Victoria Wood: The comedian gets serious in a new ITV drama

The comedian Victoria Wood may enjoy national-treasure status, but portraying a wartime housewife's fight for recognition in her new ITV drama was a serious business, she tells James Rampton

(Getty Images)

I've conducted interviews in some funny places in my time, but few can match this for strangeness. Victoria Wood and I are sitting on the steps of her trailer. It's in the car park of The Pavilion, a venue that proclaims on a large banner over the door that is it "Huddersfield's premier party ranch". It almost feels like being in a sketch from Victoria Wood - As Seen on TV.

The comedian and actress is done up in an eye-catching combo: designer sunglasses, an elaborately sculpted 1940s wig, and a turquoise dressing gown that conceals a period costume. This consists of an unflattering blue floral housecoat and rumpled stockings that wouldn't look out of place on one of her most celebrated creations, Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques.

Taking a swig of water, she jokes that "wearing this wig and thick period clothes, it feels like my brain is being boiled." Oh, the glamour of film-making... We're on the set of Housewife, 49, the new ITV1 drama written by and starring Wood. Drawn from the wartime Mass-Observation diary of Nella Last (played by Wood), a real-life woman from Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, this moving drama focuses on her struggle as the downtrodden wife of a sullen man (David Threlfall). Nella feels that her life has no meaning. She is distraught that her two grown-up sons have flown the nest, and her distress is only compounded when her beloved younger boy Cliff (Christopher Harper) joins the Army. However, she manages to find a sense of purpose when she signs up to help with the war effort at the local branch of the Women's Voluntary Service. A highly personal work, it is about the liberation of one woman, rather than the liberation of Europe.

Housewife, 49 is a poignant story, but Wood would be incapable of writing something entirely devoid of comedy, and she has managed to slip many of her trademark witty lines into the script. Later in the afternoon, for instance, I watch as the actress plays Nella overseeing the catering in the WVS kitchen at a run-down church hall in Huddersfield. (Having been bombed by the Germans, Barrow itself is now too modernised to be convincing.)

Painted in a dreary municipal yellow, the room gives off a pungent smell - a unique mélange of decades-old must and industrial cleaner that only seems to exist in church halls. Standing in the drab communal kitchen redolent of wartime austerity, in front of posters urging people to "Dig for Victory!" and "Be safe in the blackout!", Nella's WVS colleague stirs a giant pot on the stove and sighs, "My custard is being recalcitrant, Mrs Last." "Oh, just whack it about a bit, dear," Nella replies. "Show it who's boss."

This is characteristic of Wood, a woman who has been entertaining the nation with such lines since winning the talent show New Faces in 1973. Over the past three decades, she has built up a passionate following. Her fans, known as the "Woodettes", publish the Acorn Antiques Newsletter, and meet regularly to act out her sketches. Underlining her broad appeal, they have taken to sending her not lacy underwear but woolly jumpers. Dawn French, something of an expert on the subject, has called her fellow-comedian "a national treasure".

With her worries about dieting and the tyranny of fitness coaches, for example, Wood, now 53, shares many people's everyday concerns. More anxious about red jam stains than red carpets, she is very much "one of us". In particular, people warm to the fact that she seems so unaffected. And indeed, in person, Wood manifests that same quintessentially British self-effacement. She strikes a chord especially with women. In her live shows, lines such as the following are greeted with a rousing female cheer: "You know that building in London where all the windows blew out? That wasn't a bomb, it was 56 premenstrual women the day the chocolate machine broke down!" That's why she chimes with people: she is extraordinarily ordinary.

A warm and witty interviewee, Wood is quick to point out that Housewife, 49 is not replete with laugh-out-loud moments. "I hope people don't think this is just a jolly Northern comedy set in a kitchen. People expect me to write that, but this is something quite different." Also, she says, this is not your average Second World War drama: "It's set during the war, but it's not about a soldier on active service, or the Blitz in London, or a Wren's first love. It's really about Nella's emancipation."

It is to this aspect of Housewife, 49 that Wood hopes viewers will relate. We all, at one time or another, have felt that we don't get the recognition we deserve. "Nella was a woman who married at 19 and now does nothing outside the marriage. She has no independence. Back then, people didn't talk about their emotions as much as they do now. They just stayed silent because they had no emotional vocabulary.

"Nella's therapy was writing her diary, and she started to learn about herself and to recognise her emotions. She changed. From writing her diary, then joining the WVS, she realised that she could live a life beyond her claustrophobic relationship with her husband."

Wood goes on to stress her respect for Nella's sense of duty. "Even when she was working for the WVS, she thought her main duty was to her husband. Those days are long gone now," Wood deadpans. "Bad luck, James. Bring back the downtrodden wife, eh?"

She adds, with a wry laugh, that another reason for writing Housewife, 49 was that "it has loads of great parts for middle-aged women. I can't imagine writing something that had loads of male parts. I don't understand men at all - they're a complete mystery to me."

The actress had a sheltered upbringing in a remote part of Lancashire. The family were not great communicators; she and her three siblings often ate on their own. However, that childhood has proved a fecund source of comic material. "In my day," she jokes, "we didn't have sex education, we just picked up what we could off the television, and, as far as I was concerned, if Pinky and Perky didn't do it, I didn't want to know about it."

The young Victoria found release through performing, and, after studying drama at Birmingham University, went on to triumph in New Faces, and strike up an enduring partnership with her close friend Julie Walters. Together, they have shone in such work as Victoria Wood - As Seen on TV, Pat and Margaret, Dinnerladies and Acorn Antiques: the Musical!. Wood also developed into the country's top live draw, a stand-up capable of filling the Royal Albert Hall in London for weeks on end.

Wood, who split from her husband Geoffrey Durham four years ago and is the mother of two teenage children, shows no sign of slowing down. In addition to Housewife, 49, she is fronting Victoria on Victoria, a BBC1 documentary about the British Empire, and directing the touring production of her stage show, Acorn Antiques: The Musical!

In the New Year, Wood is to be the subject of a South Bank Show special (the second time she has been accorded such an honour). And, to cap it all, she recently topped a Radio Times survey to find "the funniest woman of all time".

The interview must end because Wood is being called back on set. Before she heads off, I have a final question: just why is it that she strikes such a chord with audiences? "People see something in me," she reflects. "I once won a poll of People You'd Most Like to Live Next-Door To. That gave them a laugh at home, I can tell you. The Queen Mother came second to me. I should imagine she was very annoyed about that."

'Housewife, 49' is on ITV1 on Sunday at 9pm