Even if you didn’t have an Auntie Dot in Cockermouth (the one who ate a raffia drinks coaster, mistaking it for a high-fibre biscuit), it was impossible not to feel Victoria Wood got you, somehow. Her death in 2016 triggered an outpouring of grief commensurate to her talent, but it also revealed how intimately, how individually, she was loved. Lazily viewed as the cosiest of national treasures, Wood was finer and fiercer than that: she distilled something essential about British character (national, regional, sexual), and her forensic skewering of middle-class aspiration, high and low culture and any and every class of stupidity managed to remain warm: a spectacular balancing act.
Mainly, though, she was wickedly, consistently, funny: Acorn Antiques alone merited a damehood. I could paste 800 words of randomly selected Wood lines here and you would enjoy it more than anything I could write. That is unfortunate for me, but it is a far bigger problem for her biographer Jasper Rees: you can’t possibly be as funny as Wood, so how best to honour her?
With meticulous thoroughness is one answer: Let’s Do It is nearly 600 pages long and copiously footnoted.
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