Victoria and Dennis Lawson sing this duet about a relationship that started well but has got to the point where both parties involved can’t stand the sight of each other…
“You know since I teamed up with you
There’s so much I’ve wanted to do
Stick an old garden hose up one side of your nose
And maybe a deckchair too!”
A Simple Northern Boy
Victoria sings this song about a romance between a boy and the girl of his dreams, but he’s shy so takes a ‘few’ friends along for support when they meet.
“I’m just a simple northern boy
I’m sure you understand
Love makes me shy and that is why
I’ve brought along my own brass band”
Go Away
Victoria sings another song about another relationship that isn’t exciting as it used to be…
“Once I’d catch my breath if you just looked at me
Now it’s all as dreary as Monopoly…”
Say Goodbye
Victoria begins this number which is meant to sign off the first series and she’s joined, one by one, by Julie, Celia and Duncan and then a whole lot of other random people including a woman from the launderette, Celia’s married lover (apparently!), Julie’s plumber and his family and the extras from Acorn Antiques! Eventually, Victoria realises she’s made a mistake because it’s not the end of the series and there’s one more episode to go!
The Ballad of Barry and Freda (Let’s Do It)
Victoria debuted her most famous song in the first episode of the second series of As Seen On TV. We all know what Freda wants to do, but Barry keeps making excuses to get out of it!
“Let's do it! Let's do it
Do it while the mood is right!
I'm feeling appealing
I've really got an appetite
I'm on fire with desire
I could handle half the tenors in a male voice choir
Let's do it! Let's do it tonight!”
Count Your Blessings
In this song, Victoria says that whenever she's feeling "lousy", she reminds herself that things could be much worse…
"I could be a little hedgehog trying to get across the highway
I could be Frank Sinatra getting sick to death of My Way
I could be too cold, I could be too hot
I could be permanently knackered like Selina Scott
I could, I could and it would not be good
So I say, count your blesssings cos it's worth your while
Count your blessings and you'll have to smile
Other people have it really rough
So count your blessings until you've got enough!"
